4/5 A gentle story about family
  by Kona (Emerald City)
An elderly couple are excited to make the long trip to visit their grown children in Tokyo; once there, however, they find the children are too busy to spend time with them.

This is a lovely and touching movie from the acclaimed director Yasujiro Ozu. His specialty was observing familial relationships and the ordinary day-to-day life of post-war Japan. In "Tokyo Story," we see a couple who love their children and patiently and philosophically forgive them for their rudeness. The circle of life and the real personalities of all the characters make for a poignant story.

It moves slowly and may be too long, but the result is an unforgettable glimpse into another time and place. In Japanese with English subtitles. Recommended.

4/5 Family Story for Everyone
  by c. bautista (Honolulu, HI)
As noted elsewhere, Tokyo Story is about family dynamics. Almost anyone who views this movie will identify with someone in the movie, with all the character's flaws. The movie unfolds in a very deliberate and subtle manner. Simple everyday acts accumulate which, like all of our lives, result in choices, sometimes less than ideal ones, being made. While this movie is sad, so is our existence (which must inevitably end). Still, life must go on; we must persevere because we are connected.

Only problem with this DVD is its sometimes inadequate sound.

5/5 Ozu masterpiece with Stsuko Hara
  by Helen (USA)
Nothing equals seeing the intelligent, beautiful face of Setsuko Hara as the kind heroine. It almost restores one's childhood faith in the future of humanity!

5/5 Masterpiece
  by Cosmoetica (New York, USA)
There are many roads to greatness. This is a notion that I have always held to be true. No greater example of this could be given than by comparing the films of two of the greatest filmmakers from Japan. Of course, most people have heard of Akira Kurosawa and his classics like Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and Ikiru. But there is also Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963), whose canon of films is set in modern times far more often than Kurosawa's. Where Kurosawa was grand, Ozu is small. Where Kurosawa was kinetic, Ozu was static. Where Kurosawa celebrated the epic, Ozu celebrated the ordinary. Yet, despite their differences, their greatest films are indisputable masterpieces of cinema, even if they achieve their ends in seemingly contradictory ways.
Perhaps the greatest of all Ozu films is his 1953 black and white classic Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari), which follows a simple story outline, unfolds very slowly - the film is two hours and fifteen minutes long, builds its power through the slow accumulation of facts, and the deft, but subtle revelation of character. In short, it's everything that Hollywood films are not, and it would never have been produced there, then or now. It has been derided as being stale, dull, and plodding, even as it has alternately been chided as melodramatic and a third rate soap opera. Such definitions only go to show how little the claimants know of the words they wield.
It is true, that nothing much of `excitement' happens in the film- no murders, car chases, explosions, steamy sex scenes. It follows an old couple, from the small town of Onomichi, on a long train trip to Tokyo to visit their grown children. Some have seen the film as a remake of Leo McCarey's 1937 Hollywood sudser, Make Way For Tomorrow, but Tokyo Story is to that film what Long Day's Journey Into Night is to The Bold & The Beautiful. There, the old couple see the town, are shunted aside, then return home. The mother dies, the children come to visit, and there are some revelations, but most of the living family members just return to their own patterns of life. Yet, having watched soap operas for many years, I can tell you this film soars well beyond soap operas, which rely on archetypes and stereotypes, and the most silly plot contrivances. Everything in this film happens as it would in reality. Plus, Ozu does not milk scenes for their overwrought emotions. In fact, he wields his edits like a rapier, and excises scenes that soap operas and more standard films would include. Tokyo Story is no shameless tearjerker.
Ozu is the master of narrative ellipses. As example, we do not see an early emotional farewell scene between the parents and their youngest daughter Kyoko. We do not see the parents' first stay with their youngest son Keizo (Shiro Osaka), in Osaka, as they head toward Tokyo. Another technique he mastered is that of developing subplots, such as that of the widowed daughter-in-law, Noriko, who treats the old couple far better than all but one of their children. Yet, she is not hagiographized at the expense of the other children, even as they are not demonized for their lack of care for their parents. They are simply caring and selfish, as most people are to a certain degree.
Tokyo Story is a great film, all the way around, but it was ignored for many years until it was re-released in New York in 1972, with the publication of Paul Schrader's Transcendental Style In Film. Twenty years later, in the 1992 Sight And Sound film critics poll, Tokyo Story was ranked as one of the ten greatest films ever made. In 2002 it repeated that feat. It is not a film that provides easy answers, and it lacks all the phony sentimentality and contrivances Hollywood films wallow in. It is not melodramatic in the least. When Shige, as example, bursts out in tears, when Koichi says their mother has not long to live, it is not Ozu's melodrama, but the character's own, and there is a huge difference in recognizing that. That the film so perfectly captured all the Japanese conventions of the era, yet still resonates with worldwide audiences, is the mark of a great work of art, and a testament to the great circularly narrative screenplay by Ozu and Kôgo Noda, which deftly interweaves symbolism, such as train tracks and laundry, while capturing the way real people talk and react. Never is there a forced moment nor false reaction. The character building is superb, and the very relaxed and slow pace of the film shows what such a style can do. The film's score, by Kojun Saito is a tad over the top, at times, but understated far more often than not.
If only Criterion had done their usual good job with this film the experience would have been perfect. But, don't let that deter any lover of great cinema from basking in one of the great films of all time. Tokyo Story makes its own leisurely way, but where it heads to is where all art desires to be.


5/5 Yosujiro Ozu' masterpiece
  by Hiram Gomez Pardo (Valencia, Venezuela)
First at all, I should remark this is a milestone film in the history of cinema, and according the British Film Institute one of the five greatest films ever made.

The poetic intensity of this overpowering movie transcends by far any egregious epithet. A deeply, poignant and touching drama about an elderly couple who travels to Tokyo, where they are unenthusiastically received by his children.

But it's such the narrative power and the unforgettable shots along this masterpiece, that you will be engaged from start to finish.

I politely invite you to acquire this memorable masterwork, and once you have watched you will necessarily include among the milestone films ever seen through your existence.

The cast, the emotive and tender scenes ( the grandmother and her unworried grandson picking up flowers, is a true landmark sequence) , the multiple issues around a new generation with lack of personality, enthusiasm permeated by an absolute indifference, is just a part of this artful script, whose nostalgic gaze about an emerging Tokyo from the ashes of the WW2 will spell you.

An immortal masterpiece and one of my top twenty films ever made.