Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		4.0

The Little House Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 25, 2015

Amy Tan’s lovely and moving The Joy Luck Club captured a lot of attention with its depiction of various Chinese and Chinese-Americans whose lives unspooled over a couple of generations, and whose lives at least tangentially intersected with some epochal historical events like World War II. Those wanting something of a Japanese analog, at least in some ways, might well want to check out the quiet but frequently incisive The Little House, an often beautiful film which traffics in some (admittedly tangential) transgenerational drama as it ping pongs back and forth between two timeframes, slowly doling out a soap operatic tale that takes place in the 1930s and 1940s, just as Japan’s imperial ambitions started to sweep up the general populace.

The film begins with the death of Taki (Chieko Baishô), an evidently fairly feisty elder whose legacy is one of love mixed with a certain degree of tartness. Her great-nephew Takeshi (Satoshi Tsumabuki) is bequeathed with her diary, and the film then segues back to scenes of Takeshi helping Taki write her memoirs, as well as even further distant flashbacks that detail Taki’s life as a young domestic (the younger Taki is played by Haru Kuroki, who won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival). While co-writer and director Yôji Yamada alludes to the historical maelstrom building in the background, the film is really an intensely intimate story following Taki’s relationship with an older married woman (Takako Matsu) who gets involved in a doomed love affair. Handsomely mounted, expertly performed, and graced with a really gorgeous score by Hayao Miyazaki regular Joe Hisaishi), The Little House ends up leaving a rather large impact despite its seemingly unobtrusive exterior.

The Little House Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Little House is presented on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. The good news is that this Twilight Time release does not exhibit the anomalies that were present in Yamada's The Twilight Samurai, though there is a somewhat odd (and admittedly slight) color timing issue at play here where a lot of the film seems slightly skewed toward the yellow-green side of things, something that tends to put a jaundiced cast on flesh tones and what should be pure whites. Other than this situation, the transfer boasts a nice looking image, with good sharpness and clarity and some excellent fine detail in close-ups. Some of the interiors have a surplus of brown tones, and that general sameness tends to slightly minimize detail levels in backgrounds.

The Little House Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Little House lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 is often fairly subtle, but nonetheless very effective, offering good discrete channelization for ambient environmental effects and providing a lush, rather wide bed for Hisaishi's beautiful score. Dialogue is cleanly rendered and is always well prioritized on this problem free track.

The Little House Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Original Theatrical Trailer (1080i; 1:02)


• Teasers (1080i; 1:38)


• Isolated Score Track is presented in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1.

The Little House Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The metaphorical aspects of The Little House may zing right past the heads of some who become deeply involved in the touching story of Taki, but the film's mingling of present and past and its cogent analysis of family and society in the wake of huge historical events is increasingly moving as the film progresses. The film works an almost subliminal spell, managing to communicate and ultimately captivate as much through its quiet (even its silences) as in any of its restrained histrionics. Technical merits are generally excellent, and The Little House comes Recommended.