Original title: Negatibu happî chênsô ejji
One night, disenchanted teen Yosuke (Hayato Ichihara) stumbles upon the rather surprising event of a beautiful teen girl we’ll soon enough learn is called Eri (Megumi Seki) fighting a pretty obvious metaphor for grief, depression and loneliness in form of a large, hooded guy wielding a chainsaw who appears to drop down from the moon. Yosuke is instantly smitten and fascinated by Eri, and starts to accompany her on her nightly fights against Chainsaw Guy as her awkward, tea-fetching, sidekick.
Of course, they get closer to each other, what with them both being movie teens in a dangerous situation suffering from alienation and grief – Yosuke for a “courageous” buddy who got himself killed doing idiot teenage things, Eri for the whole of her family, though Yosuke will take ages to figure that one out.
When it comes to teen coming-of-age movies/romances with obvious central metaphors, you could do much worse than Takuji Kitamura’s Negative Happy Chainsaw Edge. In its tropes and ideas, it is a very standard post-2005 Japanese treatment of its material, somewhat lacking in originality or depth, and clearly built for a teen audience more than for an old fart like me.
While it is a little direct for me, and Yosuke’s idealization of his suicidal dead friend does get annoying rather quickly if you’ve have seen kids from your own childhood die exactly the kind of stupid death that guy did, there’s nothing wrong at all with the movie. Seki and Hayato are as cute as their audience needs them to be and happen to be perfectly capable actors, the script flows nicely, and Kitamura’s direction is generally competent, sometimes even a little stylish.
I think the story Negative Happy etc tells would have had more emotional impact told from Eri’s perspective rather than Yosuke’s – her story’s simply more interesting than his – but it’s still something I would probably have eaten up at the right age, and can still respect for what it is now.
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