KIKUJIRO

Name: KIKUJIRO
Item: KIKUJIRO
Author: Review

“Strange Fiction”

Family Content: -3 Excessive sex, violence, immorality, and/or worldview problems. (Sometimes excessive content such as violence is in otherwise redemptive movies.)

Entertainment Quality:

	None	Light	Moderate	Heavy
Language
Violence
Sex
Nudity

Credits →

What You Need To Know:

MOVIEGUIDE® cannot really recommend this slow-moving movie, despite some of its good qualities. There are several disturbing scenes where the husband mistreats the boy and other people. There are also many mild obscenities, a pagan worldview regarding angels, some nudity, and a particularly bad scene where an old pervert tries to take off the boy’s underwear until Kikujiro stops him and knocks him silly

Content:

(PaPa, B, LLL, V, S, NN, A, D, MM) Pagan worldview regarding angels with two people praying at Buddhist temple (but Buddha not mentioned or shown in foreground) plus some minor moral elements about caring for parentless child; 1 strong obscenity, 32 mild obscentities & 1 mild profanity (“my god”); mild dramatic & comic violence such as man gets angry, man threatens people, man smacks boy on top of head (not brutally) to get him to move along, implied rock throwing against truck’s windshield, man punches pervert, man beats other man with stick from afar, & thugs beat man unconscious off-screen bloodying his face & shirt a little; no sex scenes but pedophile tries to take off boy’s underwear after forcing him to take off clothes off screen, then tries to do same with adult male; rear male nudity, full male nudity covered by cartoon photo & full male nudity in longshot; alcohol use; smoking; and, man gambles away boy’s traveling money, gambling man makes boy pick numbers in bicycle races, boy has very scary nightmare about pedophile, & man is almost constantly rude to little boy & other people until the last quarter of the movie.

More Detail:

KIKUJIRO is a strange Japanese drama about a gloomy little schoolboy living with his grandmother in Tokyo. With his school friends gone for the summer, he decides to visit the mother he’s never seen, whom his grandmother says is working hard for him in another city. The grandmother’s friend sends her ne’er-do-well, gambling husband, Kikujiro, to go with the boy. After being rude to the boy and losing all his traveling money at the bicycle races, Kikujiro starts to take a shine to the boy as they hitchhike to see his mother. They fail to locate the mother, so the man camps out with the boy, along with three young men they meet along the way. The movie shows the men playing lots of goofy games before it’s time to return to Tokyo.
MOVIEGUIDE® cannot really recommend this slow-moving movie, despite some of its good qualities. There are several disturbing scenes where the husband mistreats the boy and other people. There are also many mild obscenities, a pagan worldview regarding angels, some nudity, and a particularly bad scene where an old pervert tries to take off the boy’s underwear until Kikujiro stops him and knocks him silly.