Destiny: The Tale of Kamakura

The house in Kamakura where the mystery writer Masakazu lives with his young wife Akiko is not an ordinary small-town home: ghosts, gods of death and assorted creatures come and go through the door, and the townspeople treat it as normal. When Akiko falls into the land of the dead, her husband sets out to bring her back. The film is not interested in horror. It is interested in an everyday relationship with death: the other world here is not frightening but bureaucratic and crowded, reached along something like a railway line, with queues at the other end. The form threads live action and computer animation together. That is Takashi Yamazaki's speciality: because he directs the effects side himself, the creatures sit comfortably in the same frame as the actors. Yamazaki is the director who once remade a Crayon Shin-chan film as a live-action period drama and who later won an Oscar for Godzilla Minus One; this is one of the most elaborate examples of his fantastical streak. Masato Sakai plays the writer and Mitsuki Takahata his wife. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese fantasy, yokai mythology and effects-heavy fables. Who it is not for: anyone who wants consistent world rules. The film changes them as it needs to and drops its logic entirely on the way to an emotional finale.