As the title to my review alludes to, this is my experience watching "His Motorbike, Her Island", the last movie included in Nobuhiko Ôbayashis 80s Kadokawa movie compilation, and I'm disappointed honestly.

"His Motorbike, Her Island" follows the story of a narcissistic city boy who loves bikes, and writes music(??) who dumps his girlfriend after falling in love with a country girl with the same passion for motorbikes as him.

Let's start with the positives. As always, I love the absolute commitment Nobuhiko Ôbayashi has to make a story compelling visually and aesthetically and in this movie he delivers it in spades, it's a gorgeous movie and the shots are wonderful. The choice to have both black and white and colour shots in the narrative is a very inspired choice but a bit of a missed opportunity and badly applied. The music is also pretty good.

And now to the negatives, this story has absolutely no DRIVE. It's hard to try and connect to a movie when the main character is basically just an asshole that gets his way right on the very end. God I freaking HATED this character (and actor!), and it's not because this person was "bad" per se, there's many interesting and fun bad characters that are great at having as a lead movie driver but in this movie it doesn't work at all.

The story meanders as well, things happen inexplicably out of order and there's many story stuffs that could've used an extra scene (or less) because for real, stuff happens without you even knowing what's going on. And the changes to black and white and colour make no sense at all. There's no natural explanation as to what the characters different relationships are either, stuff happens haphazardly and you the audience has to accept that... which makes me angry honestly. Also I don't get the ending nor what the movie was trying to portray, a city guy that impresses a country girl? A delinquent guy that atones for his sins (not really) by romancing this new girl? You tell me, cause I have no clue.

I was honestly counting the minutes and seconds till the movie was over, I don't appreciate this at all. Now it sounds like I'm being overtly harsh but it's just my feelings, I guess if you want to check out more of Nobuhiko Ôbayashis movies then do it but otherwise this is really not worth it.

HIS MOTORBIKE, HER ISLAND is another movie from the guy who brought us HAUSU, and so if you're looking for quirkiness then you've come to the right place. It's not quite up there with his best work, sadly, feeling both pedestrian and disjointed at times; the story is indeed very slight and seems to jump about all over the place. There's a rebel-without-a-cause backdrop and then a highly melodramatic romance, complete with lots of little offbeat moments that the director is well known for. The actors do their best with the little material they're given but their scenes do feel a bit stilted, and it's the directorial touches that make this interesting.