Parents planning a trip to the cinema over the school holidays in Japan can generally count on a new “Detective Conan” or “Doraemon” anime to keep the kids happy, but live-action family movies are a rare breed. Rarer still are ones with the lavish production values of Takashi Yamazaki’s “Yokaipedia,” which comes on like a homegrown answer to “Harry Potter.”
At multiple points during this fizzy fantasy romp, viewers may feel like they’ve been whisked back to Hogwarts: there are battles with supernatural creatures; a magical book in which words appear on empty pages; and a labyrinthine emporium that turns out to be much bigger than it looks from the outside.
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