This late work of director Tomu Uchida may be his most daring and bold artistic statment, although i gotta admit that i've so far only seen four (or rather... eight?) of his films - the historical Road Movie *Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji*, his rather conventional five-part *Miyamoto Musashi* cycle, the first part of his *Dai-bosatsu tōge* triligy *Swords In The Moonlight*, as well as his brilliant swan song, the crime drama *Straits of Hunger*, also known as *A Fugitive from the Past*.

You'd be hard-pressed to find something as visually striking as *The Mad Fox* in japanese cinema other than, maybe, late Kurosawa and, of course, Masaki Kobayashi's *Kwaidan*. In a brilliant sequence, the emakimono picture scroll setting up the folktale-like narrative appears to morph seamlessly into the live action plot while the visuals keep up the otherworldly impression of a flat painting, where you can't really tell where the set decoration ends and the matte paintings begin. Towards the end, this style progressively gives way to a more stage-like flair (including the brilliant use of a revolving platform at some point) while, at the same time, the noh and kabuki-influenced writing and acting gets dialed up to eleven.

As you might already have guessed, this is surely not for everyone. I'd say if you can appreciate the slow pace of *Kwaidan* and enjoy the theatralics of Kurosawa's *Throne of Blood*, you will probably get a kick out of this. And so will adventurous cinephhiles already fairly familiar with japanese cinema, looking for a different, one-of-a-kind experience. I wouldn't recommend this as an entry point for the average viewer though.