Japanese b-movie auteur Seijun Suzuki is one of those rarest of creatures: a film maker spurned for his unorthodox ways who has suddenly been re-discovered and received international acclaim. Okay, the re-discovery and acclaim isn't so rare, what make it unusual is that it happened within Suzuki's own lifetime and it has allowed him, now well into his eighties, to resume a stagnant career.
Enormously prolific throughout the fifties and sixties Suzuki was fired from his Japanese studio position for consistently producing films that were just too strange for the Japanese studio system. A man who, at his peak, routinely produced three or four films a year was reduced to picking up scraps where he could and experienced gaps of six and seven years of complete inactivity before disappearing entirely in the early nineties.
The offending film - Branded To Kill - acquired underground cult status as a result of it's career stifling nature and as word slowly spread more and more people became attuned to Suzuki's bizarre world of surreal and psychedelic yakuza gangsters, resulting in the western world finally cluing in to his unique vision. He's now become one of the golden boys of the Criterion Collection, with a handful of Suzuki titles already released on the art film label and a mitt full more coming soon.
The end result? In 2001 Suzuki returned with the garishly technicolor Pistol Opera - a quasi-sequel, quasi-remake of Branded to Kill. That film was well enough received that he is now back again, this time with Princess Raccoon, a trippy looking musical with A-list stars Joe Odagiri and Zhang Ziyi. The official website, complete with trailer, has just gone online for Suzuki's latest and this bad boy looks to be every bit as pot-fueled as his work from the sixties. Those garish color schemes and psychedelic effects are back in a big way and it looks glorious in a very camp, b-flick trash sort of way. Check the trailer - in Real Video format - here.
via Monkey Peaches