Jellyfish Eyes

Pop art superstar Takashi Murakami makes his feature film debut with a campy, genre-defying adventure that mixes lo-fi Japanese disaster movie, new kid-on-the-block coming-of-age story, and Pokemon-style anime with a delirious abundance of wonderfully imagined magical creatures. Setting Murakami’s fantastical animated designs in an otherwise life action film, Jellyfish Eyes tells the story of Masashi, a young boy who moves to a sleepy town in the Japanese countryside in the wake of a natural disaster. When Masashi encounters a flying, jellyfish-like creature, he soon discovers that all his classmates have similarly magical pets, known as F.R.I.E.N.D.s, that are controlled by electronic devices that children use to battle one another. Despite their playful appearances, however, these F.R.I.E.N.D.s turn out to be part of a sinister plot that threatens the entire universe.