Takashi Murakami, Jellyfish Eyes, 2013, Film still
© 2013 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Image courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles.
The Dallas Museum of Art will be the first stop on a nine-city tour of the US for Japanese artist and art world big-shot Takashi Murakami’s live action film Jellyfish Eyes, the museum announced today. The film blends Murakami’s trademark anime-inspired sensibility with socio-political themes, as well as themes of self-empowerment. Typically dealing in fast-action gross-outs loaded with social commentary about consumerism and glut, Murakami’s foray into feature-length filmmaking promises to be equally as compelling, or repellent, depending on your stance.
In his feature filmmaking debut, renowned visual artist Takashi Murakami transforms the classic cinematic trope of the new kid on the block into a genre-defying adventure. Having recently lost his father, young Masashi moves with his mother to a small city in the Japanese countryside. But when he discovers that their new apartment is already inhabited by a pint-sized, gravity-defying creature, Masashi begins to pull back the curtain on this sleepy town and finds that very little is what it appears to be. As a connoisseur of Japanese popular culture, from children’s manga and anime to classic monster movies, Murakami packs his film with a delirious abundance of ideas and imagery. What other coming-of-age fantasy has romance, battling CGI avatars, nuclear intrigue, rival doppelgangers, and a giant monster?
Right on. And, just to be sure that Murakami is a real person and not himself some avatar in a virtual world, the man will be at the museum IRL (that’s computer for in real life) on May 1 after the screening of the film to dialogue with DMA curator Gabe Ritter, an expert on contemporary Japanese art.
