Movies: Nobuhiko Obayashi

Hoping to find a sense of connection to her late mother, Gorgeous takes a trip to the countryside to visit her aunt at their ancestral house. She invites her six friends, Prof, Melody, Mac, Fantasy, Kung Fu, and Sweet, to join her. The girls soon dis...

A college student has an affair with a married, middle-aged teacher....

Yoshiyama Kazuko is a third-year junior high school student. One day while cleaning the lab, she smells lavender and faints. From then on, she has the power to travel through time....

After a series of chance meetings a shiftless motorbike enthusiast Ko begins a romance with a carefree girl Miyo, after teaching her to ride. When Miyo proves herself a biker prodigy Ko begins to fear that she is destined to crash....

An 11-year-old boy who goes to Africa with his father in 1941. Because he is Japanese, the father is detained by the British. The boy joins up with a beautiful native girl, and the adventure begins....

A mouse and his child, the two parts of a single small wind-up toy, go on a quest to become "self-winding"....

It is 1965. High-school student Takeyoshi Fujiwara hears "Pipeline" by the Ventures, and is mesmerized by their unique sound. With three friends, he forms a band called "The Rocking Horsemen." A warm and comic glimpse into high-school and small-town ...

Obayashi's take on the famous Kosuke Kindaichi series, made popular partly thanks to the numerous movie-adaptions by Kon Ichikawa, the most known being The Inugami Family. Kosuke Kindaichi is the most famous detective in Japan. Kindaichi gets a new c...

Lonely and love-stricken high-school student Hiroki pursues a girl, but another one mysteriously appears in his life. Is she a figment of his psyche, or is she real?...

When lightning strikes a theater about to close its doors, three moviegoers are thrust back in time to the world inside the screen....

Komori Chiaki is a budding tennis student. However, one day while training, her coach hits a ball into her eye on accident. At the hospital, the news that she will never regain the sight in her eye leaves her heartbroken. As a last resort, she underg...

During the fervently nationalist months leading up to World War II, a rebellious teenager is transferred to a new primary school in a small Inland Sea town. He vies with the school’s reigning bully, who takes a romantic interest in his older stepsist...

Ayase Shinsuke, a popular writer of a series of girl novels, visits Otaru, the town he grew up in. He meets a strange boy who calls himself by the author's real name....

Mitamura Yuka is a normal, shy high school student. Except for the fact that she has psychic powers. When a new student with similar powers begins to show her skills, creating a force of psychic Nazi student enforcers, Yuka and her friends vow to sto...

Veteran filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi rounds out the second of his two trilogies about his hometown of Onomichi with this film about the budding relationship between a young lad and an eccentric old man. Fifth-grader Yuta (Takuro Atsugi) is a typical c...

The film follows the life of Sada Abe, who became a celebrity in 1936 after strangling her lover and slicing off his penis....

Harada is a successful scenario writer, and his best buddy has just announced an intention to propose to Harada's ex-wife. Recovering from the shock, Harada indulges in melancholy, mainly on his failure as a husband and father, and goes to a 'Rakugo'...

In the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, a journalist arrives in Nagaoka, a city decimated during a WWII air raid and by the 2004 Chūetsu earthquakes, to report on the disaster; there, she learns about the experiences of its inhabi...

Spring, 1941. Sixteen-year-old Toshihiko attends school in the coastal town of Karatsu, where his aunt cares for his ailing cousin. Immersed in the seaside's nature and culture, Toshihiko soon befriends the town's other extraordinary adolescents as t...

Four sisters with no consanguinity are living together since childhood. When facing misfortune and grievances in lives, they give support and encouragement to each other, even sacrifice oneself to help others....