If you are obsessed with all things having to do with Japanese popular culture, then the feature Jellyfish Eyes, which combines humans and animated creatures, will not bore you. But if you are only mildly interested in this form of mass entertainment, the film will appear as mostly silly and a bit long.

The film’s director, Takashi Murakami, has one foot in anime and another in Nihonga paintings, a style that is very refined, traditional, and uses paper or silk. This combination of highbrow and lowbrow in the director’s background is expressed in the film’s plot, which alternates between detailed theodical (the nature of god and evil) expositions that only adults can understand and the shenanigans of creatures whose fantastic appearance and goofy noises will easily engage humans who have recently learned to walk.

These fantastic creatures are called F.R.I.E.N.D.s. A bunch of the kids at a suburban school have them and control them with their smartphones. Some F.R.I.E.N.D.s are cute, and some are not. The one attached to the main character of this film, Masashi (Takuto Sueoka), floats about the air like a drunk balloon and likes to eat something that looks like string cheese.

There is also a crew of bad-looking guys at a nearby laboratory who want to master the energy of children for some mysterious purpose. Yes, this laboratory looks like Fukushima. If nuclear bombs gave Japanese popular culture Godzilla, then maybe the nuclear accident of 2011 gave Japanese culture F.R.I.E.N.D.s. recommended