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“Baseball! That’s the word I hate the most!”
Well, don’t worry if you can’t – Battlefield Baseball is big, dumb, loud and very funny, so there’s no need to strain your puzzler trying to figure out its lunatic storyline. It’s all a goof, and at times a very clever goof (Yamaguchi’s spoofs of overwrought music video emoting and martial arts movie wirework made me laugh out loud), but mostly, it’s the shameless cast screaming at the top of their lungs, clonking each other over the heads with mallets and baseball bats, sailing through the air like rubber balls, and generally behaving like the Far East version of the Looney Tunes crew, complete with asides to the audience and laws-of-physics-defying abilities. In short, a solid evening of entertainment, with our without your brain. Subversive’s DVD is packed to its little digital gills with extras for
the Battlefield Baseball completist (and there’s no reason why, after
seeing the film, you won’t want to become one); chief among them is a
hilarious trainwreck of a commentary track featuring Sakaguichi, the
soft-spoken Yamaguchi, and other members of the cast and crew. There’s
also a battery of deleted and extended scenes, as well as lots of behind
the scenes footage, in which Sakaguichi sends up his superstar status by
acting like a colossal pain in the ass (one bit involves him and Yamaguchi
good-naturedly abusing a bit player by making him endlessly rehearse an
inconsequential line) and complain about a helicopter hovering overhead
during his “Tornado” pitch; there’s also a ton of trailers for Baseball
and other Subversive DVD titles (including the upcoming ‘70s Stateside
sick-fests The Candy Snatchers and The Witch Who Came from the Sea), and
weirdest of all, two semi-sequels to Baseball featuring an all-Lego cast.
Like I said, the Japanese, they are a nutty people, but damn, they make
fun movies.
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As I’ve said time and time again on this site, the Japanese are
completely out of their minds, but their national psychosis does has a
positive outlet in a seemingly endless spate of bizarre but entertaining
movies. One of the weirdest testimonials to their cinemania is Battlefield
Baseball, a berserk live-action cartoon (based on a popular manga)
produced by Ryuehi Kitamura and directed by his former AD, Yudai
Yamaguchi, who also co-scripted his best-known (at least in the States)
features, Versus and Alive. The movie also reunites them with their
regular leading man, Tak Sakaguchi, who shows off a talent for broad
slapstick comedy as Jubeh the Baseball (that’s his name), a pouty teen
rebel with an unstoppable fastball who’s sworn off the game after
launching a pitch through his dad’s chest. Jubeh’s vow is bad news for the
principal and head coach of Seido High School, who’s counting on Jubeh to
help his team of lovable losers against the current champs, Gedo High,
which employs a pack of green-skinned zombies that butcher visiting teams
on the field. But before this can happen, Jubeh has to air his grief
over his father (which he does in a drippy pop musical number), amass a
new team Magnificent Seven-style after the original lineup is massacred
(the new team features a grumpy mom, a cyborg power hitter, and a
teacher’s aide with robotic implants), gain a new brother, and get over
his fastball neuroses; only then can he take on the Gedo killers and their
monster-faced, buckskin-jacket-wearing coach. Will Jubeh’s “Tornado” pitch
be enough to win the game? Do you understand anything that I’ve just
described here?