Adrenaline Drive

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
1999

Adrenaline Drive
Shinobu Yaguchi
JAPAN, 1999
111 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Adrenaline Drive Committee
Producer: Kiyoshi Mizokami
Screenplay: Shinobu Yaguchi
Cinematographer: Takeshi Hamada
Editor: Shinobu Yaguchi
Production Designer: Yoshio Yamada
Sound: Seiichi Yamamoto
Music: Rashinban
Principal Cast: Masanobu Ando, Hikari Ishida, Kirina Mano, Jovi Jova Production: Adrenaline Drive Committee

Hidora to Odoro | Dancing with Hydra
Takuji Suzuki
JAPAN, 1999
4 minutes Black and White/16mm

The jet-black slapstick humour of Shinobu Yaguchi’s universe has been winning him admirers around the world since the now cult classic Down the Drain was released in 1993. His newest film, Adrenaline Drive, certainly retains enough Keaton-esque pratfalls and impossibly logical set-ups to keep fans happy, but also displays a joyous, absolutely credible romanticism. Yaguchi has discovered love and wants to share it with us in his giddy, unpredictable way.

Suzuki is a meek and indecisive rental car clerk. His life—or, more accurately, his fingers—is put in jeopardy after a fender bender with a histrionic yakuza. Something like luck intervenes when a massive explosion rocks the yakuza’s H.Q., killing off the whole gang.

Shizuko is a plain and timid nurse, mercilessly teased by her colleagues. She dreams of a better life, infallibly predicted by her horoscope at the local convenience store. When she is called to the site of the explosion, she finds Suzuki, a briefcase full of blood-soaked money and one not-quite-so-dead gangster wondering what happened. Love blooms, the yakuza wise up and all hell breaks loose.

An unfailing ear for dialect is one of Yaguchi’s great skills, in particular the breathless discourse of the Japanese teenage/young adult woman, which he uses to great comic effect. Here he especially uses language—eminently accessible in subtitled form—to follow Shizuko through her transition from bookworm to willful combatant against organized crime. The two leads—both “Dawson's Creek”-style stars at home—are delicious, especially the adorably confused Masanobu Ando, the feisty friend from Takeshi Kitano’s Kid’s Return. A complete delight in every way.

Dancing with Hydra is a crazy animation piece by frequent Yaguchi collaborator Takuji Suzuki. It is best described as an ode to a monster.
—Noah Cowan