Funky Forest: The Sketch-Comedy Fever Dream

Funky Forest: The First Contact runs about two and a half hours and has no plot. That is the first thing to establish, because almost every unhappy encounter with this film begins with someone waiting for one to start.

What it has instead is sketches. Three directors — Katsuhito Ishii, Hajime Ishimine and Shunichiro Miki — assembled a feature-length sequence of loosely grouped, occasionally recurring, entirely unresolved comic and surreal episodes, released in Japan in 2005 under a title that translates closer to Nice Forest. Some episodes recur. Some appear once and are never mentioned again. Some have no discernible joke. The film ends when it stops.

Twenty years on it has one of the more peculiar reputations in Japanese cult cinema: almost nobody defends it as a film, and a surprising number of people rank it among the most memorable things they have ever watched. This is a revisit, and the material that benefits from surprise sits below the spoiler line, though the concept of spoiling Funky Forest is itself faintly comic. Above the line, the case for taking it seriously.

What is actually in it

The recurring strand most people remember involves three brothers collectively characterised by their comprehensive failure with women, whose scenes consist largely of talking around that failure in a register of excruciating, deadpan realism. Tadanobu Asano appears as one of them, credited as Guitar Brother, and his air-guitar material is the film’s most famous sequence.

Susumu Terajima appears. Rinko Kikuchi appears, two years before Babel made her internationally visible. There is a strand involving schoolteachers, a strand involving a mole, an extended and genuinely inexplicable sequence involving a hot spring and a conversation that will not end, and a series of increasingly grotesque and organic setpieces built around bio-mechanical apparatus that squelches.

Katsuhito Ishii, the best-known of the three, had made Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl and the widely admired The Taste of Tea the year before, and had contributed to the animated sequence in Kill Bill. Shunichiro Miki went on to direct The Warped Forest, which functions as a companion piece. These are not amateurs. The shapelessness is a decision.

Why the shapelessness is the method

The interesting craft question is why this works at all, given that it violates the single most reliable rule in cinema — that an audience will forgive almost anything except the sense that nothing is being built.

The answer is that Ishii and his collaborators are exceptionally good at the thing they refuse to do anything with. Every individual sketch in Funky Forest is directed with total precision. The framing is beautiful. The colour is controlled. The comic timing — particularly in the brothers’ material, which lives or dies entirely on pause length — is the work of people who know exactly where a laugh is. Each episode is a small, well-made film. The provocation is that they are then placed next to each other with no connective logic whatsoever.

The result is a specific and unusual viewing state. Deprived of narrative, the audience stops predicting. You cannot anticipate what comes next, because nothing that has happened constrains what happens next, and after about forty minutes your brain gives up trying and enters a mode much closer to dreaming than to watching. That state is the film’s actual product. The sketches are the delivery mechanism.

Duration is essential to the effect and it is why the running time defeats people. A ninety-minute version of Funky Forest would be a curiosity. At two and a half hours, the film outlasts your defences. The surrender is the point, and the film has to be too long in order to achieve it — which is a genuinely difficult thing to defend to someone checking their watch at the eighty-minute mark, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

The organic material is the most technically impressive strand. The bio-mechanical setpieces are practical, wet, and designed with real inventiveness — apparatus that appears grown rather than built, operated by performers in ways the film never explains. It sits in a Japanese tradition the desk has traced repeatedly, and it is executed to a standard the rest of the film’s slacker register gives no warning of.

The sound editing is where the method is most visible, and it is the detail that convinced me the shapelessness is engineered. Sketches in this film do not end on a beat. The audio bleeds — a sound from the next episode arrives under the tail of the current one, so you are already in the following sketch before you have registered leaving the last. Any competent editor would put a moment of silence between two unrelated pieces to let the audience file the first one away. Ishii and his collaborators deny you that moment, systematically, for two and a half hours, which is precisely how the film prevents you from building a mental index of what you have seen. The dream state is manufactured in the sound mix.

The collector’s ancestor

The film has no obvious feature ancestor, which is why it is usually filed under “inexplicable”. The ancestor is a format rather than a film.

Funky Forest is descended from the avant-garde short programme — the underground screening at which a dozen unrelated pieces run back to back, and the meaning, if any, is generated by the audience out of the collisions. That is exactly this film’s structure, presented as a single object. Maya Deren’s dream loop is the type specimen for what an individual item in such a programme does — a self-contained piece of dream logic that refuses to resolve — and Funky Forest is what happens if you commission fifteen of them and refuse to say which is the main one.

The second ancestor is the midnight movie, and the debt is behavioural rather than formal. Jodorowsky’s El Topo and the birth of the midnight movie established the model: a film that makes no sense on a screen alone at home and becomes an event in a room full of people at one in the morning. Everything the desk has argued about why the midnight movie needs a crowd applies to Funky Forest more literally than to almost anything else. Watched alone, it is homework. Watched with six people and no plans, it is one of the great nights out in cinema.

The third ancestor is Japanese television. Ishii and company are working in a comic grammar built by decades of variety programming — the sketch, the endurance bit, the celebrity placed in an absurd situation and filmed until something happens. Matsumoto’s white-room puzzle draws on the same well and applies iron structure to it; Funky Forest takes the same material and removes the structure. The two films are a matched pair, and they arrive at comparable strangeness from opposite directions.

The nearest sibling in tone is the candy-coloured ad-world chaos of Survive Style 5+ — same era, same country, Asano again, and a shared conviction that a film’s obligation to make sense is negotiable. Sekiguchi’s film keeps a skeleton. This one dissolved its own.

The case against

It is punishingly too long, in a way that costs it the audience it deserves. The film’s own logic requires the duration, and I accept the argument, and I have still watched people leave the room at ninety minutes and been unable to tell them they were wrong.

The hit rate is inconsistent. Perhaps half the sketches are genuinely inspired. A quarter are decent. A quarter are simply inert, and because nothing accumulates, an inert sketch is dead weight with no possibility of retrospective redemption. In a narrative film a weak scene can be forgiven later. Here, a weak sketch is just eight minutes gone.

And the film is impossible to recommend responsibly. There is no version of “you should watch this” that does not require four paragraphs of disclaimer, which is why it remains a cult object rather than a canonical one, and why its reputation travels almost entirely by personal insistence.

The verdict

Funky Forest is a real film by serious people asking a real question: whether cinema’s obligation to build something is a law or a habit. Its answer is that the obligation is a habit, and that a film composed of nothing but beautifully made fragments can produce a state no plotted film can reach. I think it is right, and I think it pays a heavy price for being right, and both of those things are worth sitting with.

Do not watch it alone. Do not watch it tired. Get people in, start it late, accept in advance that you will lose track of it, and let the thing happen. What survives is a handful of images and a specific quality of bewilderment that has stayed with me for years and that almost nothing else in cinema supplies.

Disc is the only dependable route; the film has never had a stable streaming home outside Japan, which is entirely in character.

Spoilers below

The film’s most notorious sequence involves the bio-mechanical apparatus and a young woman operating it, and describing the machinery in detail would be a genuine disservice — it is one of the few things in the picture engineered for pure shock, and it works because the film’s aimlessness has completely disarmed you by the time it arrives. Ishii and Miki understand that a surrealist image lands hardest when the audience has stopped bracing.

The Guitar Brother material is the film’s real heart, and its payoff is that there is none. Asano’s air-guitar performance builds and builds through the running time, acquiring an intensity that a conventional film would have to cash in — a triumph, a humiliation, something. The film simply moves on. The refusal is the joke and it is also, oddly, moving: here is a man doing something magnificent that nobody in his world will ever notice or reward, and the film honours it by declining to make it mean anything.

The closest the picture comes to a thesis is its subtitle. The First Contact implies aliens, and aliens never arrive in any form you could point to. The contact being made is between the audience and a film that will not meet them halfway — and after two and a half hours of failing to negotiate with it, you have in fact made contact with something. It just is not going to shake your hand.