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 "excerpt": "Passing Fancy (Dekigokoro, 出来ごころ) is Yasujiro Ozu's 1933 Shochiku silent comedy-drama, his 29th film, first of the Kihachi series with Takeshi Sakamoto, and Kinema Junpo Best Film winner for 1933.",
 "snippet": "Passing Fancy (Dekigokoro, 出来ごころ) is Yasujiro Ozu's 1933 Shochiku silent comedy-drama, his 29th film, first of the Kihachi series with Takeshi Sakamoto, and Kinema Junpo Best Film winner for 1933.",
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 "markdown": "# Passing Fancy\n\n**Passing Fancy** (*Dekigokoro*, 出来ごころ) is a 1933 Japanese silent comedy-drama directed by Yasujiro Ozu for the Shochiku studio, following Kihachi, an illiterate, sake-loving brewery worker in Tokyo raising his young son Tomio alone.<sup>[1](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/passing_fancy/)</sup> It was the first of Ozu's films about the Kihachi character and won the Kinema Junpo first prize for 1933, the director's second time taking that award.<sup>[2](https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/passing-fancy-2023-06)</sup>\n\n| Key fact | Detail |\n|---|---|\n| Original title | *Dekigokoro* (出来ごころ), also rendered 出來ごころ; released as *Passing Fancy* in the USA<sup>[3](https://3rada.silentera.com/PSFL/data/D/Dekigokoro1933.html)</sup> |\n| Production | Shochiku Kinema Kenkyū-jo; scenario by Tadao Ikeda from an idea by Ozu under the pen name \"James Maki\"; released 7 September 1933<sup>[3](https://3rada.silentera.com/PSFL/data/D/Dekigokoro1933.html)</sup> |\n| Place in Ozu's career | His 29th of 54 films in a directing career spanning 1927 to 1962<sup>[1](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/passing_fancy/)</sup> |\n| Running time and format | 101 minutes, black and white, silent, 1.33:1, ten reels<sup>[4](https://www.criterion.com/films/924)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[3](https://3rada.silentera.com/PSFL/data/D/Dekigokoro1933.html)</sup> |\n| Principal cast | Takeshi Sakamoto (Kihachi), Tomio Aoki as \"Tokkan Kozo\" (Tomio), Nobuko Fushimi (Harue), Den Obinata (Jiro), Choko Iida (Otome)<sup>[3](https://3rada.silentera.com/PSFL/data/D/Dekigokoro1933.html)</sup> |\n| Recognition | Kinema Junpo Best Film award winner for 1933<sup>[5](https://www.jiu.ac.jp/files/user/education/books/pdf/838-30.pdf)</sup> |\n| Survival | A print exists; the film is available on home video and streaming<sup>[3](https://3rada.silentera.com/PSFL/data/D/Dekigokoro1933.html)</sup> |\n\n## Spoilers\n\n### Story\n\nKihachi lives hand to mouth in a Tokyo tenement with his son Tomio, a bright schoolboy who is teased by classmates because his father is illiterate and shiftless.<sup>[1](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/passing_fancy/)</sup> One night, walking home from a drinking binge with his friend and co-worker Jiro, Kihachi meets Harue, a destitute young woman with nowhere to go, and arranges for her to be taken in by Otome, the owner of a nearby restaurant.<sup>[6](https://www.nishikata-eiga.com/2008/08/passing-fancy.html)</sup> Kihachi falls for Harue, but she is drawn to Jiro instead.<sup>[7](https://www.a2pcinema.com/ozu-san/films/passingfancy.htm)</sup>\n\nThe central crisis turns on money and fatherhood. After Tomio, upset over his father's lack of education, strips the leaves from Kihachi's prized bonsai tree and slaps him, the two are reconciled.<sup>[1](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/passing_fancy/)</sup> Tomio then falls severely ill with gastro-intestinal distress after gorging on candy bought with pocket money from his father, and Kihachi cannot see how to pay the hospital bill.<sup>[1](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/passing_fancy/)</sup> Jiro borrows the money from the neighborhood barber, planning to repay it by taking a better-paying job in Hokkaido, but Kihachi insists on taking the job in his friend's place. He boards the boat, decides within a short distance that he misses his son too much, and jumps overboard to swim back to shore.<sup>[1](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/passing_fancy/)</sup>\n\n## Comedy within melodrama\n\nA bare plot summary makes the film look like straight melodrama, but Ozu treats the material as comedy even in its most serious moments.<sup>[1](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/passing_fancy/)</sup> While Tomio lies sick, Kihachi borrows the cold compress from the boy's forehead to cool himself; asked by the boy's visiting teacher what made him ill, he cannot remember the name of the ailment and instead describes its cause in excessive detail; arguing with Jiro over who will go to Hokkaido, he runs out of rhetoric and sucker-punches him.<sup>[1](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/passing_fancy/)</sup>\n\nThe film opens with a lengthy comic overture unconnected to the main plot. At a ballad-chanting performance, a mislaid coin purse passes through the audience, each person discarding it on finding it empty, until it reaches Kihachi, who keeps it because it is in better shape than his own and tosses his old purse back through the crowd in reverse. A plague of fleas then makes the same journey, reaching even the balladeer.<sup>[1](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/passing_fancy/)</sup>\n\n## A silent film full of words\n\nAlthough *Passing Fancy* is technically silent, it carries almost 400 intertitles, and only a handful contain no dialogue.<sup>[1](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/passing_fancy/)</sup> Ozu uses them to unsettle the audience: the first intertitle, about a geisha and her customer, appears before any image, and only several shots later does the viewer realize it is text from a stage performance within the film.<sup>[1](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/passing_fancy/)</sup> In Japanese theaters of the period, a benshi, a live narrator standing beside the screen, would have recited the titles, commented on the action, and voiced the characters; benshi were celebrities in their own right and received scripts of the intertitles to expand on.<sup>[8](https://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2020/07/12/ozus-silent-talkie-passing-fancy-on-the-criterion-channel/)</sup>\n\nThe film's visual style is also more active than the common description of Ozu's \"unmoving camera\" suggests. The average shot length is around four seconds, the camera moves between participants in a scene through matched positions, and the film includes well-placed pans and a combined pan and tracking shot opening the final shipboard scene.<sup>[1](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/passing_fancy/)</sup> A recurring visual joke has Kihachi start to leave a scene, return almost to his starting point, and only then complete his exit; before the film ends, both Tomio and Jiro pick up the habit.<sup>[1](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/passing_fancy/)</sup> Scholar Yuki Takinami has analyzed the film's narration of repetition and differentiation and its idiosyncratic shot/reverse shots with mismatched eyelines, connecting them to the debate between Noël Burch and David Bordwell over whether Ozu's editing carries a sense of discontinuity.<sup>[5](https://www.jiu.ac.jp/files/user/education/books/pdf/838-30.pdf)</sup>\n\n## Ozu's late silent period\n\n*Passing Fancy* belongs to the tail end of Japanese silent production. Shochiku had released Japan's first successful feature-length talkie, Heinosuke Gosho's *The Neighbor's Wife and Mine*, in 1931, but Ozu held out, believing silent film was an art form approaching perfection; his first talking feature, *The Only Son*, did not come until 1936.<sup>[9](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/652-eclipse-series-10-silent-ozu-three-family-comedies)</sup> 1933 was a productive year: besides this film, Ozu directed *Woman of Tokyo* and *Dragnet Girl*.<sup>[1](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/passing_fancy/)</sup>\n\nThe film also introduced Kihachi, played by Takeshi Sakamoto, a supporting player in Ozu's films since 1928. Sakamoto reprised the role in *A Story of Floating Weeds* (1934), *An Innocent Maid* (1935), and *An Inn in Tokyo* (1935), and is generally remembered as one of Ozu's greatest collaborators.<sup>[9](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/652-eclipse-series-10-silent-ozu-three-family-comedies)</sup> Tomio Aoki, about ten years old at the time and appearing in Ozu's films since 1929 under the stage name Tokkan Kozo, played the son; Choko Iida, a staple of Ozu's pre-war troupe since the late 1920s, played Otome, a role that launched her subsequent leading parts for the director.<sup>[1](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/passing_fancy/)</sup>\n\nThematically, the film marks a transition in Ozu's work from youth and college subjects toward the working world, and it established his thirties concern with parents and children living paycheck to paycheck, a concern that would rise up the social ladder in his later career.<sup>[7](https://www.a2pcinema.com/ozu-san/films/passingfancy.htm)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[9](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/652-eclipse-series-10-silent-ozu-three-family-comedies)</sup>\n\n## Availability and reception\n\nA print survives, and the film was released on DVD in Criterion's Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu—Three Family Comedies (2008) alongside *Tokyo Chorus* and *I Was Born, But...*; it streams on the Criterion Channel.<sup>[3](https://3rada.silentera.com/PSFL/data/D/Dekigokoro1933.html)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[9](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/652-eclipse-series-10-silent-ozu-three-family-comedies)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[10](https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/passing-fancy)</sup> [The Eclipse](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-eclipse) edition offers a piano score composed by silent-film specialist Donald Sosin, which the reviewer notes was not what original audiences would have heard.<sup>[11](https://criterioncast.com/column/a-journey-through-the-eclipse-series/a-journey-through-the-eclipse-series-yasujiro-ozus-passing-fancy)</sup> On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 72% Tomatometer from five critic reviews, with critics describing it as \"a pleasing melodramatic silent\" and \"a stylized snapshot of working class life in 1933 Japan.\"<sup>[12](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dekigokoro)</sup>\n\n## References\n\n1. [Michael Kerpan, \"Passing Fancy (Dekigokoro)\", Senses of Cinema, July 2004](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/passing_fancy/)\n2. [Passing Fancy (Dekigokoro), Harvard Film Archive, 2023](https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/passing-fancy-2023-06)\n3. [Dekigokoro (1933), Progressive Silent Film List, Silent Era](https://3rada.silentera.com/PSFL/data/D/Dekigokoro1933.html)\n4. [Passing Fancy, The Criterion Collection](https://www.criterion.com/films/924)\n5. [Yuki Takinami, \"The Moment of Instability: The Textual and Intertextual Analysis of Ozu Yasujiro's Passing Fancy\"](https://www.jiu.ac.jp/files/user/education/books/pdf/838-30.pdf)\n6. [Catherine Munroe Hotes, \"Passing Fancy (出来ごころ, 1933)\", Nishikata Film Review, 2008](https://www.nishikata-eiga.com/2008/08/passing-fancy.html)\n7. [Passing Fancy (1933), Ozu-san.com](https://www.a2pcinema.com/ozu-san/films/passingfancy.htm)\n8. [David Bordwell, \"Ozu's silent talkie: PASSING FANCY on the Criterion Channel\", Observations on film art, 2020](https://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2020/07/12/ozus-silent-talkie-passing-fancy-on-the-criterion-channel/)\n9. [Michael Koresky, \"Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu—Three Family Comedies\", The Criterion Collection, 2008](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/652-eclipse-series-10-silent-ozu-three-family-comedies)\n10. [Passing Fancy streaming, JustWatch](https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/passing-fancy)\n11. [\"A Journey Through The Eclipse Series: Yasujiro Ozu's Passing Fancy\", CriterionCast, 2009](https://criterioncast.com/column/a-journey-through-the-eclipse-series/a-journey-through-the-eclipse-series-yasujiro-ozus-passing-fancy)\n12. [Passing Fancy, Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dekigokoro)\n\n---\n*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Early and silent cinema › Silent feature films › Released 1927 to 2012*\n\n*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*\n\n*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*\n\nLicense: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license\n",
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 "speakable": "Passing Fancy is Yasujiro Ozu's 1933 Shochiku silent comedy-drama, his 29th film, first of the Kihachi series with Takeshi Sakamoto, and Kinema Junpo Best Film winner for 1933."
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