Another Decade with Takashi Miike is a series of essays on the 2010 films of the Japanese maverick, following Notebook's earlier survey of Miike's first decade of the 21st century.
Jim Emerson once wrote that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom tells you how to watch it in its first shot. By a similar token, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable - Chapter 1 (2017) tells you how to watch it with its very title. Making sense of its three parts requires either familiarity with the manga series JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (or its anime adaptation) or a willingness to do some work as a spectator. Diamond Is Unbreakable is the name of the fourth story arc of the JoJo manga; it was originally serialized from 1992 to 1995. (It’s also the name of the third season of the JoJo anime series, which originally aired in 2016.) It speaks to Miike’s love of—and entrenchment in—cartoon media that he’d choose not to adapt the first story of this long-running series (which debuted in 1987), but rather tackle a “deep cut” that generally forgoes exposition in favor of narrative complications. (Also, there are enough “origin story” movies anyway.) The film’s title all but promises that these complications won’t be resolved at the end, which means that Takashi Miike, cinema’s reigning poet of ultraviolent and hypersexual pulp, is free to play with storytelling for its own sake. So, if you don’t like byzantine whimsy, bow out. If you don’t share Miike’s undying respect for the comic-book images that have held sway in Japanese pop culture since he was a boy, this passion project will simply hum at a frequency you can’t hear.
As he’d do later in First Love (2019), Miike crams in all the exposition he thinks the audience needs in the first ten minutes of JoJo, which features two distinct beginnings. The first of these recalls Michael Mann’s Manhunter: In sleek blue, angular compositions lit by birthday candles, a killer played by Takayuki Yamada (an alum of Miike’s 13 Assassins and Terra Formars) sits at a birthday celebration with his victims duct-taped under the table. Jun Kunimura plays the police chief standing outside the killer’s apartment trying to coax him to surrender to the law. It’s always good to see Kunimura, because his presence carries the weight of a huge swath of Japanese cinema; similarly, Miike’s tableau-like compositions convey just how much detail a manga like JoJo has accumulated over its 30-year history. After the killer escapes his building, he gets stopped by a man with a bow and arrow. The archer shoots him in the throat, then resurrects him, some greater purpose apparently in store. The assailant gets taken into custody, where he fills the interrogation room with rainwater and then escapes in the precipitation. Apparently, he’s able to shape-shift into a small current that moves through moisture.
The second beginning is even more comic and outsized. Hiroshi Koichi (Ryûnosuke Kamiki, returning from As the God’s Will) is new to his high school; he doesn’t make it to class before some toughs try to mug him. Enter Josuke, a.k.a. JoJo (Kento Yamazaki), who happens by and intervenes. The thugs make fun of JoJo’s hair, a Miike faux pas of unimaginable consequence. We’ve seen Ace Attorney, we’ve seen Terra Formars—we know that appearance, especially a highly stylized one, is not just fashion, but a way of life. It turns out behind JoJo’s hair, a full flat layer jutting out from his brow by a few inches shaped like a surfboard, is an invisible demon avatar he uses to do battle with his foes. Hiroshi has much to learn from JoJo (who starts showing up in his life on a regular basis), and style is just the beginning.
Hiroshi acts as a welcome identification figure for viewers who are new to the JoJo universe; he provides a reason for the title character to reiterate parts of his backstory. As Diamond Is Unbreakable - Chapter 1 proceeds, JoJo’s life comes poignantly into focus. The teenage boy lives with his single mother and beat officer grandfather, who treat him with affection and make little mention of his superpowers. JoJo attends high school, but he seems too busy saving his community from supernatural forces to devote himself to classwork. Not long into the film, JoJo meets a strange, older man who tells him that he’s not the only one in his town with a fighting avatar, known in this world as a “Stand.” This stranger, Jotaro Kujo, also reveals that he’s JoJo’s nephew; it turns out that our hero is the illegitimate son of Jotaro’s grandfather, who can pass down his superpowers to subsequent generations. In little time, JoJo and Jotaro team up to take on the Stand-using serial killer.
Miike’s world is a decadent layer cake of allegiances and violent clashes, and each time two characters wrap their destinies in each other, we progress to the next delicious layer. Since the first Dead or Alive—the film that introduced him to the wider world as a dynamo of action cinema—Miike has shown that nothing pleases him more than when an immovable object meets an unstoppable force. In Dead or Alive he dramatized this conflict with gleeful insanity that ended in the destruction of the entire world. Here, there’s still destruction, just on a smaller scale. The climactic clash of JoJo involves big, goofy, CG Stands fighting it out in an attic while an army of toy soldiers (controlled by one of the film’s villains) fire little guns and missiles at each other. Miike’s VFX team collaborated with JoJo creator Hirohiko Araki to maintain the integrity of the manga artist’s creation, and it’s a good thing they did. The digital creations evoke hand-drawn cartoon figures in their bold colors and exaggerated details; seeing them interact with real actors comprises another one of the film’s aesthetic clashes.
More importantly, the elegant and superficially pretty CGI make Miike’s compositions feel especially like manga panels, as do the relatively subdued medium close-ups and glossy color correction. Miike maintains a cartoon sense of movement, too, through the directionality and momentum of his shots and edits—it’s as though he directed it with his own personal Stand. As a result, big things jump out: the battle cries, the character details, the look of the monsters and mayhem, the powers of each combatant, the beautifully silly performances. The Miike film this most frequently resembles is Ninja Kids!!! in that everyone onscreen fully commits to the bigness and Road Runner-style manic energy. (Notwithstanding the climactic fight in the attic, the most characteristic moment may be a long take of JoJo’s grandfather lifting barbells in his bedroom) What’s different is the intricacy of the characterizations and visual design; where the earlier film was a cheerful introduction to the Ninja Kids!!! world, this reflects the pleasure of being enmeshed in an ongoing narrative that’s existed for years and years.
That pleasure, so central to any comic book lover’s experience, rarely comes through in Hollywood comic book movies. Obsessed with appealing to people who don’t read comics, those films fail to communicate why comic books acquire such diehard fans in the first place. Miike, manga fan that he is, knows that it’s OK to stuff a comicbook adaptation with detail even if some spectators won’t grasp all of them. In fact, there’s something appealing about coming into Diamond Is Unbreakable - Chapter 1 with limited knowledge of the JoJo universe: uninformed spectators have to piece together their understanding of the characters and settings through stray details in the dialogue and mise en scène. This scavenger hunt approach to narrative can be a lot of fun—more fun, certainly, than entertaining the possibility that alien forces might destroy the world (something that seems to happen in virtually every Marvel Studios outing). Miike, with his emotional investment in the material, perpetuates a sense of consequence (and, of course, grandeur) to the action, regardless of how large his canvas is. What emerges is a film that feels spectacular even when it trades in ridiculous hairstyles and battling toys.