“Warm and fantastical … Ishii’s domestic frame is as tightly packed and layered as his horizons are expansive.”

Michelle Orange, Village Voice

Imagination is the modus operandi guiding Ishii Katsuhito’s whimsical chronicle of a quirky, millennial Japanese family. Set across a sakura-brimming springtime in the countryside of Tochigi prefecture, the film captures—in vibrant colours and with bursts of effervescent, reality-augmenting fantasy—the extraordinary-scaled everyday of the multigenerational Haruno household. Dad is a hypnotherapist; mom is an anime artist reentering the industry (Evangelion​’s Anno Hideaki is her boss). She’s inherited the trade from her eccentric live-in father, whose cut-from-the-same-cloth son is a mangaka. Teenaged Hajime and eight-year-old sister Sachiko, meanwhile, are undergoing kidhood: puberty, crushes, fecal folklore, and a kaiju-sized doppelgänger. Writer-director Ishii, coming off a gig directing the gnarly anime sequence in Kill Bill, renders this entry into the family-drama genre with an animator’s sense of unbridled play and possibility. The Taste of Tea is presented here in a new HD master.

In Japanese with English subtitles

“[A] droll and oddly touching film … The movie is a family portrait as painted by a moderately demented Cubist: the family involved is nothing like yours, yet somehow, in its fractured way, exactly like yours.”

Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times

“The most charming comedy in town, writer-director-editor Katsuhito Ishii’s 2004 piece is a modern Japanese variation on You Can’t Take It With You, with some lovely fantastical flourishes.”

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
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