User reviews

It's hard to put into words what makes this film so good (and I'd actually written a whole review on this before the stupid app crashed, so now I'm rewriting it), so I think I'll just stumble my way through a few vague paragraphs and call it a day.

His Motorbike, Her Island focuses on a carefree guy who drifts through life, and doesn't seem to care about much other than his motorbike and pretty young women. Early on, he dumps a very nice girlfriend, has to deal with her angry older brother, and ends up travelling around Japan, falling for a free-spirited girl who doesn't actually own an island, as the title might suggest, but instead lives on one.

The story might sound like much, but it doesn't need to be, because the main appeal of His Motorbike, Her Island is how it looks, sounds, and feels. It's a stylish and hypnotic movie, and feels unlike much else out there. Even if Nobuhiko Obayashi's best known film is the cult classic comedy/horror film Hausu, I think I liked this one more.

As long as you go in accepting this is more about style than emotion instead of plot or characters, I think it's easy to get a lot out of this. The fact that the pacing isn't always perfect and the final act loses its way a touch is easier to forgive when the whole film is such an interesting one to experience on an emotional level above all else. I'm also glad it didn't exceed 90 minutes - I think its unique pacing may have started to challenge me more if it had gone on much longer.

A carefree rural girl meets a hot-headed young biker riding through her island hometown and gets obsessed about riding a motorcycle, especially his 750cc Kawasaki. The narrative starts from a failed urban romance and culminates into another almost teenager-ish melodramatic love story. Although the dialogue are often cheesy and the narrative is often interrupted by musical interludes, this film has a certain esoteric quality to it, perhaps due to this strange mix. The director (famous for "House", "The Girl Who Cut Time" and the recent "Hanagatami") frequently mixed colour and black-and-white footage with abundance. They perhaps added some dreamy quality into all of this - although personally I felt a lot of it were unnecessary. The camerawork was brilliant, with beautiful riding sequences that stay in the viewer's mind. Definitely not close to any kind of cinematic gem, but it is not easy to quickly forget this lesser-known oddity either.

As the title to my review alludes to, this is my experience watching "His Motorbike, Her Island", the last movie included in Nobuhiko Ôbayashis 80s Kadokawa movie compilation, and I'm disappointed honestly.

"His Motorbike, Her Island" follows the story of a narcissistic city boy who loves bikes, and writes music(??) who dumps his girlfriend after falling in love with a country girl with the same passion for motorbikes as him.

Let's start with the positives. As always, I love the absolute commitment Nobuhiko Ôbayashi has to make a story compelling visually and aesthetically and in this movie he delivers it in spades, it's a gorgeous movie and the shots are wonderful. The choice to have both black and white and colour shots in the narrative is a very inspired choice but a bit of a missed opportunity and badly applied. The music is also pretty good.

And now to the negatives, this story has absolutely no DRIVE. It's hard to try and connect to a movie when the main character is basically just an asshole that gets his way right on the very end. God I freaking HATED this character (and actor!), and it's not because this person was "bad" per se, there's many interesting and fun bad characters that are great at having as a lead movie driver but in this movie it doesn't work at all.

The story meanders as well, things happen inexplicably out of order and there's many story stuffs that could've used an extra scene (or less) because for real, stuff happens without you even knowing what's going on. And the changes to black and white and colour make no sense at all. There's no natural explanation as to what the characters different relationships are either, stuff happens haphazardly and you the audience has to accept that... which makes me angry honestly. Also I don't get the ending nor what the movie was trying to portray, a city guy that impresses a country girl? A delinquent guy that atones for his sins (not really) by romancing this new girl? You tell me, cause I have no clue.

I was honestly counting the minutes and seconds till the movie was over, I don't appreciate this at all. Now it sounds like I'm being overtly harsh but it's just my feelings, I guess if you want to check out more of Nobuhiko Ôbayashis movies then do it but otherwise this is really not worth it.

HIS MOTORBIKE, HER ISLAND is another movie from the guy who brought us HAUSU, and so if you're looking for quirkiness then you've come to the right place. It's not quite up there with his best work, sadly, feeling both pedestrian and disjointed at times; the story is indeed very slight and seems to jump about all over the place. There's a rebel-without-a-cause backdrop and then a highly melodramatic romance, complete with lots of little offbeat moments that the director is well known for. The actors do their best with the little material they're given but their scenes do feel a bit stilted, and it's the directorial touches that make this interesting.