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.
Then there’s the film’s protagonist, Itsuki (Kairi Jyo), whose tousled hair and round spectacles give him a passing resemblance to a certain boy wizard. That said, Yamazaki is drawing on a wider range of inspirations here — from “The Goonies” and “Ghostbusters” to “Spirited Away” — while revisiting the retro aesthetic of his own “Destiny: The Tale of Kamakura” (2017).