Manga artists have one great advantage over live-action film directors: They can fantasize and satirize and otherwise have fun with their characters without worrying how flesh-and-blood actors will interpret them. As American comic artist R. Crumb once told his readers, "It's only lines on paper, folks!!"

Instead of making manga characters more realistically human, actors in Japanese film adaptations of popular comics typically imitate the originals, which leads to a lot of odd, over-caffeinated performances.

In bringing Hikaru Nakamura's hit manga "Arakawa Anda za Burijji (Arakawa Under the Bridge)" to the screen, director Ken Iizuka ("Sairen," "Summer Nude") abandoned any attempt at realism from the get-go, opting instead for tongue-in-cheek stylization in everything from the outlandish costumes to the clipped line deliveries. The film, however, is not the quirky romp promised in its trailer; in its final act it devolves into a preachy, overwrought melodrama on that eternal theme of Japanese films — father-son miscommunication.