Review: Now in his early 80s, Seijun Suzuki makes his most accessible work in PRINCESS RACCOON. The material is presented in a straightforward manner. The mise en scènes are established right from the get-go and are used to resemble that of a stage play. While the action takes place on a stage, Suzuki does use blue screen, propelling the characters to far away places and situations with brightly designed, floating backdrops, and effectively using this technique to transition between scenes. The scenes change from natural to artificial settings and PRINCESS RACCOON is full of such demonstrations; on a boat down a swirling matte painting to an actual sandy beach to a proscenium with barely a single prop. Thornton Wilder would be proud. Actual locations are used sparingly. This selective use of properties allows the focus to be on the cast, which cleverly engages the audience with the artifice of musical theater (also probably much easier for an octogenarian director).

This fairytale uses song to help further the story and to provide some pleasant tunes that run the gamut, from highbrow, opera-like arias to campy rap-delivered songs. All of the musical numbers are quite wonderful and an exquisite earful. Adjectives like zany, Noh hip-hop, funny and kitschy are apt terms to describe this musical fairytale. And like fairytales, the audience has to suspend its disbelief and let the story unfold to their eyes and ears for the whimsical surroundings. The characters are sharply defined in absolutes; bad and good. Only fairytales can really exploit pure good or evil, one-dimensional characters, like Tanuki-hime or Amechiyo. The supporting cast is also similarly predisposed. Just think of Grimm's fairytales or Aesop's fables and you'll understand.

Once you settle into the feel of the movie as a play on film, the music of PRINCESS RACCOON becomes most prominent. The "Koisuru Tansansui" duet with Zhang and Odagiri echoes throughout the film and is used to introduce the lovers as they float along the river or walk in the forest and whenever they are together.

The rest of the cast is uniformly welcome. All are properly archetypal in their portrayals of the characters in PRINCESS RACCOON; for example, the lord is vain and unloving except for his self aggrandizement, while the son is open and giving and Zhang is almost thrust upon a pedestal for the entire film by Suzuki to look beautiful and desirable. Even though Zhang Ziyi spoke Chinese while the rest of the cast spoke Japanese, the languages were not too distracting. Suzuki even provides an aside in the movie to take care of this difference.

But, the performances were a tad flat and stiff. At first I thought that this was a product of placing the film on stage and pulling back from the audience, but after further reflection, the range was limited to the script. Since this is a fairytale, the characters had to deal with absolutes. No shading was emoted because there were no greys or muted tones; everything was bright and bold, no room for subtlety. But even with such a drawback, the entire movie was such a joy that I look forward to an actual musical rendering on stage somewhere and sometime in the future.

Suzuki's eye for color is still evident, from the costumes to the colorful backdrops used to transport the characters from scene to scene. Age hasn't diminished Suzuki’s palette of vibrant colors. While many may attempt to discern the esoteric elements, they will be in for a complete surprise because there really aren't any. PRINCESS RACCOON is a fairytale for all ages. And the biggest pleasure is that this Seijun Suzuki work isn't hard to follow isn't veiled with cryptic messages and it isn't made for snobby aesthetes. Suzuki’s writing is clear and unambiguous. PRINCESS RACCOON is for all who hold children's fairytales dear, and for those who want to recapture that lost innocence of discovering a new fairytale for the first time.