Japan’s reverence and fascination with Western pop culture has given birth to many wacky screen characters and concepts. But this one really takes the cake. It’s equally as bizarre and quirky as it is endearingly entertaining. From the first moment to the last, it assaults and surpasses all normal expectations and then leaves you feeling better off for having had the experience.

Funky Forest: The First Contact plays like an amalgamation of short stories, but you kind of get the feeling that each character in each separate story lives in a small world, one that continuously threads through itself and through an interlinking higher subconscious. This may or may not be due to the underlying presence of aliens from Piko Riko, with whom everyone seems to either hear about or come into contact with.

Each story feels like a preparation for the next, so there’s no real displacement or distance between them. More so there’s a commonality of self sublimity, ridiculousness, and a deliberate madcap impetuousness that pulses, or impulses, throughout the entire film. This is cool and clever cinema. Its wit and brash humour make its abrupt, unexpected and seemingly pointless plotlines not only forgivable but an enhancement to the cinematic experience.

Watching Funky Forest: The First Contact makes you feel like you’re in a weird and surreal blend of dream, anime, computer game, life and a not so scary version of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Naked Lunch. This film is everything that’s fun and interesting about Japan. And for the Eeyore in all of us, it still has a lot of philosophical merit. That is, if you’re Freudian enough to interpret the dream states. Get seriously lost, and laugh that shocked, innocent laugh you haven’t had since you were a kid. Not recommended for the responsible adult in you.