Nobuhiko Obayashi Is Not Tim Burton

The Tim Burton of Asia comparison follows Nobuhiko Obayashi around, but it doesn’t fit. Burton trades in gothic spectacle; Obayashi makes something weirder and more genuinely unsettling. His films—”House,” The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, The Last Snow—exist in their own register, something between horror and pop, the personal and the fantastical, without needing an American reference point to make sense.

What gets me about his work is how it’s centered on women as complete people. Not love interests or victims—the actual center of the story. It’s a conviction that runs through everything he’s made across decades. His characters are complex and self-directed, and that commitment to their interiority matters as much as whatever surreal or frightening thing is happening around them.

He’s still working, still experimenting. Hanagatami, his recent film, is about youth and friendship and how a moment in time can crack open into something larger. He also makes music videos for Japanese idol groups, which feels like the kind of constraint that actually frees something creatively. He’s not trying to be respectable. He’s just making films that are genuinely strange and that take their characters seriously.