National Comedy Master Kōki Mitani: Start from Comedy, End with Affection

　　The Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald was Kōki Mitani’s first work put on the screen. Following that, multiple comedies with box office appeal, such as University of Laughs (screenwriter), The Uchōten Hotel, The Magic Hour, A Ghost of a Chance, Airport 2013, The Kiyosu Conference and Galaxy Turnpike, gave him the identity of comedy master. However, when we summarize his great achievements made in comedy creation, we should not ignore the fact that he was originally a stage play director, and has been to and from among the fields of stage play, TV drama and film. His works have always been inspired by the fruitful experience of creating stage plays, which is also a material source for them.

　　Kōki Mitani has been fond of comedy and fanatically worshiped Chaplin from his childhood. His determination of being a comedy creator was aroused by the predecessor who greatly surprised him. Another comedy master, Billy Wilder, is also his idol. He tasted all the movies of Wilder very early. Furthermore, once being a “TV Child”, Kōki Mitani likes American dramas and Hollywood movies very much. It is easy to find the signs of their influence in his works. For example, the form of depicting a crime ahead of the detection process, which prevails in the Furuhata Ninzaburo, imitates the classic American drama Columbo. Deeply influenced by Hollywood’s comedy movies and American dramas, all his works released after The Gentle Twelve, the Japanese version of Hollywood’s classic movie 12 Angry Men, were created in pursuit of entertainment and popularity. Although not favored by movie critics and the Kinema Junpo, which holds art films in esteem, Kōki Mitani made comedies “a part of Japanese people’s daily life” by accurately capturing audiences’ bursting points, and has been regarded as Japan’s “national comedy master”.

　　Like all the other comedy masters, Kōki Mitani has a unique secret of success.

　　If you watch the movies and TV dramas of Mitani one by one, you will find that there are always very few outdoor scenes in his works and that he laid more stress on indoor scenes which are even called chamber play or backstage play by some commentators, showing their nature of secret uncovering and mystery solving. For example Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald focused on the workshop of radio play performing; the Suite Dreams laid the lens into a hotel and every corner of the hotel, disclosing the secrets of all kinds of people in the hotel; and the University of Laughs had its scenes shot in the script review room in the war time where the censor and screenwriter matched wits with each other. The A Ghost of a Chance had most of its scenes focusing on the court, and The Kiyosu Conference was most composed of indoor scenes where two sides of the family pulled every string to compete for the Oda family successor. The Galaxy Turnpike is though a science fiction film, all the story happened in a hamburger shop from beginning to end.Focus on indoor scenes is a natural choice of Mitani who has the origin as a stage play director. It can be regarded as the communication media for Mitani to respond to film and television media, and is also an expression to make the two-dimensional stage to be three-dimensional. In other words, it is to move the two-dimensional stage, so as to make it become three-dimensional. Mitani created the effect of "curtain rises and curtain falls" by opening and losing the interior doors and windows. For instance, a number of times of opening and closing the guestroom doors in the hotel in the Suite Dreams and the opening and shut-up of the paper sliding door in The Kiyosu Conference are similar to the rising and falling of stage curtain, which creates the acts of the plays. Moreover, Mitani also uses the time as a backdrop, and makes events as the act. e.g. in the University of Laughs and A Ghost of a Chance as well as The Kiyosu Conference, he used time as the marker of the acts, and the story of each day was an act; as the story went on for a number of days, it's just as a number of acts were put on stage.

　　With regard to the fact that Mitani's stories are always filled with intensive lines, exaggerated performances by actors/actresses, and accidents and conflicts frequently occurred, they can better considered as the typical characteristics of stage play.

　　The later works of Mitani show more outdoor scenes, such as The Magic Hour, and two of his works even uses single take, which are Short Cut and Airport 2013. This can be said to be his pursuit of aesthetic image: Make fictional events performed in real space. It looks like a documentary, but there are also plots; it seems to be a feature film, but there are characteristics of a documentary. On the other hand, it's the continuation of Mitani's spatialization on stage play as always. Mitani's cancellation of editing and use of single take can be seen as building the space of stage play with lens. The stage space is, though, moving, gives the audience the same old feelings as watching the one-act stage plays. At the same time, uninterrupted photography and full documentary record have the following profound meaning behind: Life and lifestyle go on without a rehearsal, and every moment is like in a live broadcast. A script, however exquisite it is written, is not as good as the life that can bring greater excitement by accidental or unexpected events.

　　Mitani said in an interview that there are no leading and supporting characters in his plays, just as there are no leading and supporting roles in real life. He further pointed out that, in his works, he is not fond of writing those who move the earth, but those ordinary people who make unremitting efforts to support their lives, and their diversified lives to make people feel interesting.

　　In Mitani's works, the protagonists usually are the ordinary people with both strengths and weaknesses, such as the screenwriter and the censor of the bottom class in the University of Laughs, the housewife screenwriter and staff of the radio station in Welcome Back, Mr. Macdonald, the manager and staff and a variety of guests in the Suite Dreams, the unlucky and one track-minded new female lawyer in A Ghost of a Chance the gangster punk and the third-rate actor obsessed with performance, the family of ground staff Okouchi and Tsuruhashi in Airport 2013, and the protagonists, the couple who operate a hamburger shop, in the Galaxy Turnpike.

　　Mitani is good at group figure processing of the ordinary people, with typical works of Suite Dreams and Daikuko 2013 / Airport 2013. His technique of expression is that multi lines go hand in hand. In the Suite Dreams, the 23 characters and 1 duck constitute the relationship among 9 groups of people who go hand in hand and in good order, showing all living creatures in the hotel on the eve of Christmas: There is a scandal-ridden politician, a singer trying to commit suicide due to great pressure, call girls looking for clients, a back-out hotel waiter with broken dreams, a scientist with scandal-involved wife, young girls finding a sugar daddy, a shabby-genteel hotel manager who met his ex-wife, a staff who is from the writing department and lives in the basement, a ventriloquist who lost his duck... In Airport 2013, the ground staff Okouchi functions as the go-between to bring out the activities of the representative Tsuruhashi family unintentionally: The father and the coming-after mistress are sentimentally attached to each other, the mother come close to falling into the arms of a swindler who hangs out in the airport, the uncle tries to cheat money from his brother-in-law due to the latter's a romantic affair to build his own planetarium, the grandpa has always been thinking about whether to confess his homosexuality to his family, the daughter falls in love with a wretched middle-aged man who divorced repeatedly, and the son is hesitated to tell the family that he wants to drop out of school to study drama...

　　Mitani formed a network of relationships with a number of characters whose stories develop side by side, and the unexpected and accidental events are sufficient to trigger the butterfly effect, thus causing the crisis of contradictions and relevant solutions.

　　In Welcome Back, Mr. Macdonald, as the big-name actors/actresses constantly put forward harsh requirements to modify the script, the difficulty of performance of radio play was then escalated and conflicts were produced; in the Suite Dreams, they have to solve the troubles of hotel staff and guests within the last two hours on the eve of the new year; in The Magic Hour, they need to find out a top (fake) killer in five days; in the A Ghost of a Chance, the female lawyer has to convince others to accept the dead as a witness to solve the case; in Airport 2013, they have to settle all the troubles of passengers appeared in the short time of flight delays… How to solve the problems? In the sitcom HR, Mitani pointed out his tried-and-tested comedy creation rule: "There must be an ironic misunderstanding, an unexpected turning point, and also an affectionate ending." By studying all works of Mitani, you can find that the comedy creating rule has basically become his routine. Although Mitani said, "a comedy does not need moving staff and it should be something that can make people laugh from beginning to end", his comedies often make people laugh from first to last, and have a moving ending. It is said that, after finishing the shooting of A Ghost of a Chance, Mitani had went to the tsunami-devastated Sendai, Japan to screen the film to the Northeast audience who laughed constantly and cried after laughing. A lady said, "It's really sad to lose someone who is important, but after I watched this movie, I feel like he's really near me. Thinking of this, I will feel better."

　　Start from comedy, and end with affection. This is what makes Kôki Mitani great.