So… 2015 was somewhat of a big year for Sion Sono, I guess. He churned out some six films in that year alone, along with a web series, and generally seems to have cemented a level of ubiquity to rival that of Takashi Miike. Still, perhaps more than that however, the year saw him get to make a couple of long-term pet projects that he’d been kicking around since the ‘90s in addition to myriad adaptations of All Esper dayo! Why, here’s one right now!

Yes, Love & Peace was apparently a screenplay that he’d written way back when but only now had the cachet to get produced. The other for the year, in case you were wondering, was The Whispering Star. They’re both kind of odd and not necessarily in a way that might be expected from his oeuvre. Don’t go thinking they’re necessarily similar to each other either. One is a slow, quiet Doomed Men in Space™ type sci-fi film except instead of men there’s like a robot delivery woman. The other is Love & Peace.

Dateline: Tokyo. Life is a bit shit for not-especially-young Ryoichi Suzuki (Hiroaki Hasegawa), who like most normal adults has given up on his dreams, specifically those of becoming a musician, and like a large portion of normal adults has entered the drudgery of white-collar office work. Everyone’s totally laughing at him all the time. He sucks. Boo! Boo this man! Again, like most normal adults. Dying young’s only cool in your twenties, kids. Hit thirty and it’s just seems lame. TRU FAX! Anyway, yeah, he’s hot to trot for his frumpy and awkward co-worker Yuko (Kumiko Aso), while being totally oblivious to the fact that she has plenty of time for him in a frumpy, awkward sort of way. That’s not going anywhere, what with him being a loser, baby, and her evident aversion to killing him. Instead, he buys a teeny tiny terrapin on a whim; calling it ‘Pikadon’, after old time slang for the A-bomb, the tortoise becomes his constant companion and confidante, privy to all his maybe hopes and maybe dreams. Then people at work find out, make fun of him and in fit of madness he flushes Pikadon down the bog. He immediately regrets this, which is just as well given the amount of time we’re going to be spending with him, and slides further into despair and misery. Still, this anguish reaches a boiling point, and he actually manages to write (or rather adlib on the spot) a pained power ballad about his lost turtley love… though everyone thinks it’s about war.

Um, so… there’s actually more. If you went in blind, you might be taken aback by the sudden turn things take after the first twenty minutes. So, er… the sewers of Tokyo are apparently like the ones from Batman Returns, and our Pikadon (voice of Ikue Otani) is taken in by a mysterious old man (Toshiyuki Nishida) who lives in the waterways amidst a bunch of talking animals and living toys. He gives Pikadon some magic candy which is meant to make him talk, but due to a mix up accidentally gives him instead one that gives the ability to grant wishes, albeit at a terrible cost to oneself. Pikadon only wishes for his owner’s achieving of his dreams though… but that’s a very big wish. The toys help him to track down Ryoichi, but as the old man warns, if people were to find out about this ability, even those you love and trust and all that, it would inevitably be used to selfish ends.

Also, it’s Christmas, natch.

There’s quite a lot going on here. Supposedly not much actually changed in the script in the twenty-plus years between it being written and produced. Presumably the fact that Japan’s never really recovered from the recession they hit in the early ‘90s means a lot of the general concerns of the script remain intact. Malaise forever! A chilling insight into what’s to come. What one assumes is new is the lingering background of the 2020 Olympics prep; in case you forgot (I certainly did, there’s been so much going on), there was meant to be an Olympics this year. The then-hypothetical new Japan National Stadium being the monument to man’s hubris à la the new-fangled Empire State Building in King Kong, or maybe the new-fangled One World Trade Center depending on the version you’re watching. Shove that in your pipe and smoke it, Tokyo Tower! Or maybe Tokyo Skytree!

While one assumes part of the failure to get The Whispering Star made twenty years earlier was due to its leisurely pacing and general artiness, Love & Peace’s difficulty in getting made more seems to be because it seemingly wants to be absolutely everything all at once. It’s a story of stardom. It’s a fairy tale. It’s a musical. It’s a kaiju film. It’s a romance. It’s a Christmas story. It’s adventure, comedy, despair, philosophy, argle bargle. It should be a mess, and in many ways it rather is. This is perhaps as strength as much as a weakness though. Taken on their own, these different parts are fairly ordinary, but by bolting them all together suddenly the whole affair becomes rather unique. It’s all bizarrely ambitious, especially in how the different elements of the film interact with one another. It does seem like a lesser film would have the two main plotlines run parallel to each other only crossing over in time for the ending, but here the two threads interact with and influence each other with gay abandon, becoming actually aware of each other by the midpoint.

One of the most notable elements given the film’s vintage (or lack thereof, as I write this) is its use of practical effects over CGI. Obviously in the long run this is probably a pretty good thing; as it stands, CGI has a bad tendency to age poorly as technology progresses, with a load of films from all of ten years ago, if that, looking a bit naff now. I remember when this was some hot shit. (Be grateful that’s the example I went for, rather than this.) Of course, I just wrote about the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure live-action movie a few weeks back; I don’t think I went into detail regarding the effects there, but suffice to say the Stands and that are represented using CGI, and like a lot of passes at doing such things (see also, say, the shinigami in the Death Note films) look pretty damn bad, failing to gel in a remotely convincing was. Presumably the budget for such things isn’t really there. This is all a long way of saying that this film has puppets in it. Also, like, real explosions, and miniatures, and all that jazz, but more to the point, PUPPETS! Easy way to get me on board, I can assure you. Gives toytown a real tactile feel to see Pigsy from off of Monkey actually talk at the doll or the cat and carry them around and stuff rather than ping pong balls on sticks representing them. The physical nature also helps build empathy for the toys’ plight. Japanese folklore’s actually pretty rife with stories about objects being sad because they’ve been lost or discarded or broken or some such in the vein of The Brave Little Toaster or large chunks of the Toy Story films, but the film’s having them actually be present in the ‘real’ world helps hammer home the idea of their heartache. Bizarre as it sounds.

My eyes watered during the film’s climax. What of it?