Filmmaking can sometimes share qualities with baking.  For example, when making a cake, each ingredient needs to be measured perfectly and mixed together evenly in order to successfully craft a tasty product. Sion Sono achieves this type of success in a similar way with his genre-mixing in Love & Peace. These are the types of films that share commonalities with Love & Peace: fantasy, drama, musical, sci-fi, absurdist comedy, concert film, and children's film. Sono includes many of the tropes found in films like these, but the wave-like drifting in and out of genres kept the film from ever reaching a point of un-originality.

Love & Peace hops back and forth between a rags-to-riches story of a bullied worker (Hiroki Hasegawa) at a mundane job with dreams of becoming a rock star, and an old man who takes care of a group of discarded toys and animals in a sewer. The two distinct stories are connected by a magical turtle named Pikadon, who makes up for its  low-budget-children's-show look with utter cuteness. The other puppets and animatronics from the old man portion of the film are a little easier to accept as walking and talking characters. With these characters, Sion Sono pulls off some of the best physical comedy of the film, particularly in a scene where Pikadon and a few friends travel throughout the city under a large box.

Overall, Sion Sono's wonderful Love & Peace acts as a love letter to genre filmmaking. A performance of Revolution Q's (the fictional band at the center of the main story) hit song Love & Peace will look like something out of a real band's concert film. Great set design and cinematography leads to one scene imitating a kaiju film superbly. These references and imitations are slipped in seamlessly, and only when it benefits the film as a whole. Love & Peace is as hilariously weird and over-the-top as a film can get.

This film is screening as part of Japan Cuts, which runs from July 14-24 at Japan Society.