Nerawareta gakuen (School in the Crosshairs) (The Aimed School) (1981)
Obayashi starts his movie from outer space, and I’m not even surprised. The storyline is about a young girl with telepathic skills but, again unsurprisinly, Obayshi roots it tightly to high school surroundings. Better script and more characterization woundn’t hurt, but the magical soundtrack and visual supply is intoxicating. Obayashi uses black & while image, colours parts of the picture, turns the sky blazing red and makes the stars dance. In the middle of all is the incredibly cute and sweet Hiroko Yakushimaru.
I have the japanese Kadokawa dvd, which is a very solid if not outstanding effort. IVL recently released the film on english subbed HK dvd. It should be a dvd-5 again (The R2J is dvd-9 of course) with their typical less than stellar encoding. The source material is the same, though. Subs would appear to be much better timed than usual. I used the IVL script with my R2J and unlike before I didn’t have to do much retiming.
