Before he made 1977's utterly bonkers horror-comedy House, Nobuhiko Ôbayashi (1938-2020) worked in advertising. With its vibrant colors, wiz-bang graphics, and enthusiastic voiceover, his final film feels like an experimental take on that work as he grapples with 20th-century Japan as a country addicted to war—and war movies.
Intertitles explain that he made Labyrinth of Cinema with a collection of movie friends, taking inspiration from the Shōwa-era poetry of Chūya Nakahara which appears throughout. Time traveler Fanta G (drummer Yukihiro Takahashi from Yellow Magic Orchestra), clad in sunglasses and porkpie hat, begins by speaking from a spaceship-shaped set while giant goldfish swim around him.
"Wars, genocide, and annihilation," he sighs. "That's the history of mankind." He then travels to Onomichi, Ôbayashi's hometown, for local theater Setouchi Kinema's last day of operation. The show that night combines past and present as 13-year-old Noriko (Rei Yoshida) strides up to the stage to perform with a band and backup singers, the kind of pre-show entertainment World War II audiences might have enjoyed. The key lyric: "There's truth in a lie."
After getting in a fight outside the theater, Shigeru (Yoshihiko Hosoda), a banged-up debt collector with matinee-idol hair, drops by, hoping to take in a yakuza film, except that night's marathon consists entirely of Japanese war movies. After Noriko gets sucked into the screen, three audience members—Shigeru, gangly teen Mario (Takuro Atsuki), and film critic Hosuke (Takahito Hosoyamada)—find themselves on stage in tuxes as part of the entertainment. The next thing they know, they too disappear into the screen, transported into a movie musical featuring women in kimonos twirling parasols before segueing to a silent samurai film tinted in shades of blue and red. Finally, they inhabit a full-color prisoner of war picture featuring Tadanobu Asano (Bright Future) as an army lieutenant. The cinemagoers-turned-performers continue to find themselves in the midst of various wartime scenarios.
They don't understand what's going on, but they try to figure it out as they go along. On occasion, actors playing notable Japanese figures, like filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu (played by anime director Makoto Tezuka), provide a little enlightenment. In that sense, the characters are learning about Japanese history while simultaneously enacting it, all while falling in love and fighting to protect innocents like Noriko. Once they realize they've landed in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, they try to encourage the town's theatrical troupe to relocate, but the actors have personal reasons for staying.
After witnessing other major developments, including the massacre of Okinawans by the Japanese Imperial Army and the censorship of antiwar films (like Hiroshi Inagaki's 1958 Rickshaw Man) the young men return to Onomichi, changed by what they've seen and experienced. Fanta G, a stand-in for a director dying from stage 4 lung cancer, ends by expressing hope that Japan's youth will learn from the mistakes of the past and strive for fellowship with other nations. Ôbayashi’s swan song proves that his passion, loopy sense of humor, and visual ingenuity remained fully intact until the end. Recommended for film studies majors and Japanese cinema collections.