The Calamari Wrestler is about a talking squid who seeks to become Japan’s wrestling champion. He might also be the reincarnation of a deceased, highly revered wrestler. The squid costume looks marginally better than something found in a Roger Corman creature feature from the Fifties from the top, but no attempt has been made to hide that there is a boot wearing man underneath. Convinced that the squid is, in fact, the reincarnation of her late lover, a young woman, daughter of the wrestling commissioner, pursues the cephalopod. Interspecies love takes a back seat to sporting spectacles between men and invertebrates. Kawasaki’s world is one that a more conventional thinking film viewer would pass on, but I find myself easily swept up by Kawasaki’s childlike, rather than childish, universe of talking animals that coexist with humans.