The Taste of Tea

Writer-director Katsuhito Ishii's (who contributed the ultraviolent anime sequence in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol. 1) enchanting and whimsical family film A Taste of Tea is a beguiling hybrid of real-life charm and humorous fantasy, which focuses on the Harunos, a slightly eccentric family living happily together in a small mountain town outside of Tokyo. While eight-year-old daughter Sachiko (Maya Banno) is perplexed by a giant doppelganger that follows her everywhere, teenage brother Hajime (Takahiro Sato) is so smitten with a cute new classmate that his emotions send him on imaginative flights of fancy. Their mother is resuming her former career as an animator, while the father is a hypnotist who occasionally uses his professional skills on his family. A Taste of Tea doesn't really offer any coherent story—it's really just a loose patchwork of scenes that generate a kind of low-key appreciation for life's magical moments—but the best of these imaginative interludes are laugh-out-loud hilarious, while others unfold with a quiet charm that's often unexpectedly moving. Recommended. (J. Shannon)