Daiei Studios, angered over Ichikawa's overbudgeted and controversial The Outcast, punished him with a project about a young couple and their cute little baby. Ichikawa, however, remade it as a satire on family life and a personal reflection on his own confessed ambivalence towards its values. Little Baby Taro (armed with phenomenally cute cheeks) narrates the film, realizing from the start that his existence owes more to his parents' desires than his own, with both his insecure father and his overworked mother reinterpreting his every expression or movement for their own means. Certainly lightweight when compared to Ichikawa's other films of the period, I Am Two still has more on its mind than just putting a remarkably cute two-year-old on camera for an hour or so (though, actually, that could be enough), as witnessed by its topping the Kinema Jumpo poll for best film of 1962, beating out such classics as Inagaki's Chushingura and Ozu's Autumn Afternoon.-Jason Sanders