In the late ‘80s, Japanese cinema was in the doldrums. The rising popularity of VHS rental stores and imported Hollywood blockbusters had left theater seats for native productions near-empty, and the major studios of the 1950s’ golden age — including Godzilla producers Toho — were so bereft of ideas that they struggled to stay in business. Despite bright spots like Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Juzo Itami’s comedy The Funeral, box office statistics were damning: theater attendance had dwindled from 1.2 billion in 1960 to just 200 million in 1980, and even Cannes Palme d’Or wins for veteran filmmakers Akira Kurosawa (Kagemusha) and Shohei Imamura (The Ballad of Narayama) did little to curb a perceived decline in quality. Critics were so deflated that they’d call the ‘80s the lost decade of Japanese cinema.
