7 July 2020

The Burning Buddha Man (Japan, 2013)

There is a series of Buddha statue thefts in Kyoto. Beniko, a high school girl, gets the Buddha statue at her family's temple stolen and has her parents killed at the same time. Beniko hears from Enju, her parents friend, that a robbery group called SEADDATTHA are the one who killed her parents, and feels the strong urge for vengeance. 

The Burning Buddha Man has got to be one of the trippiest films ever made, that's for sure. It uses a technique called "gekimation", and it involves placing figures in the foreground and background, focusing them appropriately to add depth and scope and shaking them about to imitate body movement and such. It's kind of a primitive film-style but when it's this well made you're enjoying every second of it. 

The artwork on the flat figures are fantastic and gross, the surreal and grotesque nature of the story fits perfectly with the chosen film technique and I'm more invested in this story, played out by tiny pieces of colored paper-craft, than I've been in many big-budget productions. Imagine that. A really interesting and disgusting experience, it gives you something original and wraps it in blood-soaked Buddhistic themes of ultra-enlightenment, levels of Zen that turns us into something beyond human. Something much more slimy. 


Genre: Animation/Fantasy/Horror

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