Having been scripted by Tetsuya Nakashima, the award winning writer director of the excellent “Kamikaze Girls” and “Memories of Matsuko”, it comes as no surprise that “Lala Pipo” is another slice of colourful Japanese pop culture craziness. Marking the directorial debut of Nakashima’s assistant Miyano Masayuki, the film is based upon a short story collection by noted author Okuda Hideo, its odd title being a phonetic Japanese pronunciation of an observation by an American tourist that Tokyo does indeed have a ‘lot of people’. Although it revolves around the Japanese sex industry, the film is brash, bawdy and cheerful rather than sleazy, being very much in Nakashima’s surreal, cartoonish style. The film is being released in the UK via Third Window Films, with a November run in selected cinemas before arriving on DVD.
