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His Motorbike, Her Island
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Cult Epics Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (11th September 2025). |
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The Film
 In an unhappy relationship with young Fuyumi (Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S.'s Noriko Watanabe), Ko (Fudoh: The New Generation's Riki Takeuchi) really has only one true love in his life: his Kawasaki motorcycle that he drives for a courier company run by Fuyumi's older brother Hidemasa (Beyond Outrage's Tomokazu Miura) who threatens him to "take responsibility" for his sister. Ko flees to the countryside to be alone with his love only to meet pretty and uninhibited Miyoko (Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah's Kiwako Harada) who initially seems more attracted to his bike than to him. After a whirlwind romance, Ko returns to the city and breaks up with Fuyumi, leading to her brother challenging him to a duel. Ko wins the duel and goes to visit Miyoko on the island of her birth on the Inland Sea for the Obon celebration of the dead in which their relationship is complicated by her desire to learn to ride a motorbike. After his week's stay, Ko returns home to discover that Fuyumi is not the lead singer of a band at their old bar hangout singing a love song he wrote as rearranged by Ko's roommate and Fuyumi's new lover Keiichi (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time's Ryôichi Takayanagi). Miyoko arrives in town and they continue their romance under the eyes of Fuyumi and Keiichi, and Ko finds himself growing more and more anxious about Miyoko's riding, especially after she reveals that she got her license practicing on Keiichi's bike. Things finally come to a head when Ko demands that Miyoko choose between him and his motorbike. While nowhere near as "avant-garde" as director Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's better-known-in-the-west Hausu, the later His Motorbike, Her Island – based on a novel by – Yoshio Kataoka is actually the less conventional in its storyline. Underneath the animation, stop-motion, collage effects, and infectious pop scoring of the former film is a body count horror film while the latter at first seems like a run-of-the-mill love story between a bad boy biker and a village (or island) girl but is actually a nuanced look at the unpredictable path of modern love. The gendered nature of the title also suggests a sort of Roland Barthes-ian "A Lover's Discouse" literary depiction of the lover as an absent wanderer and the loved in stasis both as a psychological projection of an ideal by the lover and the cultural and historical circumstances of women representing home and hearth. The film, however, turns this idea on its head as Ko transforms from bad boy biker into the one who is psychologically stuck in Miyoko's absence, flying into road rage and causing accidents as he tries to ride away from his feelings; so much so that it is his pride and his fear that make the fixed space of the island seemingly unreachable to him even though it is a few hours away by ferry and definitely where Miyoko has absconded with his Kawasaki. Ko's fears about Miyoko's riding are apparent even before Hidemasa states, "She's going to die," as they observe her riding a winding road. It is not readily apparent whether this is a sexist statement about a girl taking part in the male-oriented Japanese biker culture – although there are plenty of earlier Japanese exploitation films featuring girl gangs – or a response to Miyoko's rapturous enjoyment in contrast to their disaffected cool, but there seems to be only one way in which Ko and Miyoko can exist on equal footing. The film is told not only from Ko's point of view through narration but also through the use of both color and monochrome. Ko claims that he dreams in black and white, and while his first meeting with Miyoko has a certain romanticized treatment in the camera angles and music, the color sequences seem at times even more surreal like the duel between Ko and Hidemasa which takes the form of jousting on motorbikes. The use of black and white in some early scenes with Ko and Fuyumi suggest a subjectivity to his depiction of her only crying and cooking while the color reveal of Fuyumi singing on stage seems initially tinged with regret. Ko seems surprised at her blossoming and her relationship with Keiichi but not jealous, and the fact that Miyoko then performs his song as he wrote it rather than Fuyumi's more pop-oriented version suggests that they are better suited to one another (and his perspective does not seem to treat the relationship between his ex and his roommate as consolation prizes for one another even though Keiichi seemed to pine for her early on). As the film progresses, the switches between black and white and color seem more random, enough so that one cannot nail down what is "real" and what is "dreamt" and that perhaps best illustrates the nature in the film of love which has no room for regret with Miyoko and her grandfather (Tora! Tora! Tora!'s Takahiro Tamura) shown at the Obon ceremony celebrating rather than mourning their lost loved ones (her parents and his wife, respectively). The shifts between color and monochrome at first cast some ambiguity as to the outcome of the film's potentially tragic finale but the narration, music, and photography suggest happily ever after. Coming out in the mid-eighties when Japanese theatrical cinema was dwindling and just before the V-Cinema boom that eventually birthed a new wave of more internationally-recognized auteur and commercial Japanese cinema from the nineties onwards, His Motorbike, Her Island manages to be simultaneously provincial stylistically and universal in its sentiments. 
Video
Hard to see in the West outside of repertory screenings, His Motorbike, Her Island got is first English-friendly physical media release in the U.K. in 2022 from Third Window Films as part of the Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's 80s Kadokawa Years and then as a single-disc release in 2024. Cult Epics' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray – the film switches aspect ratios from windowboxed 1.37:1 to increasingly wider during the opening sequence – likely comes from the same HD master that Kadokawa released themselves in Japan in 2019 (the DCP of which had some recent festival play along with other Ôbayashi films courtesy of Cult Epics). The high bitrate encode delivers a consistently clean but grainy experience given the film's heavy use of opticals – aspect ratio shifts, switches from monochrome to color (always in dissolve never as straight cuts), and freeze frames as the protagonist tries to fix fleeting moments in his memory – with the city scenes boasting deep blacks and generally cool colors apart from practical lighting that gives characters a bit of intimate warmth while the island scenes are bright and colorful through a haze of mist, dew, and sometimes heavy rainfall. 
Audio
According to a fellow DVDCompare writer, the previous Kadokawa DVD release featured mono sound but the U.K. and U.S. releases both restore the Dolby Stereo soundtrack – here in similar-sounding DTS-HD Master Audio and LPCM 2.0 tracks – which primarily favors the scoring and theme song with only occasional directional activity in the motorcycle scenes presumably to otherwise suggest the characters' connection to their environment rather than as a disruptive force. The city scenes are more active in terms of sound design overall while the island scenes are dominated by music, narration, and dialogue exchanges. The optional English subtitles feature a few transcription errors including some that look like optical character recognition mistakes. 
Extras
The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by critic Samm Deighan who discusses the recurring themes of director Nobuhiko Ôbayashi from his experimental Hausu through his eighties coming-of-age films which are spiked by overt supernatural and subtle magical realism elements including His Motorbike, Her Island. Deighan also notes how Ôbayashi's path to directing differed from the studio system of working several years as an assistant director before being "invited" to direct. Ôbayashi grew up during the war years largely raised by his grandparents and had the opportunity to explore several art forms, ending up forming a filmmaking collective and making shorts before being hired to direct commercials which his colleagues saw as selling out. Deighan notes that Ôbayashi learned to construct narrative through hundreds of commercials including some high profile ones – among them the famous Charles Bronson Mandom cologne commercial that went viral a few years ago when it was "rediscovered" on YouTube – and that his getting invited to direct Hausu by Toho was a combination of a period of declining theatrical viewing in the industry overall and a script that the producers did not understand. Deighan also analyzes the characters including the Ko's supposed "bad boy" and the not so clean cut dichotomy of inhibited Fuyumi and free spirit Miyoko and how they evolve throughout the film, the director's complex attitude towards conformism, and the film's ending.  "Becoming the Wind: His Motorbike, Her Island and the Biker Movie" (21:18) is a stimulating visual essay by Esher Rosenfield who discusses the parallels between American and Japanese postwar biker culture, the biker film genre and its sometimes twisted interpretation of said culture – noting that the homoeroticism intended by bikers to shock and intimidate the squares becomes a pathology in the films from which the female love interest is supposed to save the male lead and the different treatment of lesbianism in female biker movies – noting that Ko has a more optimistic worldview than his biker film contemporaries and that the two women in his lives are not reliant upon him to blossom, one literally finding her voice while the other assimilates into biker culture on her own rather than as a fallen woman-type biker chick. "Her Island: Onomichi Pt. 1" (25:11) is a visual essay by Alex Pratt who discusses the island that inspired Yoshio Kataoka in writing his novel, the islands that Ôbayashi scouted for the film while still in New Caledonia working on The Island Closest to Heaven, and Ôbayashi's own connection to the Inland Sea islands (Onomichi in particular). It is revealed elsewhere on the disc that His Motorbike, Her Island typical Kadokawa fashion played as a B-feature to a bigger production – in this case, producer Haruki Kadokawa's own Cabaret – but Director Nobuhiko Ôbayashi interview (15:44) reveals in an archival interview (presumably from the Japanese DVD) that his film was a B-film in spirit as well, distinguishing the "ambitious" A-film and the "challenging" B-film as well as discussing the film's production, its dangerous biking stunt scenes, and the casting of Kiwako Harada who he noticed in a photograph of her The Girl Who Leapt Through Time actress sister Tomoyo Harada, as well as the thematic reasoning behind Ko seeing Miyoko naked so early on in the film. The disc also includes the film's theatrical trailer (1:32) and trailers for three other Ôbayashi films coming soon from Cult Epics. 
Packaging
The first pressing includes a slipcover and a 24-page booklet reproducing the Japanese press book - in which Ôbayashi first made the claim that the film aspired to be a B-movie - without translation.
Overall
His Motorbike, Her Island manages to be simultaneously provincial stylistically and universal in its sentiments.
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