Text | Zheng Zhou
Japanese commercial animation enthusiast
In Japan, February 22 of each year is called "Cat Day", and this year, domestic idol chefs and even fans of the pan-entertainment industry will remember this day to a deeper extent: Japan's most famous idol group AKB48 first-term student, Genjin 7 member Koshima Yoshinori held a graduation concert on this day.
Just two days ago, on February 20, a popular member of another well-known idol group, Nogizaka 46, Hashimoto Nana, also graduated on her birthday and bid farewell to the show business circle.
These two recently graduated popular idols are not young, and Shima Yangcai, born in 1988, is 28 years old, especially in the entire AKB group of teenage girls. In turn, the concept of "graduation" also makes us realize that even if the age difference is large, the members under the love prohibition system all maintain the same "purity" in the idol sense.
Kojima Ryona
The current highly mature, closed and self-sufficient idol profession is also reminiscent of the Japanese idol wave of the 80s, which is not only a certain source of contemporary idol culture (Yasushi Akimoto's kitten club was founded in 1985), but also a unique cultural landscape of the era when professional idols collided with traditional media such as film, music, and advertising. Among them, idol movies, as the interface between idols and movies, have also greatly influenced the development of Japanese films themselves.
In 1953, the five major Japanese film companies (Shochiku, Toho, Shintoho, Daiei, and Toei) jointly signed the < Five Societies Agreement >, establishing the basic system of production and distribution in the golden age of Japanese films after the war, which was later called the photography studio system.
After a period of good operation, this large film company's self-produced and self-selling system gradually reached an impasse with the advent of Japan's period of high development and the rise of various new entertainment methods. By the early 1980s, the road had finally come to an end, with only Daily Life maintaining its own studio for pink films until 1988. At a time when the big film company was in a slump, Kadokawa Pictures changed the map of the Japanese film industry.
Haruki Kadokawa, the second president of Kadokawa Shoten, who was originally a publisher, was very enthusiastic about film adaptations as early as the 1970s in order to promote its books. In 1976, Kadokawa was planning to work with Shochiku to adapt Masashi Yokogou's speculative novel "Eight Tombs Village", but due to shochi's unpleasant changes, the plan was greatly delayed, so he decided to make his own film.
Later, "Inuyasha Family", directed by Kun Ichikawa, became the first work of Kadokawa's paintings. With this as a starting point, Kadokawa used his own experience in cross-media publicity, different from the previous linear film promotion, to fit the consumerist advertising strategy, and launched a series of popular novel adaptations. Haruki Kadokawa, as a producer, appears more frequently in the media than as a director and actor.
But after Komatsu Sakyo's original blockbuster film Resurrection Day failed to recoup its costs in 1980, Kadokawa Changed Strategy and began making low-budget idol-centric films. After successfully creating the "Kadokawa Three-Man Lady" (Yakushi Maru Hiroko, Harada Chisei, Watanabe Noriko), it effectively pulled the young audience into the passenger flow, and the box office was a huge success.
The Day of resurrection (1980)
In its heyday, Kadokawa Film monopolized 12 films in the top 50 of the historical box office, and at the same time, it led to the rise of idol movies in the entire industry. It may be said that the idol movies of the 1980s were the era of Kadokawa films.
"Inugami Family" (1976)
On the other hand, although Kadokawa Pictures attaches great importance to commercial effects in distribution, it is not a complete entertainmentism in film production. On the contrary, Kadokawa Has purposefully absorbed a variety of front-line film crews, from directors to lighting engineers, who were not limited by the contract after the end of the studio era. Many of the most creative filmmakers of the 1980s left their mark on Kadokawa's paintings.
Kadokawa himself has created a more relaxed creative environment for them. For example, in the "Onomichi Trilogy" directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, the first "Transfer Student" was invested and produced by the famous art film company ATG, and the second "Girl Who Traveled Through Time" was invested and produced by Kadokawa Pictures, and the two films were perfectly inherited in form and temperament. Although there was a factor in ATG's shift to youth films and entertainment in the 1980s, the bigger reason was Kadokawa's tolerance for writerism to a large extent.
The intersection of Kadokawa's paintings in these two aspects is perfectly and profoundly displayed in the same person, who is the medicine man Maru Hiroko.
Pharmacist Pill Hiroko
Born in 1964, Hiroko Yakuza Maru made her debut in Kadokawa's third work, Proof of The Wild, in the first year of high school, and in recent years has been recognized by many domestic audiences for playing an important supporting role in the critically acclaimed NHK morning drama Haenyeo. Kadokawa consciously controlled her appearance on television in the most popular media, making her a star that had been extremely rare since the 1970s that had been conceived purely from film.
As the most successful idol of the entire Kadokawa Film Era, Yakuza Maru Hiroko won great popularity among young audiences at the time, and on the second day of the release of "Sailor Suit and Machine Gun" starring in 1981, the promotional campaign originally scheduled for Osaka had to be cancelled because of the 8,000 fans gathered at the movie theater.
Sailor Suit and Machine Gun (1981)
At the same time, under the dazzling commercial achievements, the seven films starring Hiroko Yakushimaru in Kadokawa are also a kind of fragmented representative of idol movies and even Japanese movies in the 80s. Shinji Sagami, Nobuhiko Obayashi, Shinji Fukasaku, Yoshimitsu Morita... These representative directors of the 80s have deeply implemented their authorship in their cooperation with Hiroko Maru.
Just as a daily pink film can shoot anything as long as there are a few passionate scenes, Kadokawa idol films can shoot anything as long as they use the prescribed idol as the protagonist, and the rest is also filmed. Interestingly, the most temperamental day-to-day of the union is inherited in the spirit of production, but Kadokawa, who has the strongest free temperament.
Then in the face of Hiroko Yakuza Maru's films of different forms, if you must find a keyword for a taxonomic generalization, I am afraid that it will eventually come down to "idol". Originally, before the war, there were already idol movies such as "Hideko's Leader of the Rescue Group" starring Hideko Takayama, and some of Yamaguchi's films in the 1970s also received public attention.
However, most of them are only to show the cuteness and cleanliness of the idol's surface. As for today's idol movies, as mentioned at the beginning, it is the mature idol form (excess "purity") that completely erodes cinematography.
Unlike both, we can use "Girls Step on the Steps of Adults" to chart a central axis for Hiroko Yakuza Maru's idol film history. More specifically, the "purity" of an idol collides with the "maturity" of the whole world.
In 1981, "Sailor Suit and Machine Gun" starring Hiroko Yakuza Maru was released and won the first place at the annual box office. Film critic Shigehiko Hashiko Hashito described the film directed by Shinji Somi as "forcibly turning an ordinary little girl into a star".
In the movie, an ordinary high school girl absurdly becomes the leader of the gang and lives with her father's original mistress. Violence and lust as one side of the adult world are both arbitrary and direct intrusion into the life of young girls. The final yakuza Maru Hiroko completes the reconciliation of the world not through the famous line "Pleasure", but by dedicating her first kiss to a deceased middle-aged man.
Later, Hiroko Maru, a pharmacist, took a year off for college exams, and the 1983 revertation "Detective Story" tells the story of a "childish crack in the world". This time, the precocious female college student took the initiative to entangle a middle-aged detective with a complicated past.
Pink film-born director Yoshitaro Negishi meticulously depicts the scene of the two going to the love hotel to investigate the case, and builds the relationship between the two sides in the most adult space. At the end of the film, the scene between Hiroko Maru and Yusaku Matsuda at the airport has caused a huge conversation among fans, so much so that Matsuda Yusaku specifically mentioned this matter during the stage promotion.
Then in 1984, Hiroko Maru cooperated with Yoshimitsu Morita. This contemporary film called "My Summer Trip" abandons the theme of teenage uncle love, and the camera turns to distressed young men and women.
Of course, this is not a return to pure adolescence, in the film's consumerist artificial landscape throughout Okinawa, Yakushi Maru Hiroko gets rid of the interference of older men and thinks alone about what an "adult" is. Just as she asks Momoi "what is the real thing about sex", Momoi fumi replies with the line "it is a blank mind", and the end of the yakuza maru Hiroko and Nomura Hironobu "blank mind" to the longing hotel.
My Summer Trip (1984)
Finally, it was time for Hiroko Yakuza Maru to paint "The Tragedy of W" in Kadokawa's painting. This Japanese film masterpiece, which ranks among the top 100 in the Shunbun newspaper, begins with the first experience scene of Hiroko Yakuza Maru, and Shinichiro Sawai makes the story of this young woman trying to become a famous actor into a sense of heaviness that belongs to the film.
The stage play staged in the film is not only a drama nested as a film structure, but also an actual exhibition of Hiroko Yakuzaru from a girl to an adult and from an idol to an actor. As an anti-"idol" idol film, Hiroko Yakuza Maru has achieved the final maturity in this contradictory two sides.
The Tragedy of W (1984)
Japanese film researcher Hana Tsuruya wrote in the article "The End of the Studio System and the Age of "Freedom"" that after breaking away from the heavy employment and contracts of the studio era, Japanese films in the 1980s created a new physical appearance, and this "body of possibility" clearly divided into "private and public, play and work, immature and mature, death and survival".
The idol movies of the 1980s, which are also in the same era, like the series of films starring Hiroko Yakuza Maru above, are also spiraling through the idol's body, which constantly influences "purity" and "maturity", exuding a heterogeneous charm that attracts later audiences.