House

I've heard so much about how this is a bonkers acid trip, but what I was not expecting was to get choked up several times. This film represents the psyche of a generation of children struggling to reconcile the idyllic images that we desperately produce to anchor them and shield them from the world with the unexplainable existential horror of the atomic bomb. The fact that this was written in tandem with Obayashi's 10-year old daughter makes this a pure postmodern exploration of subconsciousness that allows the eerieness of the film's stylistic contradictions to transcend the screen. On the surface it's totally absurd - there's floating skulls, a hungry piano, spontaneous fruit-ification - but in a postwar world where nothing makes sense anymore, is being murdered by a sentient house really a nonsensical fear?