Kikujiro

Masao is a nine-year-old boy living in Tokyo with his grandmother, who works long hours and leaves him to spend his summer holidays mostly alone while his schoolfriends go away. After finding a photograph and an address, he decides to travel across Japan to find the mother he has never met, though he has little money and no real plan. A friend of his grandmother suggests that her husband accompany the boy, and so Kikujiro, a coarse, opportunistic former yakuza with a taste for gambling, becomes his unlikely guardian. The two set off together, and the trip takes them through a series of encounters with unusual characters, with Kikujiro's unreliable habits repeatedly threatening their progress.

The film was directed and written by Takeshi Kitano, the seventh of the sixteen features he has directed and the one that followed Fireworks in 1997 and preceded Brother in 2000. Kitano himself plays Kikujiro, while Yusuke Sekiguchi plays Masao; Kayoko Kishimoto appears as Kikujiro's wife, and Kazuko Yoshiyuki as Masao's grandmother. The credited cast numbers twenty-eight.

Released in Japan in June 1999, the film runs 121 minutes and had a worldwide box office of about one million dollars. On IMDb it holds 7.7/10 from roughly 24,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.5/10 from around 617 votes, while the critics' rating stands at 6.7/10 from 51 reviews, so audiences have rated it somewhat more warmly than critics have.