Koi ya koi nasuna koi

Although better known for his naturalistic style, Tomu Uchida’s THE MAD FOX is a visually intoxicating journey into worlds of dream and delusion, filled with mesmerizing artificiality and strange twists and turns. Inspired by Kabuki and Bunraku theater, the film tells the story of a young fortune teller named Yasuna, who goes mad after the murder of his beloved Sakaki. An encounter with her twin sister leads him to believe that he has found Sakaki again. But he is in fact dealing with a family of shapeshifters: she is a fox in human form who hides her true identity from him out of love. “As the Scope image swims in deepest incarnadine or blooms into Van Gogh yellow, or a close-up holds on the fox bride madly lapping at her husband’s wound, the topsy-turvy world of THE MAD FOX leaves one feeling like the hero, who exclaims: ‘I am in confusion unto madness.’” (James Quandt)

Tomu Uchida (1898–1970) is among the directors whose work never achieved real recognition in the West, despite his great popularity in Japan. A socially conscious filmmaker who was nonetheless not without contradictions and ambiguities, Uchida worked across a broad variety of genres, creating films of great thematic and stylistic diversity from the mid-1920s until his death, making him more difficult for Western audiences to categorize in comparison to contemporaries such as Ozu and Mizoguchi.