IMDb RATING
6.4/10
2.7K
YOUR RATING
A young boy is chosen as the defender of good and must team up with Japan's ancient spirits and creatures of lore to attempt to destroy the forces of evil.A young boy is chosen as the defender of good and must team up with Japan's ancient spirits and creatures of lore to attempt to destroy the forces of evil.A young boy is chosen as the defender of good and must team up with Japan's ancient spirits and creatures of lore to attempt to destroy the forces of evil.
- Awards
- 3 wins & 1 nomination
Ryunosuke Kamiki
- Tadashi Ino
- (as Ryuunosuke Kamiki)
Seiko Iwaidô
- Kawahime, the River Princess
- (as Mai Takahashi)
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaThe film contains several direct references and homages to the work of Shigeru Mizuki, the manga artist who is generally credited with bringing the tradition of yokai tales into the modern day via the comic-book medium. The young hero researches yokai by traveling to Mizuki's birthplace of Sakaiminato and visiting the museum dedicated to his work there; the actual museum, and its bronze statues of his most famous characters, including GeGeGe no Kitaro, are shown in the film. Later in the plot, when the yokai Ittan Momen shows reluctance to fight, another scolds it by saying "You're always really brave in those comics with Kitaro!"
- Quotes
Kawahime, the River Princess: People live in ignorance. Constantly turning a blind eye. Those that let go of their past, have no future.
- ConnectionsFollowed by The Great Yokai War: Guardians (2021)
Featured review
Not one of my favorite Miike films, but even mediocre Miike still makes a good film
Miike makes a children's adventure film, not unlike The Neverending Story. It's actually one of my least favorite of the director's films. Even the worst Miike is better than a good many films, though, and The Great Yokai War has a lot in it that's worth recommending. It's at least as loud and obnoxious as most American kiddie flicks. I might think kids themselves would find a lot to like in it (the DVD includes an English dub), but, like all of Miike's films, it can tend to move very slowly. That means you've got kind of a weird unevenness, where sometimes there's a loud action sequence and the next scene will drag on forever as characters converse. The story itself isn't very good, either, and Miike's perpetual flaw of incoherency rears its ugly head. Most of what I liked came from the technical side of things. This has to be Miike's most expensive movie, and it looks fantastic. "Yokai" are Japanese spirits, and they come in all different, fantastical forms, and the costume designers, special effects crew, and everyone else involved in the designs just did an outstanding job. I've seen the 1968 film this one is supposedly based on (Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare), and the cheesy rubber-suit monsters you can find there have been transformed into more believable entities using state-of-the-art makeup and special effects. I especially liked the look of one of the bad guys (or girls, in this case), Agi, who sports dark eye shadow, a tight, white outfit, a white beehive hairdo and a whip. She's played, incidentally, by Chiaki Kuriyama, whom you might remember as Lucy Liu's teenage henchgirl in Kill Bill: Vol. 1. The hero of the film is played by Ryunosuke Kamiki, who provided voices for Miyazaki's Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle.
helpful•94
- zetes
- Oct 30, 2006
Details
Box office
- Budget
- ¥1,300,000,000 (estimated)
- Gross worldwide
- $15,787,492
- Runtime2 hours 4 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.85 : 1
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