This is Funky Forest! I first heard about it seeing it in the Third Window collection on the Arrow Video streaming service, and it was one of those ones where I eventually over time since then saw bits and pieces of it being mentioned again here and there and got more and more intrigued. Eventually I picked up the Error 4444 blu ray, with high hopes that I would be into it. The first night I tried watching it, after it came up in my backlog system, I ended up becoming immediately very intimidated by the manzai routine starting the film (manzai always being a listening comprehension nightmare) and by the general scattershot of bits and pieces of things in this assemblage of segments. Worried that that would be the movie for 2 and a half hours, and not feeling like I had the stamina that night, I ended up stopping. I think this was sometime in the lead-up to the trip to Japan when I was feeling stressed and wanted to relax. After that I was much more wary to get back to it, and felt like when I did I would be cold to it after all. When I did pick it up again and watched it all the way through though… I loved it!! I do think the starting segments are a bit weak, but once more segments accumulate and start repeating and it becomes clear that there’s a few threads to hang onto in particular (like the mixed gender picnic hangout people get invited to, or the homeroom sequences), it was fun and engaging to follow. And some of the segments are extra strong or weird in a great way. An early favorite segment for me was the one where three women go to a ryokan, and each one of them tells a weird anecdote, in increasing order of drunkenness. I thought these were super fun listening comprehension challenges, and after watching the movie through I went back to listen to them again. I had gotten the first story pretty well, the second story I generally got the gist but thought that I was missing things and needed to listen back to confirm, and the third story I misunderstood completely and ended up watching it back a few times – including once with English subtitles, and then again with them off. They’re all amusing stories and fun performances from all three actresses! And the vibe very much gives a warm, comfortable ryokan vibe (conveniently extra familiar to me since I was just at one on the trip). Another obvious standout sequence is I guess probably maybe a centerpiece of sorts for the film? It’s the dream sequence where the guy encounters a lot of very unusual dancers and sometimes has to dance himself for the amusement of the dream version of the girl he’s maybe dating, as he tries to figure out how he feels and maybe or maybe doesn’t come to some kind of conclusion about himself (hard to say since it’s a dream). I’m not usually gigantically into dream sequences, but I really liked how this one… didn’t really indulge in a lot of the usual dream sequence tropes (fog machines, confusing editing etc.) but just presented this strange situation, that seemed authentically a mix of nonsensical happenings and personal baggage brought into it. And it amounts to this long, visually interesting like, dance concert that I really liked! Then there’s also the most directly bizarre segments, involving the gloopy silly weird body horror contraption thingies, like musical instruments but they’re weird fleshy blobs that have little men’s faces and dangling appendages and they hook into your butt, that kind of thing. I thought all of these were pretty fun and funny. I like that watching something like this in Japanese, with plenty of context to seek out, makes the old gut reaction from years and years ago ‘haha Japan’s so weird’ fully obsolete and I absorbed these as what they are – intentionally funny and weird comedy skits. The blaséness of many of the characters in these sketches really worked for me, especially. On a similar wavelength to the dance concert, one of the final segments of the movie, and I guess what gives it it’s name – this sort of, electronic music performance where the characters are playing these instruments that are a mix of electronic parts hooked directly into the trees and plants of a beautiful green forest – I loved that segment, I was totally on board, and should remember to look up the music to listen to again outside the movie. One recurring segment that I liked a lot and haven’t mentioned is Guitar Brother and the associated introductory riff. Anyway, it really is this lovely strange delightful package. I think what most surprised me positively about the movie is maybe how… kind of wholesome, it feels? Like with how in your face the weirdness is, I would probably have expected more shocking violence or nudity or whatever. But even though there are strange and off-putting things in it and it doesn’t seem like it’s for kids, My feeling of the movie as a whole was that it felt like a celebration of the strange fun of life. Like tapping into the beautiful absurdity of being human to make weird art in the same way the characters at the end tap into the trees to make music. I dunno, it might just be a zany goof, but regardless, I had a really really good time in the end. And I was happy that I followed things mostly all right without subtitles.