Lala Pipo (Review)
Saturday, 6th February 2010, 16:56

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Extras
The Loveable People of Lala Pipo is the Making Of, and this lasts 34 minutes, with lots of behind the scenes footage, and the cast and crew talk about the film and their characters. It’s a little deeper than the usual EPK fluff, but not by much.

What is Sex? lasts 10 minutes, and the actors and the director all provide their personal definitions of the act of reproduction.

You get the trailer for Lala Pipo by itself, and in another section, trailers for 16 other forthcoming Third Window Films, and films already released.

Conclusion
What a difference a director makes? Tetsuya Nakashima may have written Lala Pipo, but Masayuki Miyano directed it, and the difference is telling, even though the visual style is nigh on identical. It’s still the same bright, shiny, Technicolor dream world that so typified Kamikaze Girls and especially Memories of Matsuko, but whereas I felt engaged by those two films, invested in the characters, and taken on an involving ride by the director, that didn’t happen with Lala Pipo, where I felt divorced from the narrative, merely a dispassionate observer of the various tales that unfolded.

The movie is all about sex, and the 18 rating is justified, although it’s probably more for the prevalent adult themes, rather than any explicit sexuality. Everything is implied, nothing is seen, except for Hiroshi’s penis that is, the talking green puppet. There are countless films of this structure, of several character stories that bump together or intertwine, with the narrative switching from one viewpoint to another, and as usual, some stories are more interesting than others. Hiroshi is a somewhat downbeat indictment of the shut-in culture, while Tomoko’s tale is a fairly pedestrian one of rags to riches. Yoshie’s tale is probably the one story that can’t standalone, and really only works because of the other characters that she encounters. In that way her story is probably the best integrated of the lot, but the others really just hang loosely together, rather than mesh intricately, which is usually where films like this stand or fall.

For me Lala Pipo falls by the wayside as a nice try. For one thing, the run time is too short at 93 minutes. None of the stories is developed all that satisfactorily, and none of the characters get any real development, or narrative flow. It’s as if we get a snapshot of the middle of their stories, and the beginning and end is left to the imagination. Unfortunately, as I just didn’t react to any of the characters, failed to develop any empathy for them, I couldn’t care about their beginnings or ends, and their middles were just a passing whimsy. It would have helped the film greatly if more effort had been made to make the characters likeable.

That said, there were a couple of characters that did leave an impression, and I get the feeling that properly developed, they could carry movies of their own. The Power Ranger with a red codpiece, Captain Bonita certainly has a ridiculous story to tell, and the overweight adult movie star Sayuri that wants to break into voice acting is also a story that I would have liked to see elaborated upon. Of course there is the wide-boy scout cum pimp cum porn agent Kenji who is definitely the star of the film, but I get the feeling that if he were to carry a film of his own, it would star Michael Caine and be called Alfie.

Lala Pipo is not a Lala fun. It’s retina damagingly bright and colourful, but that’s a wafer thin veneer beneath which not a lot of substance resides. It’s also not nearly as funny or as groundbreaking as it wants to be. If you want to see this character vignette style movie done to better effect in Japan, try Survive Style 5+, which I found significantly more satisfying. Lala Pipo will serve to pass the time though.

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