Critics reviews

[Murakami's] first feature, the deceptively playful Jellyfish Eyes (2013), emerges as a hybrid of Japanese popular entertainment and his overarching conceptual project. It doesn't immediately look like an art movie—its surface form is a science-fiction action adventure for kids—but it positions Murakami as an artist-auteur with grand vision.

Murakami has invested Jellyfish Eyes with the same sort of primal pop-art aesthetic that distinguishes much of his art. The cinematography is often a wonder of shiny fluorescent colors that ironically contrast with the characters' melancholia, and the F.R.I.E.N.D.s are a triumph of tactile CGI because they've been designed to purposefully highlight the medium's fakeness in a manner that suggests a fusion of conventional animation and stop-motion.

Japanese artist Takashi Murakami directed and provided the story for this children's fantasy, which recalls Takashi Miike's entries in the genre (Zebraman, The Great Yokai War) in its wacky, free-form invention... The creatures—which range from a human-sized frog to a sprite with a big metal box for a head—provide a worthy showcase for Murakami's prodigious visual imagination; not coincidentally, the principal theme is how imagination can play a constructive role in child development...