Fantastic Fest 2009

“…A movie that invites you to drink the Kool Aid, take the red pill, show us your dancing and to break the chains of reason and logic that bind your brain” - (Subway Cinema)

The annals of strange just got thicker with the arrival of Naisu No Mori a.k.a. Funky Forest: The First Contact , a surreal sci-fi-musical-whatsit whose resistance to thematic or narrative logic renders viewers thoroughly -- but not unpleasantly -- bewildered for 2.5 hours. Breathtakingly, often hilariously bizarre, it’s nobody’s idea of a commercial sureshot. but that’s one of 10,000 reasons that this senses-shattering entry in this year’s fest is likely to permanently invade every brain in the theater.

The more-than-unique film is also the first team effort for writing-helming-editing trio of Katsuhito Ishii (Shark Skin Boy and Peach Hip Girl, Taste of Tea) and TV commercial directors Shin’ichiro Miki and Anika aka Hajime Ishimine. At first glance, you might consider Naisu a series of deadpan, oftfantastical transitions and goofy plot threads. The latter occasionally intersect, but scarcely hint at any game plan. Recurrent elements include idiot TV variety showstyle comedy duo “The Mole Brothers”; the hapless “Unpopular-With-Women Brothers”; three pretty young women first identified as “Babbling Hot Spring Vixens”; a nerdy high school teacher-cum-DJ involved with his star student; and sitcom-style “Homeroom!!!” chapters from a Dadaist school life. But don’t ask us to describe an instant of the film, as it may very well be the most hyper-fluctuating hilarious artistic explosion on record. Peppy choreographed dream sequences, unidentifiable puppet creatures, Cronenberg-nightmare queasiness, UFO visitations, squirting grade-school tentacles and set pieces that literally defy human comprehension blast across the screen without giving you a chance to blink, and that’s just for starters.

“If you look at them just right, the most mundane elements of daily life can seem utterly bizarre. Conversely, the strangest, most inexplicable things can seem perfectly ordinary. That’s the lunatic logic behind FUNKY FOREST, a sprawling omnibus of the obvious and the oddball, the casual and the completely insane. If you’re reading this in hopes of being handed a sensible synopsis of a straightforward story, you’re out of luck - Funky Forest’s daringly disjointed narrative is a mish-mash of blackouts, non-sequiturs, flashbacks, lucid dreams, magical moments and so much more. Awkward stumbles on the path to romance, and others of life’s little disappointments, are woven together with all sorts of extraterrestrial freaks and incomprehensible biological curiosities, music-video mayhem and mindbending theatrics, and psychedelic surrealism of the finest grade, delivered with a deadpan shrug. - (Rupert Bottenberg, Fantasia Film Festival)