To add to the confusion, Kore-eda has directed the children beautifully in a naturalistic vein. In his hands the young actors effortlessly create distinctive characters; they never seem like they've been cued, the usual curse of children in movies. Akira (Yûya Yagira, who won best actor at Cannes in 2004 for this performance) is mother's lieutenant when she's away. He's up to the challenge of taking care of the younger kids and preserving the family secret from the world but doesn't see the conflict between these two responsibilities. He's also old enough to know what he's missing out on--the friendships with boys his age that would develop if he were allowed to go to school and play sports. Kyoko (Ayu Kitaura) has a more limited awareness because she's never allowed out. She doodles on the unpaid utility bills and toodles on a little red plastic piano, wishing she could go to school and take piano lessons. But she's also alert to her mother's evasions and fundamental unreasonableness. Precisely because of her more limited experience, Kyoko represents children's inherent desire to develop their capacities by participating in the world.

Shigeru (Hiei Kimura) is an endlessly energetic boy who might not be aware of what they're missing out on because he's capable of turning everything into a game, providing the sound effects himself. Yuki (Momoko Shimizu), the baby daughter, is naturally the most vulnerable and the most in need of her mother. On her birthday Akira takes her out for an expedition to the train station because she's convinced it's the day Keiko will return. Because it's her birthday she gets to pick her shoes and Akira gallantly lets her wear the teddy bear sandals, despite the inconvenient fact that they squeak at every step. (Unable to sneak past her, Akira tells the landlady Yuki is a cousin just staying the night.)

At 140 minutes Nobody Knows is hard to recommend to a general audience solely on the basis of Kore-eda's technique. (Elephant was 81 minutes--a reasonable ceiling for an experimental film.) If anything would put the movie over it's the kids, in both the more casual and the more deliberate moments. The sight of Shigeru rubbing his head after his mother has cut his bangs too short, or the long shot of Yuki squeaking down the middle of the street on the way home from the train station, are irresistibly moving.

The kids wouldn't come across so well without Kore-eda's pseudo-objective technique; it's plainly a huge plus, as he told IndieWire in this 4 February 2005 interview, that he had "three months to acclimate the children to the camera's presence in their daily lives. To get them used to ignoring us." All the same, though these are perhaps the least pukey kids in movie history they're still "irresistible." That is, Kore-eda presents them in a special way specifically to move us, even if his hand is invisible.