Emotion (1966) User Reviews

Better Love Story Than 'Twilight'

[hrkepler · 7/10 · 10 June 2018]

'Emotion' is peculiar little film. Experimental, but it has warmth and some sweetness in it. Like many other such surreal experimental movies, 'Emotion' is very hard to analyze. The film has a core story - a girl meets another girl who looks like her and she falls in love to a vampire. Very interesting use of old Dracula myth. Although it might be little hard to follow or understand what is going on - is it a dream, a distorted real world - it's still enjoyable film, especially when you're into surreal stuff. Partly black/white, partly color, stop-motion effects. Cowboys having shoot-outs, vampire throwing knife into the air and laying down to wait his death by falling knife. Girl from sea discovering city and love, and then returning to the sea. Unlike most surrealist work 'Emotion' never falls into dark territory, it keeps it cheerful almost child like joy. Many state that Bunuel or Lynch would be perfect start in surrealist films, but I think Nobuhiko Obayashi's shorts, although hard to find, are also great start.

farewell Dracula, farewell youth...

[framptonhollis · 8/10 · 2 July 2018]

Here we have a classic example of charming avant garde madness from none other than Japan, a country that's the home of many extremely unique and flat out bizarre films, and this is no doubt near the top of the most unique and bizarre films I have yet to see. It isn't perfect, and by the end it has descended into such chaotic experimentation that it just becomes a collage of near nonsense, but it is lots of fun and remains consistently off-the-walls and entertainingly playful as to keep itself far from being a waste of time in the least. It's funny, scary, and, of course, highly surreal, really worth seeking out for anyone who considers themselves a big fan of "weird movies."

Although I'm making the film kinda sound like nothing much more than amusing madness, there is plenty of artistic merit at play here. The cinematography is oddly eye popping, the visuals invigorating and simultaneously beautiful and disturbing at times, it's a dreamlike quest of love, taking the atmospheres of a fairy tale, horror film, and abstract work of modern art and smashing them together in a vampire-based short film fantasy that could only come from a wildly creative mind made of pure imagination. And it turns out that mind is the same mind behind the film 'Hausu', which has been on my watchlist for years and I feel I am now ready to finally get to watching...tomorrow...

Delightfully off the wall short

[Woodyanders · 8/10 · 30 November 2017]

Young girl Emi travels to the city where she meets her lookalike counterpart Sari and falls in love with a vampire. Director Nobuhiko Obayashi keeps the freewheeling narrative hurtling along at a breathless breakneck pace, maintains an engagingly childlike playful tone throughout, and further spruces things up with inspired touches of amiable impish humor. Emi Tabata and Sari Akasaka make for vibrant and attractive leads. Better still, Obayashi's bold, dynamic, and wildly imaginative pop-art style encompasses everything from beautiful still photographs to artificially sped-up scenes to a truly loopy Wild West gunslinger showdown. Naoshi Miyazaki's jaunty score keeps things bouncing along. The hyper-kinetic editing and equally energetic cinematography further give this honey a substantial invigorating buzz. Pure infectious fun.

Fun Experimental Film

[mevmijaumau · 16 May 2014]

Norman McLaren-style stop-motion effects of people jumping in the air, a vampire killing himself by throwing a knife and patiently laying on the grass waiting for it to strike, a hyperactive camera unable to show a cinematography effect-less shot for more than a single second, an intense western duel featuring a cowboy playing a short string instrument solo before dying, a whole lot of meta-jokes, shots of newspaper cutouts that I suppose were put there to signify chapters, and a whole bunch of other enjoyable experimental techniques make this movie hella fun.

Obayashi's most famous movie, Hausu, is notable for its child-like atmosphere and bizarre special effects, Emotion being similar in style. One of my favorite moments in this movie is when a young girl's father touches her nose, only for us to find out that he actually touched a black&white photo of her, with circular water disturbances coming out of her nose when he touched it. By the way, it's hard to figure out this movie's plot while watching it, or maybe I didn't because the version I saw didn't have subtitles on during the parts with short narrations in Japanese.

Guy Maddin Inspiration?

[sambson · 8/10 · 24 June 2020]

Fine avant garde film. Call me crazy, but I feel as if Guy Maddin used Emotion as an inspiration for his film, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (2002).

Very weird

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 22 November 2015]

"Émotion" (notice the French spelling) is a 40-minute short film from almost 50 years ago. The writer and director behind this piece is Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, who you may know from his most famous work "Hausu". But here, back in 1966, this was still really early during his career and he wasn't even 30 years old. Yet this was not one of his very first works as a filmmaker. Anyway, what can i say about these 40 minutes? it is an extremely experimental movie. There may be some kind of story in here, but it gets lost in the quantity of individual shots and strange actions taking place. Most of the actors in here have never appeared in another film before or after this one. I personally did not really enjoy the watch. It was too strange for my taste. It's not a complete failure, but a very unusual movie and all in all I can't recommend it.

Incomprehensible Visual Gibberish

[SpaaceMonkee · 3/10 · 19 October 2020]

The plot makes no sense. I frankly don't think it's capable of being "spoiled" in any legitimate sense. This short movie is more about the visuals than any coherent narrative. Unfortunately, the visuals largely fall into the category of doing odd things with the camera, just because they can.

If you're thinking of watching this because it was included on your Criterion Collection version of House, I would recommend you skip this and move on to another movie from your set instead. It doesn't matter what you pick; almost any one of them would be a better use of your time.