A Live-Action Anime That Actually Moves

Read Time:5 Minute, 45 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
School in the Crosshairs (Nerawareta gakuen)
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Genre: Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Teen, Coming-of-Age
Year Released: 1981, Cult Epics Blu-ray 2025
Runtime: 1h 30m
Director(s): Nobuhiko Obayashi
Writer(s): Taku Mayumura
Cast: Hiroko Yakushimaru, Ryôichi Takayanagi, Masami Hasegawa, Miyoko Akaza, Fumi Dan, Tôru Minegishi
Where to Watch: now available, order your copy here: www.cultepics.com, www.mvdshop.com, or www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: SCHOOL IN THE CROSSHAIRS works because it takes a simple idea—a teen girl discovers her telekinetic powers—and refuses to treat it as a party trick. Yuka (Hiroko Yakushimaru) is a kid who suddenly has a lever big enough to move her world, and director Nobuhiko Obayashi uses that lever to pry open everything around her: the pressure to conform, the seduction of authority, the way adults and institutions look at students and see raw material. Even when the film gets strange—cosmic intruders, pop-art—it stays grounded in the daily reality of school life: classrooms, clubs, elections, crushes. Ordinary rituals pushed slightly off-axis until they reveal what they were training you for all along.

Obayashi’s style is instantly recognizable: composite shots, back-projection displays, gorgeous skies, and practical effects that earn their place on screen. The point isn’t realism; it’s meaning. The movie isn’t trying to convince you that superpowers exist. It wants you to feel that institutions can become possessed, that rules can turn into uniforms, that an election can become a soft coup. When a new transfer student weaponizes charisma and mind control, the school shifts into a state where “good students” patrol the halls and dissent is treated like contamination. It’s funny until it isn’t, and that pivot is where Obayashi excels.

Yakushimaru is the engine. She gives Yuka a lightness that never tips into scatterbrain territory. You get the sense she’s genuinely good at everything because she works at it, not because the script says so. When her powers manifest, she doesn’t take it and move on to show off; she worries. The movie respects that. Ryôichi Takayanagi, as the classmate entering Yuka’s life, plays the grounded counterpoint—someone who likes her for who she is, not for what she can do. Their scenes are sweet without mush, and that helps the film hold shape when the plot starts juggling Venusian lore and psychic showdowns.

Formally, the film feels like a live-action cousin to the teen anime explosion that would crest in the decades after it. Obayashi edits in confident swipes, staging with a choreographer’s eye and cutting with the precision of a punchline. The result is movement—of faces, bodies, and frames—that keeps the movie lively even when exposition kicks in. The city-pop vibe of the soundtrack, the color blocking in the costumes, the deliberately artificial skies: none of it is window dressing. It builds a playground for ideas about freedom and control, love and duty.

Where the movie lands is its portrait of soft fascism; the uniforms, marches, and rhetoric are on the nose by design. Obayashi knows the performance of power is part of power’s appeal. The “re-education” vibe that creeps through the school isn’t a parody; it’s a reminder that conformity can feel like safety until it closes the door behind you. The film lets kids be kids—petty, brave, romantic, inconsistent—and still takes their politics seriously. That might be the most radical choice here.

The effects—by contemporary standards—are transparent. That’s not a knock. The transparency is a feature, a visual language that says, “You are watching an illusion, but the feeling is real.” A composite shot that looks like theatre today: it invites your imagination into the construction. When Yuka pushes back against the school’s new order, the trickery becomes part of the argument. She’s asserting authorship over a world that thinks it owns her.

Obayashi also understands spectacle as punctuation, not a paragraph. The set-pieces escalate, but he never forgets the small moments: a glance between friends, a parent trying to advise without understanding, a teacher who knows what’s wrong but can’t find the words that won’t get them punished. Those details anchor the movie, so when the finale vaults into the cosmic, you don’t lose your footing. It’s still a story about a girl refusing to surrender her classmates to someone else’s idea of “better.”

The new Blu-ray restoration gives this 1981 film more than a dust-off. The image clean-up and track options let the color and mixing do what they were always meant to—glow, pop, and drive. Extras contextualize the work within Obayashi’s career without turning the piece into a museum piece. If you’re discovering it now, you’re getting it in a form that flatters the artistry.

Because of the blend of heart, invention, and pointed subtext, the work still feels alive. The movie argues that power without consent is just a cage, using jokes, dances, blue-screen, and a heroine who refuses to hand over the steering wheel. SCHOOL IN THE CROSSHAIRS doesn’t just get the restoration it deserves; it offers a message. And for anyone who’s ever felt their school turning into something a little too “perfect,” a little too obedient, that voice is exactly the kind of strange we need.

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[photo courtesy of CULT EPICS, MVD ENTERTAINMENT]

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