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Introduction
February is Tetsuya Nakashima month at Third Window Films, with the re-release of Kamikaze Girls in Special Edition and Blu-ray form, and this, Lala Pipo. At least the blurb has Tetsuya Nakashima prominent in its text, but a closer look indicates that Nakashima wrote Lala Pipo; he didn’t direct it. That duty fell to debut director Masayuki Miyano. Lala Pipo is what one of the characters hears when a stray American tourist happens to remark that “There sure are a lotta people” in the city. Apparently, they are all having sex, which is what Lala Pipo sets out to explore, following the lives of several disparate characters.

One of them is a shut-in loner, a freelance writer whose only sexual excitement comes from listening in to one of his neighbours who apparently gets a different girl each night. The loner is left alone with his penis, his only friend, and who’s started criticising his lifestyle choices. Well what do you expect from a furry green puppet? That neighbour is Kenji Kurino, a scout. His job is to use his considerable charms to tempt nubile young women away from the dreary drudgery of their everyday lives, and to introduce them to the infinite possibilities of Tokyo’s sex industry, working their way up from hostess bars, prostitution, and all the way to adult videos. It’s just what Tomoko is looking for, escaping her existence as a shop assistant, although it seems that Kenji has to do a fair bit of convincing nonetheless. There’s less convincing with Yoshie, who is already an adult star, specialising in fetish work. She wants to star in something a little more ‘normal’, and it falls to Kenji to find her the perfect movie. Poor Kenji, Yoshie is a nymphomaniac. Then there’s Sayuri, who doesn’t need an agent to get into adult videos, she’s doing fine dressing as a Lolita, cruising bars, and with a hidden camera in her apartment. And who is there to save the world from all this rampant carnality? Captain Bonita, that’s who. He’s an alien Power Ranger who has come to Earth to save us all from ourselves, using a bright red codpiece cannon to shoot down immorality. But by day Captain Bonita is Koichi, a timid young attendant in a sex club.

Picture
Lala Pipo gets a 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer. From what I can see, it’s a native film to PAL transfer, none of the problems of standards conversion were present, and I certainly didn’t have to deal with interlacing when trying to grab these screenshots. That said, the image is a tad soft, probably intentionally so, to go with the Technicolor zaniness and visual excess of the movie. This is bright, shiny, hyperreal and overexposed. It’s the sort of film you need to insure your retinas against, just like Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko.

Sound
Just a DD 2.0 Japanese soundtrack with optional English subtitles. The audio is clear throughout, there’s some nice pop music to go with the pop art imagery, and the stereo does get a little lively when called upon. The subtitles were well timed and free of error as well, so all in all a positive experience.

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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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