Japanese directors of TV dramas often make films that are basically big-screen versions of small-screen shows. No surprise, since their TV-network backers want product that will work equally well with multiplex audiences and home viewers.
Directors of TV commercials here, however, typically regard films as a respite from their day job, not an extension of it. Yes, some directors with CM backgrounds, such as Hiroyuki Nakano ("Samurai Fiction") and Gen Sekiguchi ("Survive Style 5+"), deliver eye-catching visuals, much as they would to stop viewers from switching channels during an ad break, but their films also venture into crazily surreal territory where few canned-coffee commercials can follow. (Not that all Japanese TV commercials are sane.)
Then there are CM directors such as the late Jun Ichikawa and industry veteran Hiroshi Ishikawa, in the ad business since joining the TYO agency in 1990, who go in a different, more classically humanistic direction in their films, while avoiding mainstream film conventions. In his third and latest feature, the woman-powered road movie "Petaru Dansu (Petal Dance)" Ishikawa not only chucked the traditional three-act structure, but also did away with scripted dialogue whenever he felt that actors improvising their lines could better express their characters' true emotions.