New Japanese film reviews appear every last Friday of the month.

Yokai Daisenso ****

Takashi Miike returns with a summer kids movie about yokai and attempts to depict every single monster in the Japanese pandemonium of ghosts, ghouls and goblins. The story begins when 10-year-old Ryunosuke Kamiki is nominated demon slayer in a local festival and summoned to a haunted forest. In the creepy woods, the little kid teams up with comical Osakan kappa Sadawo Abe, a water nymph with luminous thighs Mai Takahashi and a squeaky hamster. This motley crew must save humanity from the fearsome evil of Etsushi Toyokawa, a vengeful villain with a Dickensian manner, and his sidekick Chiaki Kuriyama, a vision in skintight white and peroxide wig. These dastardly demons are recycling garbage and yokai into killing machines! Miike plays it all for laughs, with each of the usual suspects from "Ge ge ge no Kitaro" getting their own gags. The only scary bits are the monster-machines, wonderfully horrifying hybrids of scrap metal and skulls. The climactic monster fest loses steam as Miike attempts to realize a million yokai in CG and prosthetics, but for the most part this is imaginative, monstrous fun for all the family.

Hinokio ***

The other big live-action summer kids movie is drama about a young boy and a robot. Afraid to go out of the house since his mother's death, Kanata Hongo sends a robot to school in his place. The wonder here is the expertly rendered CG robot Hinokio! It's completely seamlessly involved in the live-action and moves with a metallic grace and a solid presence. Director Takahiro Akiyama was the VFX director on "Final Fantasy" and he seems more at home with CG and virtual reality than with his human characters and their emotions. Via his robotic go-between, the boy befriends the tomboyish Mikako Tabe. Akiyama misses key opportunities to explore the meaty drama about a reclusive boy using high-tech to interact with the world, about peacetime applications of military technology (the robot is revealed to be a prototype drone soldier, but the plot point is never mentioned again). Instead, Akiyama develops a bizarre, overblown parallel story in the virtual world of role-playing games. One saving grace: at least Hinokio doesn't want to become human, like all those other pesky puppets and robots around.

Gyakkyo Nine **

This obviously wants to be "Shaolin Soccer" meets the Japanese high-school baseball movie, except that's already be done in "Jigoku Koshien" - with zombies and musical numbers to boot. Adapted by hit-maker Katsuyuki Motohiro from a manga by Kazuhiko Shimamoto, this cartoon comedy delights in throwing every kind of catastrophe at the baseball team from Zenryoku High. Headmaster Hiroshi Fujioka wants to dissolve the team, their director Naoki Tanaka is an ex-wrestler prone to making gnomic utterances ("That is that. This is this."), and their opponents are all good - unlike them, a bunch of misfits, nerds and wimps. Just when it seems as if the team is making progress (they "win" a match when the other team fails to show due to the rain), team captain Tetsuji Tamayama falls in love with cute, gutsy manager Maki Horikita. Like many comedies adapted from manga, this never becomes a motion picture. It's a series of visual gag set-ups that lead to elaborate special-effect freeze-frame laughs, stills that probably correspond exactly to the double-page spread in the manga. There's none of the antic, action comedy of Stephen Chau.

Ubume no Natsu **

Sort of the "Fall of the House of Kuronji," this is handsomely mounted, exquisitely costumed gothic mystery set in the 1950s. If only the producers had spent half as much effort on the script and effects! Masatoshi Nagase looks like a dweeb in bottle-bottom glasses as he accompanies dapper private eye Hiroshi Abe and bookshop-owner/part-time exorcist Shinichi Tsutsumi in their investigation of the strange case of a 20-month pregnancy, a missing hubby, and an ancient curse. Director Akio Jissouji thinks drama is an actor declaiming philosophy and psychology textbooks, which Tsutsumi does endlessly, even during the dramatic exorcism. The "supernatural" mysteries are all explained away with sexual abuse, phantom pregnancies, mistaken identity, multiple personality disorder, and common-or-garden murder. The cinematic potential is wasted with hammy acting, clumsy blocking, stagy spotlights, and special effects that would shame an amateur theatrical production. The terrifying electric storm sequence looked as though it was created by a guy waving a flickering neon tube outside the window.

Buried Forest *

This movie by veteran director Kohei Oguri was one of the few Japanese entries in competition at Cannes this year. It looks like something from another era, and tells the slight, slow tale of schoolgirls, led by newcomer Karen, passing the time by making up stories about their dull, dismal town. The girls fantasize about camels turning the narrow streets into mud tracks. Tadanobu Asano plays the town delinquent, an older-brother figure in an American car who occasionally goes wild at the convenience store. The film is achingly slow, the acting at a level that would shame amateurs, but at least the production design and cinematography deliver a rosy, nostalgic glow to the village. Excitement mounts when a villager receives a dinosaur egg from Peru, and the rain washes away the gate-ball ground to reveal a magical buried forest.