2026 is off to a good start! Happy Japanuary to all of you!
Godzilla vs. Biollante is so good. It's got one of the best kaiju designs ever, it has elementary school kids dreaming about and drawing cute pictures of Godzilla, and it's got Obayashi frequent collaborator Tōru Minegishi.
Tokyo Godfathers is a film that has been recommended to me often. It's a fun riff on the 3 Godfathers plot. I really enjoyed it up until the end became a sort of run-on action sequence, then I started hating it, then there's the moment near the end when Hana falls off the roof with the baby and I was expecting another stupid impossible hand grabbed out and instead we get a miraculous wind, and that moment just floored me. Really great.
One Piece has been fun with a couple of goofy episodes. I'm making progress. You know, I'm at episode 47 of only 1155 (and ongoing) episodes. At some point last year, I foolishly told everyone around me that I was going to watch every episode. I stalled out watching it in early-mid '25 after I finished the Arlong Park Arc. I'm glad to get back into it. At some point, I might write a longer post on why One Piece is so good. Sometimes, pop culture gets it mostly right. This is one of those times.
Sweet Home is an early film directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (I've only seen the recent Cloud by him, which has made me want to track down his entire filmography; this was a funny one to start with). It feels like a PG-rated family haunted house movie that forgot to tell its director about its rating. It's mostly hokey, but there's some gruesome face-melting body-ripped-in-half practical effects here. There was a Famicom/NES tie-in game that was made concurrently with the film. It looks like the sort of thing I would have played obsessively in 1989.
Megazone 23 is the most 80s film I've watched a long time, and I watched dozens of films from the 1980s last year. It's so 80s that it imagines a future society ruled by a benevolent computer that wants everyone to be happy... by making them permanently live in a simulacrum of the 1980s. This sentient computer program communicates to the world through... music videos.
I don't know how many Japanese feature films I'll watch in January, but if I watch at least one anime episode a day, I'll be on pace to watch at least something Japanese daily in January. That's a Japanuary win.