Tampopo

Tampopo (1985)

タンポポ

The first Japanese Noodle Western.

In this humorous paean to the joys of food, a pair of truck drivers happen onto a decrepit roadside shop selling ramen noodles. The widowed owner, Tampopo, begs them to help her turn her establishment into a paragon of the "art of noodle-soup making". Interspersed are satirical vignettes about the importance of food to different aspects of human life.

Date of release
1985-11-23
TMDB
7.8 / 10 (466)
Runtime
1h 55m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Jūzō Itami

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: $224.1K

Tampopo is a 1985 Japanese comedy film written and directed by Juzo Itami, and starring Tsutomu Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto, Kōji Yakusho, and Ken Watanabe. The publicity for the film calls it the first "ramen Western", a play on the term spaghetti Western.

Production

Following the success of The Funeral, Itami began writing Tampopo immediately after, drawing inspiration from Luis Buñuel's The Phantom of Liberty, and American westerns, Sergio Leone in particular. He then infused it with his own observations of ramen culture and its ability to democratize Japanese society, a subject he briefly explored in The Funeral.

Itami produced the film himself along with his wife and frequent collaborator, Nobuko Miyamoto, whom he cast in the titular role. By producing the property himself, it allowed him to quickly develop the script, begin principal photography, and release the film by November 1985.

Filming for Tampopo primarily took place in Shibaura, Tokyo, then an industrial working class neighborhood built on reclaimed land just off Tokyo's Inner Circular Route, the main throughfare truck drivers use to get around greater Tokyo. Although the main restaurant interior was built on a stage, the restaurant exterior and road driven by Goro and Gun in their truck was filmed on Old Kaigan Road just off the Takahama bridge.

Due to the lack of major studio support, Itami relied on many non-professional local residents as talent, and the use of low tech equipment and jury rigged solutions to problems. Food Stylist Seiko Ogawa was hired not only to make bowl after perfect bowl of ramen, but also to serve as Miyamoto's ramen coach, and to act as the crew's caterer. In another vignette, a homeless man sneaks into a restaurant to cook Tampopo's son's omurice.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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