Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko - Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko



Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:


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Movie
Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko is the followup feature film to director Ayumu Watanabe’s 2019 flick Children of the Sea, delivering another heart warming tale that just may be a little more accessible to the average audience goer than his previous film. While Children of the Sea was an amazing movie, it was also a bit esoteric and filled with fantasy and allegory. Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko is a more grounded and realistic slice of life comedy revolving around mother/daughter relations. It’s often times sweet, often times cruel, and often times a bit hard to piece together as the film can feel a bit disjointed, even by “slice of life” standards.

The film opens up with young Kikuko (Cocomi) narrating just how she got where she is. Her mother Nikuko (Shinobu Otake) is a fat (pay attention to that later) single mother who is kind and caring, but also easily taken advantage of. Kikuko describes her mother as being naive to a fault, and the men in her life use and dump her till at 35 she moves to a small fishing village and sets up a diner there. Now 11 year old Kikuko is at that age where everyone’s opinion means more than a parents, and she cringes while her opulent mother with her brash attitude and dad jokes seems out of place and embarrassing to the young girl. Nikuko wears bright garish clothes, and frequently is that parent that embarrasses their children.

While Nikuko continues being “her”, Kikuko just tries to survive at school. She has the typical preteen issues of falling out of friendship with a close friend, finding a boy that fascinates here, and generally trying to not be embarrassed by her mother. Unfortunately a teen can be very cruel, and pretty much anything Nikuko does ends up short in her daughter’s eyes, including how the audience views their relationship. At first viewing I had a hard time getting what the point was to the movie. It seemed incoherent and fractured. And while that is true to a certain extent, a second viewing clued me in to a massive narrative punch that makes things fall into place much easier. We have to remember that we’re viewing Nikuko through Kikuko’s eyes. The abject cruelty of childish narcissism actually crafts our perception of her as Kikuko is sort of an unreliable witness. If you pick up at the beginning Nikuko is described as about 150 lbs, yet Kikuko sees (and the artist animates) her as this massive blob of flesh. Kikuko sees her mother as embarrassing, so we see the single mother engaging in what seems to be over dramatic and excessive behavior. It’s not till the third act when the secret of Kikuko’s origins comes to light that you realize that pretty much everything we’ve seen before is highly biased from another point of view.

At the end of the day this is really a story about acceptance, but not for our "hero" Kikuko. It's in fact Nikuo who is the real heroin of the movie, having loved a daugher with all her hear and all her weary soul these so many years despite derision and a low brow personality. She's the real shining star of the movie, and the one you beging to realize is the most honorable person in the entire film. However, despite the sweetness and modes of acceptance that are harbored in the story, I felt it was a little too late. While It’s notable that much of the fat jokes and derision for Nikuko throughout the story is only as seen by her resentful daughter’s eye, it feels a little bit too late by the time the film tries desperately to turn the tone in the last 20 minutes or so. Nikoku herself is seen as the hero of the story, but all we see is a shallow caricature, and even at the end it has to be explained in an exposition dump that she really isn’t that way. I get that this is supposed to be a conflict of parental and children relations in the tumultuous years of teen hood, but again, it just feel a bit too little too late. A solid film, with some very good themes, but it’s a movie that requires 2-3 viewings before it really reveals all of it’s secrets. Something that may be a bit frustrating for someone who wants a quick once and done watch.




Rating:

Not Rated by the MPAA




Video:

4°C studios animation is near impeccable, with gorgeously shaded colors and amazing detail levels. You can see everything from the rust on Lady Nikuko’s boat, to the pale blue waters, down to the creases on shirts. The bright and shiny fishing village is incredibly vibrant with colors that literally pop off the screen, and hand drawn lines that are incredibly nuanced. There’s some minor banding in darker sequences, and sometimes the character animations don’t lend itself towards perfect detail levels, but overall this is an amazingly well done encode from Gkids and Shout Factory.









Audio:

In a rare instance we have only the native Japanese 5.1 DTS-HD MA track and no dub to compliment it. As someone who almost always prefers the original language track it’s not a big deal, but dubbed fans may raise a bit of an eyebrow. Still, the mix is quite the treat, with lovely music filling out all channels evenly, and picture perfect dialog. Vocals are crisp and cleanly located in the center of the room, while the LFE channel supplements the music. That being said, there’s a few pop out moments (such as the fire works going off) where the subs kick in outside of the music. Surrounds are excellent, with strong presence during the score, but also in more nuanced ways, such as the school race, or the hubbub of Nikuko’s diner. All in all, a great sounding mix.












Extras:

• Making of Featurette
• Film Completion Press Conference
• Introductions by Filmmakers
• Sanma Akashiya Greeting
• Talk Show
• Trailers

Final Score: ​

Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko is a mostly pleasing film, with great highlights of emotional resonance, but also a fractured sense to the narrative that makes it a little less than the sum of it’s parts. There are large swaths that are genuinely sweet and powerful, but the 3rd act stumbles a good bit and fails to really tie everything together for the audience in a meaningful way. People who watch the film multiple times will definitely get more out of it, but it’s not always pleasant. Sweet, bitter, and brutally cruel at times, the family drama is showcased on a great looking/sounding Blu-ray with moderate extras. Worth checking out at the very least for anime fans.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Shnobu Otake, Cocomi, Natsukie Hanae, Ikuji Nakamura
Directed by: Ayumu Watanabe
Written by: Kanako Nishi (Novel), Satomi Ohshima (screenplay)
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1 AVC
Audio: Japanese: DTS-HD MA 5.1
Subtitles: English, English SDH
Studio: Shout facotry
Rated: PG
Runtime: 96 minutes
Blu-Ray Release Date: July 19th, 2022

Recommendation: Solid Watch

 

[tripplej]

Thanks for the review. Never heard of this but will check it out.