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Kikujiro, a lazy small time gangster, agrees to take a lonely boy who lives with his grandmother on a road trip during the summer holidays. The two set off to find the boy’s mother who he has never met. Over the course of the return journey the pair meet up with a range of eccentric characters who engage in a series of absurd games and exchanges. While Kitano’s deadpan comic character with a tendency to extreme and sudden violence is familiar from his earlier work, ‘Kikujiro’ marks a departure from the milieu of the criminal underworld to focus on the unlikely bond that gradually develops between the man and boy. The film evokes Chaplin’s ‘The Kid’, both in Kitano’s trademark use of visual gags and in its sentimental bittersweet tone. In Japanese with English subtitles. Cast includes Takeshi Kitano, Yusuke Sekiguchi and Kayoko Kishimoto.
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How to watch
Collection
In ACMI's collection
Credits
Collection metadata
ACMI Identifier
313795
Language
Japanese
Audience classification
PG
Subject categories
Advertising, Film, Journalism, Mass Media & TV → Foreign language films
Family, Gender Identity, Relationships & Sexuality → Children and adults
Family, Gender Identity, Relationships & Sexuality → Children of divorced parents
Sound/audio
Sound
Colour
Colour
Holdings
VHS; Access Print (Section 1)