Gakudori is a homage to the time-honored tale of teenagers trying to achieve amazing feats that will have no impact whatsoever on their adult lives. It's about... drifting cars. More than that, apparently drifting movies are totally a genre. I'm afraid. Hold me.
SHOULD I WATCH IT?
I wouldn't say it's in my top ten, or even twenty, but it's not unbearable. The bad translations and subtitle misspellings are funny at times, and there's lots of weird flip transitions and split-screen effects. If you're into anime or manga - say, Initial D - it's worth seeing why these types of stories fare better in the animated medium. It's also worth noting that if I hadn't taken careful notes, the plot would have made no sense to me. It's kind of a head-scratcher as far as who's doing what, when, why, and how, almost like a highly compressed soap opera. If confusion irritates you, maybe skip this one, or watch it with a group so you can try to compare notes about what's going on. You'll need the help. It's at times mythical, at times goofy, at times dramatic.
If you're going to watch a drifting movie, I recommend Midnight Drift instead.
PARTICIPATION
- Write down each character's name as it appears on-screen. Create a diagram of their relationships to each other. (Posterboard works best.)
- Make zombie noises for wide-angle shots of people standing in groups.
- Take a drink for split-screen effects.
- Throw your arms up and yell "DRAGO!" when characters shout to the sky.
- Make obnoxious engine noises at every opportunity.
THE SUMMARY
The first thing to say is that I wrote down the name of every character that was given in the subtitles, and it came to over 15. That's a lot of characters, man. The movie switches between 3 to 4 major storylines, and then flashbacks within those storylines. It was my husband's second time seeing this one, and he was still having a hard time keeping track of all the threads.
Gakudori is the all-wide drifting competition for university students, and everybody wants to enter. From the auto club, which spends most of their functions standing around in a line...
...to four girls who augment their driving skills with makeup seminars and low-impact aerobics, in an attempt to perfect "the drifts only women can do"...
...and some other guy, whose name we never actually learn, but I guess his arc is supposed to be important, or something.
We watch all of these characters toil, build their drifting skills, make difficult choices, and yell their aspirations into the horizon for about an hour and ten minutes, and then get to the actual drifting competition, which ends up having basically no payoff. We see one of the girls and Nameless Guy drift for a few seconds, and then it's back to one of our characters from the auto club for the big climax. 'Cause I guess two-thirds of the story was just kinda filler.
As far as I could tell, nobody actually wins. The last frame of the film is a car driving off into the sky.
No, really. A guy drives into the sky on a floating road.
It's kind of like ending Rocky with a shot of Balboa leaping into the air, punching a flaming hole in the roof of the arena, and giving the thumbs-up in mid-air. Freeze frame. Cut to black.
Oh, Japan.
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