Shinobu Yaguchi’s breakout movie Waterboys was a commercial and critical smash, elevating him from a writer/director of low-budget indie flicks to the big league. But the zany tale of a group of schoolboy losers who form a synchronized swimming team didn’t do his creative muse much good. When it came time to make a proper follow-up (after the little-seen anthology Parco Fiction), he did the obvious thing: he made the same film again. Swing Girls (2004) was a much more polished piece of work, but there was no escaping the fact that its zany tale of a group of schoolgirl losers who form a swing band was kind of… familiar.

Based on the name alone, you could be forgiven for expecting Happy Flight, Yaguchi’s latest feature, to be the zany tale of a group of university dropouts who form a budget airline company. It isn’t, thankfully. Breaking from the template of the films that made his name, Yaguchi’s made an ensemble piece which might appropriately be subtitled “A Day at the Airport”: centering on a flight from Tokyo’s Haneda airport to Honolulu, it follows the work of the flight crew and the people on the ground, from air traffic control to the old geezer scaring birds from the runway with a shotgun. On a purely educational level, it’s fascinating stuff. (And on another level, it’s a good advert for ANA, whose fleet is shown in quite loving detail.)

The nominal hero is Kazuhiro Suzuki (Seiichi Tanabe), a co-pilot we first see on a simulated flight that ends up nose-first in a digitized Tokyo Bay. That doesn’t bode well for his next trip, an assessed flight presided over by the grim-faced Harada (Saburô Tokitô) that will determine whether he’ll be promoted to the rank of pilot.
Suzuki isn’t the only person on the plane hoping to make a good impression. It’s flight attendant Etsuko’s (Haruka Ayase) first international flight – and she has to get through it under the stern gaze of Shinobu Terajima’s lead attendant. Back on the ground, meanwhile, Natsumi (Tomoko Tabata) is fed up with her job working on the check-in counter, operation room director Takahashi (Ittoku Kishibe) is still getting to grips with the new-fangled computer system, the bird-patrol guy (Bengaru) is contending with uppity animal rights activists, and… well, I could go on.

There are a lot of plates to keep spinning, and Yaguchi does a pretty good job, moving everything along at a brisk pace without losing track of any of the players. What’s missing is a particularly involving storyline. Yaguchi’s take on ensemble comedy is no match for that of compatriot Koki Mitani: While Mitani’s The Uchouten Hotel was a film with a lot of characters in intriguing situations, Happy Flight just feels like a film with a lot of characters. Nice characters, yes, but a bit more dramatic interest wouldn’t have gone amiss.

More damagingly, it’s just not very funny. I watched Happy Flight in a reasonably full cinema and, although it is breezy and agreeable enough, I counted less than a dozen big laughs during the whole thing. Which makes me wonder what Yaguchi was really trying to achieve here. The film’s title isn’t meant to be ironic – Happy Flight inhabits an insanely chipper universe, where no problem is so great it can’t be overcome in a few minutes of screen time, and every character is just waiting for the right moment to give the others a wink and a cheerful thumbs up.

As it skips from one happily resolved situation to the next, this film starts to resemble something other than a light comedy – is it just me, or is Happy Flight inadvertently harking back to the golden age of socialist realism? James Marsh