Japanese screen legend Kiyoshi Atsumi built his entire career on one role. For nearly three decades, the comic actor played a character named Torajiro Kuruma — “Tora-san” to his onscreen family and…
” to his onscreen family and real-world fans — appearing in approximately two new installments of the long-running franchise per year.
The effect is not unlike watching the reunion episode of a long-running TV show, minus its most important character.
“My mom loves those movies,” a local told me at the Tokyo Int’l Film Festival, which kicked off with the highly anticipated but far-from-hip premiere, two months before its Dec. 27 release in Japan.
Izumi now works for the United Nations, stopping through Tokyo just long enough to stumble upon Mitsuo’s book signing. When Yamada turns earnest, boy, does he lay things on thick, as the scene from Izumi’s save-the-refugees presentation demonstrates. The humor here is broad and relatively gentle, as it was in the earlier films, relying on often untranslatable puns, polite misunderstandings and the occasional fart joke .
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