Prolific visual artist Takashi Murakami makes his feature directorial debut with this whimsical sci-fi fantasy set in post-Fukushima, Japan, where a colorful race of extraterrestrial creatures visible only to children are revealed to be crucial components in a diabolical scheme to manifest negative energy. His urban home decimated by a natural disaster, young Masashi moves to the Japanese countryside with his mother. Upon moving into his new apartment, Masashi strikes up a fast friendship with Kurage-bo, a flying creature that looks like a jellyfish, and it captures the uprooted boy's imagination. Before long, Masashi discovers that all of the children in this remote village have their own special creature. Convinced that they can control their Kawaii-like friends via a hi-tech electronic remote, the children begin using the creatures to bully one another. Later, Masashi and his friends learn that the adorable beings are being used to harvest negative emotions for nefarious purposes, and they decide to fight back.

Jellyfish Eyes is a parable about cellphones and video games as distractions that enable a voluntary, easily manipulated surveillance state. In the film, children are given silver rectangular gadgets that produce fully mobile, four-dimensional animated creatures, which they rely on as bodyguards, cage fighters, and, most poignantly, as sort of corporatized imaginary friends (the latter are even referred to by an acronym, F.R.I.E.N.D.). These devices are dispensed to the children by a shadowy company overseen by a quartet of people who dress in black, full-body armor that suggests Darth Vader without the famous mask, functioning as a combination of scientists, mystics, and mercenary CEOs. This cult knows the world is coming to an end, for the same reasons that it's actually endangered: Industrial pollution that's unchallenged due to the mass population's pervading indifference to taking uncomfortable action.

Gary Tooze

November 19th, 2015