Best movie ever!

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

–Whats your name any way– –After a smile he says–Kikujiro–The name was not that important till the end. He was with the boy and he was with us with his ridicule persona and big mouthed nature. By the time when he was about to leave, I was about to ask his name. Masao helped me. Takeshi Kitanos 1999 film is about a young boy searching for his estranged mother in his summer vacation. The journey towards his mother would have remain simple and he could have met his settled mother and his life still would have remain sad only if he had gone to meet his mother alone. Kikujiro went with him and shared a wild misadventure together which changed both of their lives. Kikujiro is an aggressive middle aged crook. He had a overruling wife and a sad mother who had been kept on a old people\s shelter. In his sub–conscious, he had kept enough suffering of his life, accumulating it into next level. Thats why he gets angry , put his foul mouthed conversation into anyone, It is just because he doesn't want to be happy and shows the cynical nature, just because he was suffering. In one of the scenes from the film, when he requests Fatso, the biker to help him get to the old house where he sees his mother sitting lonely on the table. He just watches her and fears to go near to her and spend a whole day in silence. This shows how he had lived his life in a suffocation of alienation. How he had utterly desired to be accepted among the civilized Japanese Society. When he was ignored and alienated from that part of good society, he became a rebel in the form of goons. He had idolized the Yakuza because it was the only way of Solace for him. Masao and Kikujiro takes a wild road trip into a Japanese countryside where they meet Angel like strangers, who in real life were outcast and alienated people. They became friends and share a beautiful childish holiday together. They were all outcast in search of whole happiness. The real and civilized people were portrayed as demons and were treated in a cynical and unromantic nature. The unforgettable things about this film are its characters, like the lonely poet, baldy, Fatso and the soothing soundtrack from Joe Hisaishi. A great film worth watching. Two Thumbs Up! I was wondering why it was not considered for Palme D or at Cannes.Nischal Poudyal

This is the first film that Takeshi Kitano directed after the critically acclaimed "Hana-bi" and it represents a totally different approach from him. Perhaps he wanted to make a movie that didn't have the violent content that characterized his previous work, also trying to prove his versatility as an actor. The result is a film that manages to be funny and touching in the same time and it accomplishes that without relying on the clichés that are usually present in films of this kind.Little boy Masao decides to go on a long trip in order to visit his mother whom he had never seen, but in order to do that he must be accompanied by an adult. He finds his companion in Kikujiro, a grumpy and loudmouthed middle-aged man who sometimes cannot avoid getting into trouble. They embark on a journey that is filled with adventures, adventures that manage to build a strong relationship between the two characters. Takeshi Kitano rose to fame as a comedian and this is a film where he fully displays his comedic skills. In spite of all his bad habits, Kikujiro is a likable character and that is the merit of Kitano, who proves once again that he is a talented actor. His directing is also precise and he makes great use of the wonderful score from Joe Hisaishi.With "Kikujiro", Kitano started from a formula that you can also find in Hollywood movies (that of two very different people traveling together), but the final result doesn't look like anything from Hollywood. Kitano managed to make a highly original film by using his unique style and that really paid off in the end.My rating: 8/10

I think Kikujiro is mainly about loneliness.Takeshi's character and the boy, Masao, seem really different on the surface. Takeshi's provokes people, is loud and rude. Masao is quiet and sad.But they're really the same person: someone whose life is full of disappointment, abandonment. They both feel isolated, like no one could understand. They might be pitied, but no one could understand like they'd been there, like they'd lived that kind of life.And when you get really lonely like that, I think it makes you bitter. The whole world continues to smile and sing its fortunes while your life seems to get worse and worse, less and less reason to stay living.Masao is very withdrawn because of this. Over time, as he gets older, I can see him getting more and more bitter about it. Maybe Takeshi's character was like Masao at first, too. Lonely and sad. And then maybe he thought, "why should I be sad? All the world has brought me is misfortune. I should rather be angry!" and then started trying to provoke and anger people on purpose. Why should they be content, anyway? But, all the other characters they meet on the journey are like that, too. Isolates, people on the edge of society, people who might call themselves "countercultural" or something like that. What I think is really important is how they change over the course of the movie. Like they might have the liberty to sit around all day, smoking and brooding and depressed. Masao is only a child, and all this kind of disappointment is new to him.In a less realistic film maybe the characters would be, in their characteristic brooding way, like, "Eh, them's the breaks huh kid". In Kikujiro they're people. They can see how much he's like them, how much pain he's in. And they're so jaded because they're still hurting, too.So they try and cheer him up, play games with him. Show him the kind of love he never got from anyone else in his life, that they never got. And it's so touching because they, especially Takeshi's character, start to see it's not so bad, not so hopeless. That everyone loves, and everyone cries, and just because their lives have been particularly worse than others doesn't mean they can't reach out to and come to an understanding with others.The film's long takes sometimes feel kinda pointless, like they're just there because that's part of the director's style. But other times they really work, especially in the more emotional scenes. They help say more than any amount of ridiculous sad symphonic music could.And the music, which is intermittent and plays on a single theme, is really good too. It doesn't feel like some kind of deliberately tragic cliché, but still adds a great amount to the mood of the movie and helped bring me to tears at some points.Some negative reviews I've read call Kikujiro shallow or emotionally manipulative, but I can't see that at all. The whole thing is very human, and doesn't force any moral down your throat other than that, I guess, that you are not so alone. And it feels like it's coming from someone who has been alone, who has felt this incredible sadness, and also conquered it. And I think, that means more than I can really put into words.

Kikujiro no Natsu has gathered public and critical acclaim over the years, so it gives me no pleasure as a Kitano fan to state that the film is a flabby, undisciplined and self-indulgent episode in Kitano's film career. Kitano reverses his usual protagonist traits - the stoic, silent guy gives way to a volatile motor-mouth. The trademark graphic-schlock violence takes place off-screen. The tale is well-worn; the odd couple thrown together set out on a journey that changes both of their lives. Unfortunately, there is no evolution in the relationship to an emotional climax, just a few titters along the way.The child character, Masao, is problematic. His quest is to meet his real mother, whose abandonment of him at an early age is never really explained, to Masao or the audience. At the moment where he sees his mother and her new family, it is not made clear what effect this has had on him. He cries, but does his past, no matter how traumatic, now make sense to him? Kikujiro sets out to distract the boy, and succeeds immediately. There is no progression in the boys recovery from the shock of seeing his mother for the first time - in fact, five minutes later, it is as if the whole episode had never happened. At the end, when Kikujiro says, "Let's look for your mother again," we do not know if the boy is aware of the lie or not. Strangely for this kind of movie, we do not care about the boy. Compare the child protagonists in Stand By Me, Leon, or Sixth Sense. This is not a cultural thing, as evidenced by the sympathetic portrayal of children abandoned by adults in Kore-eda's Nobody Knows or Iwai's Swallowtail Butterfly. In Kikujiro no Natsu, little Masao is more a totem pole for Kitano and his buddies to re-hash their slapstick comedy routines around.The character of Kikujiro does not make sense either. The moment when he realises the parallels between his own life and Masao's is hackneyed in the extreme, a soliloquy to off- camera. His interaction with the boy is superficial, and the interaction of Kitano with the various quirky characters they encounter does not make any sense, either comedic or plot- driven. His visit to his mother in her Retirement Home merely ices the cake too sweetly.The film seems to show more of the other Kitano, Beat the TV personality than Takeshi the filmmaker. The camping sequence with the obsequious bikers could come straight from one of his goofy game shows. The interaction with the farmer/banker at the bus stop is mildly funny if you realise the actor is Kitano's older brother, but just bizarre otherwise. Some excellent cinematography and an outstanding score from Joe Hisaishi are two compensations in this disappointing, ill-advised film.