Ace Attorney, like many Takashi Miike films, is a virtuoso showcase for various cinematic techniques and tones. Stationary shots play against frenetic editing, comedy against high tragedy. This being Miike, he succeeds at all of these approaches. Miike's cinema is the cinema of the limitless, a cinema unbound, the promise of the medium itself a perfect promise; indeed, Miike is cinema.
Ace Attorney, a playful, dramatic, somber, upbeat work, is a perfect example of his strengths. Although it may fall short of his masterpieces (Graveyard of Honor, Izo, Dead Or Alive 2: Birds, The Guys From Paradise, Detective Story) it offers a vast array of Miike's talent. Take for example the sequence capped above, in which the memory of a crime becomes a screen in front of our titular attorney, a moment of old school cinematic layering (which also calls to mind a similar sequence from Francis Ford Coppola's recent Twixt). Here we receive memory (and legal process) as cinema, an approach continued in the courtroom sequences, suffuse with Miike's devil-may-care attitude towards CGI, as well as a casually masterful wielding of camera and editing (rack focuses worthy of McTiernan, long shots, jump cuts, etc). Miike, in the sequence above and throughout the film, proves himself a true melting pot of film; Coppola may be beholden to the cinema of Old Hollywood and 60s Europe, but Miike is capable of absorbing and reinterpreting all.
Only with Miike could you get a devastating death and a hilarious joke about a cockatoo in the same film and not feel a critical imbalance.
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