My Neighbors the Yamada is Isao Takahata's newspaper comic strip adaptation, an anthology of wildly amusing misadventures featuring an average Japanese family and their daily foibles. The visual style is practically groundbreaking, a zen-watercolor style with vast splashes of color, and equally vast splashes of empty space. There are a number of inventive CGI sequences that explode off the screen, a wonderfully surreal introduction to the family history from marriage to (folk tale) childbirth. And there is a jubilant, almost bittersweet musical number at the end that features fireworks, umbrellas, and seemingly half the population of Japan.
This is the movie that you wish Hollywood executives would watch when the time comes to attempt adaptations of popular comic books. It's like Bill Melendez' Peanuts cartoons, but with a vastly larger budget, wider color palette and stronger pop-jazz bent. Don't you dare try to make a Calvin and Hobbes movie without memorizing every frame of this near-masterpiece.
Listen to Paku-san, aspiring moviemakers. Always listen to Paku-san. He's the Yasujiro Oju of our generation and we must treasure him while he still walks among us.
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