Itami uses his background in commercial art: every now and then, the characters assume shiny Pop poses, and the images have the slightly crazed look of heightened reality.

So you're watching all this amazing food being consumed, you're getting hungrier and hungrier and you're laughing harder and harder.

In Tampopo, every aspect of life is filtered through the prism of food - its rituals of preparation and consumption, its role as a social unifier or divider, its many healthy uses and perverse abuses.

Itami squeezes Japanese food customs, even as he offers a fondly humorous survey of them.