Movies - Koki Mitani

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Koki Mitani (三谷幸喜 Mitani Kōki, July 8, 1961 – ) is a Japanese comedian, playwrite and director.

Biography

Mitani was born on July 8th, 1961 in Tokyo, Japan, with blood type A. He was raised as an only child in an upper-middle-class family and has hopes of pursuing a career in medicine. He even went to a high school that was geared towards a university that would specialise in medicine. Mitani's hobby was storytelling. He would act out stories with his toy soldiers as a child, write plays and short films in his spare time from grade school all the way until college. When he was accepted to Nihon Geijitsu University, he made a number of private short films and ended up graduating with a major in theatre rather than his original interest of medicine. As you might expect, though, his love of medicine and his education pop up from time to time in his work: for example in his works Furi-kaereba Yatsu Ga Iru and Furuhata Ninzaburo.

His major in theatre encouraged him to look less at home and more towards England and the West, especially Billy Wilder, Woody Allen, and the author he now most enjoys being compared to - Neil Simon.

Just after college, Mitani has a short and unsuccessful history of wanting to be a stand-up comedian. But the Japanese comedy, or, "Owarai" business is raunchy and fierce - most of the punch-lines in the jokes make someone else the butt of it - precisely the opposite of what Mitani Koki had in mind. Though he had a love of the spotlight, he also lacked the stage presence and foolishness that is generally required of Japanese stand-up comedians today.

It was during that time that his parents, who ran a printing company, helped him to distribute his scripts, which he continued to write throughout college and his quest for stardom as a one-man act. Some radio producers picked up the scripts at that time and gave him the odd job, which helped him fund his after-college career.

All the while his name was slowly spreading as a young college graduate, he did what most struggling yet serious actors do - he joined a theatrical troupe. Well, not just joined. He started it - with a few of his closest actor friends of the same age. It was 1983, the guys were only 22 years old, and they called themselves the Tokyo Sunshine Boys. After Neil Simon, of course.

Mitani wrote all the plays. His first with the Tokyo Sunshine Boys was Sixpence no Uta, and he continues to write them today, though the Sunshine Boys have disbanded as of about 10 years ago. He wrote songs for occasional musicals and even performed himself under the rather awkward stage name of "Hitotsubashi Soutaro."

His first big hit with the Sunshine Boys came in 1990 with his parody of the Reginald Rose classic, 12 Angry Men
. He called it 12 Nin no Yasashii Nihonjin, or loosely translated, "Twelve Nice Japanese." It was the culmination of the Sunshine Boys' success in the theatre world until then - they had gathered quite a following and fans reportedly even came to get their autographs as they exited the theatres after work - an honor rarely awarded to theatrical troupes.

"12 Nin..." was made into a movie soon after, with a number (but not all) of the Sunshine Boys in the film cast. That film made the Sunshine Boys famous on the grand scale - those who had never bothered to watch theatre (which had, and has, an image of surrealism and unattainable art) until then were suddenly curious.

The next big - and possibly greatest - play of the Sunshine Boys was the 1991 performance of The Show Must Go On. This play, never made into a movie because of its appeal that is limited to the stage, was in fact so popular that it brought the entire troupe into the media spotlight and awarded its star actor - Masahiko Nishimura - the award of Best Actor in the Japanese Theatre Awards.

His most famous movie to date is the 1997 international release of Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald, which won four awards at the Japanese Academy Awards in 1998 as well as a number of other awards at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Blue Ribbon Awards.

Appeal

Think about it. His screenwriter idols were all foreigners, yet Koki Mitani does not speak English. Therefore, his admiration for the men was all based on translations - translations that depended not on word-play or culturally-based gags. (Lest he wouldn't understand them.) They were what we would now call the lost art of "situation comedy": comedy based entirely on plot and strange twists of fate.

Mitani learned his art from people who were able to communicate to him through language boundaries. Thus, Mitani now is able to write stories that appeal to an audience without having to make complicated puns or overtly physical slapstick.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Koki Mitani ]

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