Why we picked it – It’s a while since we showed an animation. This is technically excellent and intriguingly quirky. English dialogue with Japanese accents. No sub-titles.
Synopsis – This animation is an anthology of six different short stories by Haruki Murakami. There are multiple characters navigating life after the 2011 tsunami. Mr Katagiri works in a bank loans department. His boss demands that he recovers and overdue Yen 700M loan. After a particularly dispiriting day, he returns home to find a giant talking frog waiting for him – “call me Frog” – who needs Mr Katagiri’s help to fight a giant subterranean worm in order to save Tokyo from devastation. He needs Mr Katagiri to help him. Meanwhile, Katagiri’s colleague, Komura, is shell-shocked. His wife, traumatise by TV coverage of the tsunami, has left him, his job is threatened, and his cat is missing. Attending a hospital appointment with his nephew evokes the memory of his wife before they were married telling him the a story of the blind willow and the sleeping woman.
The film – It would be a challenge to knit six separate stories into a coherent whole and, wisely, Földes doesn’t try to reconcile all the loose ends. This results in convoluted, but pleasing, intertwined stories with parallel journeys towards moments of enlightenment, most of which involve letting go of the unsatisfying aspects of life that are taken for granted — hollow relationships and dead-end jobs. The animation uses live-action 3D motion capture technology, producing a more realistic, albeit slightly unsettling, depiction than even the best solely digital animation. Here is an interview with Pierre Földes in which he discusses that technique.
Director and Writer: Pierre Földes; Writer: Pierre Földes, adapted from Haruki Marukami; Cinematography: Etienne Boilard,