The Mad Fox Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

The Mad Fox Blu-ray Movie Review

Hallucinatory, this film is.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 3, 2020

There are any number of iconic directors in the annals of global cinema whose styles are so distinctive that it can be patently obvious “whose” film any given property is even if you’ve missed the credits or perhaps aren’t even aware that a particular well known helmsman was in charge. Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and a host of others ranging from the relatively sublime (Douglas Sirk) to the relatively ridiculous (Ed Wood) might spring to mind, but there is also a glut of other journeymen directors who managed to churn out quite a few films over the course of long careers whose “styles” seemed as changeable as whatever subject the film they were currently directing happened to be, which may actually be a good thing to certain minds, and one sign of those individuals’ abilities to “go with the flow” and create something organically appropriate, aside and apart from any “meta” tendencies they might want to add. But there’s a notable difference between “style” and “stylish”, and in that regard, The Mad Fox is a virtual explosion of stylish elements by Tomu Uchida, a director who is regularly described, including in a commentary by Jasper Sharp included on this Blu-ray disc as a supplement, as not really having an identifiable style of his own.

As Sharp gets into in his commentary, The Mad Fox was written by Yoshikata Yoda, a scenarist whose surname evidently provided a spark of inspiration for the moniker of an iconic character who aids on a quest for greatness. There's a quest at play in The Mad Fox as well, and this piece is in its own way certainly as mythic, or at least suffused with folkloristic elements, as was Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back. That said, The Mad Fox has a somewhat more disjunctive narrative style that may (probably unintentionally) create a few hurdles for Western viewers in particular to overcome.

In a rather lengthy introductory sequence which also offers the credits, an old style Japanese scroll unrolls while a narrator offers some background about various characters the viewer will ultimately meet. The film officially begins with a weird astronomical phenomenon that includes a bizarre "white rainbow" (as the characters call it, even if it looks a bit more like a fluffy cloud) and various other anomalies like the moon changing various colors, due at least in part to the threat of Mount Fuji erupting. These curiosities are taken as omens, and ill omens at that, and court astronmer and/or astrologer Yasunori (Jun Asami) consults another oracular scroll called The Golden Crow to figure out what's going on. Unfortunately, the news isn't good. (As Sharp gets into in his commentary, Yasunori was evidently a real life historical figure during the Heian Period, and there likewise was evidently a real divination scroll known as The Golden Crow.)

Without giving away all of the carnage which ultimately breaks out, suffice it to say that there's a good deal of palace intrigue at play, and that leads to not just Yasunori's death, but several subsequent deaths when Yasunori's two acolytes, Yasuna (Hashizô Ôkawa) and Dōman (Shinji Amano), are thrust into ostensible "competition" to replace their master, since Yasunori left no official line of succession, and the Emperor is obviously interested in figuring out what all of these ostensible omens may portend. The upshot of it all is that a grief stricken Yasuna does indeed set out on a quest to somehow resurrect his love Sakaki (Michiko Saga), Yasunori's adopted daughter, after she perishes when she and Yasuna are tortured by Yasunori's widow (Sumiko Hidaka), who thinks the pair have stolen and hidden The Golden Crow.

Yasuna arguably undergoes a nervous breakdown (maybe more than once, actually), leading to a number of truly bizarre presentational touches as the story continues to unfold. Some may feel that some of the imagery actually suggests that Yasuna is experiencing some kind of post-mortem visions himself, a la something like What Dreams May Come (a perhaps especially apt reference, given some of the "painterly" environments Yasuna finds himself in). As Sharp details in his commentary, the meta references here come fast and loose, and include typical Japanese folklore elements like fox spirits, but there are also meta structural influences at play, with aspects that are obviously modeled on Kabuki (the last half hour or so of the film is almost deliberately theatrical, with a curtain being opened on a traditional proscenium stage as the final "act" gets underway).

The Mad Fox Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Mad Fox is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Arrow Academy, an imprint of Arrow Video, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. Arrow's insert booklet contains only the following fairly generic verbiage on the transfer:

The Mad Fox is presented in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio with mono audio. The High Definition master was provided by Toei.

It's perhaps salient to note that some of Arrow's PR on this release, including on their own site as well as this release's back cover, touts a "brand new restoration by Toie", but unless I missed something (always a possibility), I didn't see anything similar stated in the release's actual insert booklet where details of the transfer are printed. There are certain inherited characteristics here which Sharp alludes to in his commentary which affect the imagery, probably inarguably detrimentally so. Chief among these are some artifacts courtesy of the lenses utilized in the "Toeiscope" process, which Sharp overtly mentions still had "issues" even five years into this technology's life, when The Mad Fox was filmed. There are several warping anomalies which are comparable to "Cinemascope mumps", something that Sharp again mentions overtly in his commentary, but what I found more debilitating were variations in clarity and sharpness within the frame, where, for instance, clarity can be generally pretty good toward the center but considerably fuzzier toward the edges. Much of this presentation looks rather soft in any case, something that is probably only exacerbated in some of the effects shots. As Sharp also gets into, this was shot in Fujicolor, a process that can have a noticeably cool ambience, and the film's production design emphasis on yellow tones probably unavoidably leads to a jaundiced look some of the time. That said, the color timing here looked just a bit skewed and faded on occasion, with an intermittent brownish undertone. Densities are generally at least decent, but the film is such a riot of color I personally wondered if they might have been improved. As can perhaps be made out in some of the screenshots, the prevalence of yellow may tend to point up a similar kind of splotchy tone with regard to some of the grain resolution. All of this said, detail levels are often very good, especially in close-ups (even if "mumps" also intrude in some of these shots), and the film is just simply ravishing from a visual standpoint in any case. My score is 3.75.

The Mad Fox Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Mad Fox features an expressive LPCM Mono track in the original Japanese. The film utilizes sound effects quite interestingly, and those elements along with a kind of "nativist" ethnic sounding score by Chûji Kinoshita give the track some energy and a generally full bodied ambience. Dialogue as well as elements like the narration that begins the film encounter no real age related issues of wear and tear, and fidelity is fine throughout the presentation.

The Mad Fox Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary by Jasper Sharp is an informative and interesting listen, as alluded to above in the main body of the review, though it does sound like Mr. Sharp is literally phoning it in, with a kind of thin, boxy ambience to the sonics.


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2:46)


• Image Gallery (1080p; 3:50)

Additionally, Arrow provides their typically well appointed insert booklet, this time with two essays, stills and technical data.

The Mad Fox Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Arrow brought Uchida's Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji to Blu-ray last year, and it's heartening to see the label continuing to mine this very interesting, if perhaps "uncategorizable", director's work. The Mad Fox is a dreamlike fairy tale (think Brothers Grimm rather than Mother Goose), and it features some really astounding imagery (including some animation courtesy of Toie's "cartoon" wing). Technical merits are generally solid, even if video is arguably improvable, and the commentary by Jasper Sharp is really first rate. Recommended.