His Motorbike, Her Island emerges on home video in August

While most cinephiles know director Nobuhiko Obayashi with comedy horror classic House; he created a lot of films during his lifetime including movies about teenagers. Over the next few months, Cult Epics will be giving us a chance to see Obayashi’s other works. First up is His Motorbike, Her Island in August on both Blu-ray and DVD. The movie is about a young woman who falls hard for a motorcyclist. Here’s the press release from Cult Epics with all the details:

Cult Epics presents the first of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Kadokawa films:

HIS MOTORBIKE, HER ISLAND

on Blu-ray & DVD August 12, 2025

Los Angeles, CA (May, 2025)

HIS MOTORBIKE, HER ISLAND Blu-ray & DVD

Obayashi 1980’s Kadokawa films

The teenage symphonies of Nobuhiko Obayashi (1938-2020) are wound in a melancholy nostalgia for a period indelibly lost to time—that inexpressible gap between adolescence and adulthood. Braiding visually expressive fantasias with striking formal experimentation and pop-art boldness, Obayashi’s idiosyncratic cinematic language produced some of Japan’s most beloved seishun eiga (coming-of-age youth films) in the 1980s. Captivating generations of filmgoers with his earnest portraits of young love and vanished worldviews, Obayashi’s films were further bolstered by Kadokawa’s innovative tactics of popularizing dreamy pop idols like Hiroko Yakushimaru and Tomoyo Harada. With a career overshadowed abroad by the oddball eccentricity of his electric 1977 debut House, the 1980s would prove to be the high-water mark of Obayashi’s popularity. Framed in 35mm viewfinders, against wildly ingenious chroma-key composites and characterized by his unflagging optimism for the youth of Japan, Obayashi’s youth passages are caught up in the ages of transition, demonstrably attuned to the extraordinary nature of ordinary adolescence.

Synopsis

Following a painful breakup, macho biker Koh (Riki Takeuchi) skips town and hits the road on his beloved Kawasaki W3 650. On his countryside excursion, he encounters the free-spirited Miyo (Kiwako Harada, older sister of Obayashi favorite Tomoyo Harada) who quickly takes interest in both the leather-clad Koh and his motorbike. Koh and Miyo fall in love even as Miyo’s prodigious biking talent and thrill-seeking tendencies heighten Koh’s fear that she may push it all too far. A nostalgia-filled reminiscence, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s monochromatic dream playfully worships the biker culture of yesteryear, delivering a sentimental and liberating take on young love.