Born Wild, Run Free / イタズ 熊 / Itazu kuma (‘Bear’, 1987)

Obscure Japanese Film #264

Takahiro Tamura

1928. ‘One-Shot’ Ginzo (Takahiro Tamura), a matagi, or bear hunter, returns to his home village of Ani in Akita Prefecture after having spent 10 years in the penal colony on Sakhalin Island for fighting. He learns that his son was killed in action in Siberia seven years earlier, and that most of the villagers now work at the new mine. Ginzo’s daughter-in-law, Kimi (Junko Sakurada), is living as a widow with his grandson, Ippei (Hiroshi Miyata).

Junko Sakurada

When a bear kills one of the villagers, Ginzo sets out to kill it and succeeds. However, shortly after this, a bear cub turns up looking for its mother. Ginzo, believing that he has committed a sin against the god of the mountains by making the cub an orphan, resolves to give up hunting and raise the cub to make amends. Ippei is delighted to have a furry new playmate, but of course cute little bears turn into big scary ones and one day they will have to release it back into the wild…

Hiroshi Miyata and friend

This co-production between Toei and the independent Kobushi Productions was made to capitalise on the success of director Toshio Goto’s earlier film The Old Bear Hunter (1982), although this film is aimed more specifically at the family market, with considerable focus on the boy and the bear cub. There are even two montage sequences of the two frolicking together and the bear getting into various mischief over which a female singer croons a cheesy ballad about human-animal friendship. The film is not exactly subtle, then, but it is quite well-made and entertaining, and some of the animal and nature footage is certainly impressive even if the filmmakers occasionally resort to using a fake bear for the more difficult shots (there is some pretty amazing ursine acting at the end, though…)

As with Goto’s other wilderness movies, I would question how much the welfare of the animals was considered here, and I can’t help feeling there’s some hypocrisy in promoting such a film as wholesome family entertainment when some of the various bears used must have had an unpleasant time in certain scenes . Still, I suppose this reflects our generally inconsistent attitude to animals, which easily changes depending on convenience; in this film, bears are both monstrous killers and cute anthropomorphised playmates as the story demands.

It’s perhaps worth saying a few words about this film’s star, Takahiro Tamura (1928-2006), whose father was none other than Tsumasaburo Bando, the sword-fighting star of silent films whose career continued until his untimely death in 1953 at the age of 51. Apparently, Bando died owing money to Shochiku, the studio which had him under contract, and Tamura was urged to follow in his father’s footsteps as a means of repaying his debts, which he agreed to do. However, he refused to be marketed as Tsumasaburo Bando mark II and resisted appearing in period dramas for the most part. He worked for Shochiku from 1953-1963, becoming a regular in Keisuke Kinoshita’s films, then went freelance. Career highlights include his role as Shintaro Katsu’s sidekick in The Hoodlum Soldier series (1965-68), Seisaku in Yasuzo Masumura’s Seisaku’s Wife (1965) opposite Ayako Wakao, the air force commander in Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), and the father in the Oscar-nominated Muddy River (1981). I don’t think Tamura ever became a box office draw, but he was a serious, hard-working actor who managed to avoid typecasting and successfully took on a wide range of roles. His performance in this film may be a tad broad at times, but on the whole he makes a good fist of it and, though Ginzo initially appears unlikeably gruff and aggressive, Tamura gradually reveals the heart of gold that’s concealed beneath the surface.

A note on the title:

イタズ (itazu) means ‘bear’ in the matagi language, but as this would not be understood by most Japanese people, the original title also contains the standard Japanese word for ‘bear’, 熊 (kuma).

English subtitles at Open Subtitles

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Under the Northern Lights / Pod severnym siyaniyem / オーロラの下で (1990)

Obscure Japanese Film #50

Koji Yakusho

This Japanese-Russian co-production stands very much in the shadow of Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (1975), the Russian film which had rescued the great director from a 5-year dry spell and returned him to international success with an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Like Dersu Uzala, Under the Northern Lights is another wilderness adventure set in the early years of the 20^th-century. 

 

Junko Sakurada

 

The leading role is played perfectly by Koji Yakusho, a student of Tatsuya Nakadai’s who would go on to international success himself a few years later as the star of Shall We Dance? (1996) and The Eel (1997). Here, he is Genzo, a hunter and fur trapper who slips across to eastern Siberia in the hope of collecting enough hides to buy back his fiancée (Junko Sakurada) from the geisha house into which she has been sold by her poverty-stricken family. When some locals rob him, he is helped by a Russian, Arseniy (Andrei Boltnev), with whom he forms an unlikely friendship. Arseniy lives with his widowed sister Anna (Marina Zudina) and her child, and Genzo develops a bond with them too. However, the difficulties he faces mean that it takes him a long time to raise the money necessary to fulfil his dream.

Tetsuro Tanba

 

Returning to Japan after an absence of 5 years, he discovers that, believing Genzo to be dead, his former fiancée has married and had a child. In the meantime, the Russian Revolution breaks out and the Japanese government is concerned about the possibility of it spreading to Japan. Genzo, having learned to speak Russian, finds himself heading back to Siberia after being recruited as a spy by a government official (Tetsuro Tanba). On his return, he checks in on Arseniy, who turns out to be so ill that he is confined to his bed. Genzo attempts to nurse him back to health, but Arseniy dies. Genzo then has to fulfil his friend’s last wish – to deliver a vital serum to combat an epidemic in the remote rural community where Anna and her daughter are now living. In order to get there, Genzo has to travel by dog-sled and finds himself battling for survival in the harsh Siberian winter. Along the way, he receives some unlikely help in the shape of Buran, a dog which is half-wolf and which he had previously tried to kill for bounty.

If the serum part sounds familiar, it’s probably because the producers incorporated elements of a true story which occurred in Alaska in 1925 involving a Siberian Husky that later served as the basis for the animated American film Balto (1995). This part was not in the 1971 children’s book by Yukio Togawa upon which Under the Northern Lights is based, and I felt that the producers were over-egging the pudding a little by adding it. 

Maksim Munzuk (Dersu Uzala) in a cameo

 

For some reason, IMDb credits three directors on this film, although the film’s own credits list only Toshio Goto as director. I suspect that Sergey Vronski, a cinematographer, shot some second unit footage and Petras Abukiavicus, who co-wrote the screenplay, directed the Russian actors. In any case, Goto had experience with this challenging type of movie, having made The Old Bear Hunter (1982) and Born Wild, Run Free (1987), two films also mostly shot in remote locations and featuring wild animals. Animal welfare did not seem especially high on his agenda, though, and Under the Northern Lights features numerous scenes of animals attacking each other – it’s certainly not a film that could convincingly claim that ‘no animals were harmed in the making.’ These scenes may have prevented the film from being passed by the censor in some countries and may well be the reason why it seems to have had little or no release in the English-speaking world.   

As one would expect from a Russian-Japanese co-production shot in Siberia with a half-dog, half-wolf as one of the main actors, the film had an immensely troubled and protracted shoot. While it certainly has its impressive aspects – most notably, the photography of the Siberian wilderness – the story is all over the place, and the music (full of cymbal crashes and swelling strings) strains too hard for emotion. Worth seeing, then, but certainly not on a par with Dersu Uzala.

Watched with subtitles I auto-translated from Serbian (they didn’t come out well). The Japanese dialogue had Russian narration over the top.

 

The Old Bear Hunter / Matagi (1982)

Obscure Japanese Film #3

A film from 1982 about an old hunter trying to kill an especially large and vicious black bear sounds likely to be another schlocky Jaws rip-off in the manner of Grizzly (1976). However, the story actually owes more to Moby-Dick in that Heizo, the hunter in question, was attacked by the bear some years previously and left with a bad facial scar as a result. As played by Ko Nishimura, he seems too level-headed to seek revenge on an animal for this reason alone, but further motivation is provided as the film progresses. One of the many surprising things about The Old Bear Hunter is that the thinness of the plot turns out to be something of an asset, providing a decent enough excuse for a film which is as much a fascinating portrait of the little-known matagi as it is an adventure movie.

The matagi, traditional hunters often accompanied by specially-trained Akita dogs, have been active in northern Honshu for over 400 years hunting bear and other game. They consider these as gifts from the mountain gods, and are careful not to waste any part of the animal or kill more than they need.

The film opens with a sequence on a snow-covered mountainside in which a bear is shot dead and the hide removed. This appears to have been done for real, and The Old Bear Hunter is certainly a problematic film for animal lovers. As in the case of the kangaroo hunt in the Australian film Wake in Fright, the filmmakers perhaps attempted to justify this scene by saying that the hunt was not staged specifically for them, and they simply received permission to film a hunt that was going to happen anyway. In any case, it certainly lends the picture a remarkable degree of authenticity. Even more uncomfortable to watch are the scenes of Heizo training his Akita – he slashes at it with a bear claw, force-feeds it bear meat smeared with big dollops of bear fat, and even dons an entire bear hide before attacking the hapless dog. Worse still, there is a sequence featuring a matagi dog-training competition in which a number of Akita are forced to attack a chained bear. This scene goes on for some time and there is clearly no fakery involved. However, if one can get past the brutality of these sequences, this is a thoroughly absorbing and extremely well-made film.

This is also a film which shows, rather than tells, and is therefore light on dialogue, something which works very much in its favour. Director Toshio Goto makes full use of his snow-laden, mountainous locations to often breathtaking effect, and the fact that nothing appears to have been shot in a studio lends a sense of documentary-like realism, while the esoteric details about bear bile, etc, suggest that the ways of the matagi were thoroughly researched in advance. Goto also skillfully manages to avoid lapsing into melodrama and, when the climactic battle between old man and bear finally arrives, it’s not only entirely convincing, but steers well clear of the sense of triumphant revenge found in many ‘bad animal’ movies.

The Old Bear Hunter was Goto’s first film as director. Born in 1938, he worked as an assistant director under Satsuo Yamamoto in the ‘70s. On IMDb, his filmography has been mistakenly merged with another Toshio Goto who worked as an editor on some of Kurosawa’s early films. However, the fact that he subsequently made a Russian-Japanese co-production set in the wilderness of Sibera entitled Under the Northern Lights immediately brings to mind Kurosawa’s 1975 film Dersu Uzala.

As Heizo, the diminutive Ko Nishimura is miscast in a role that would have been better suited to a more physically powerful actor such as Toshiro Mifune (perhaps Mifune turned it down). Considering this, he does very well in the part and deserves respect for taking on what must have been a physically arduous role at the age of 59. Nishimura made over 200 movies beginning in 1953, and will be a familiar face to most Japanese film fans, popping up as he does in parts large and small in such classics as Sword of Doom and Red Beard.

If it were not for the scenes of animal cruelty, I would wholeheartedly recommend this film to anyone.  

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