Noriko Yuasa followed her directorial debut Looking for my lost sunflowers with this film, a more ambitious tale both stylistically and storywise as she explodes a teenage girl’s life on screen and touches on extremes of emotions.
Noriko Yuasa wowed me earlier this year at the Osaka Asian Film Festival with her short film Ordinary Everyday(2017) which was a showcase of her fantastic mastery of aural and visual techniques in the creation of a highly atmospheric psycho-thriller. Her earlier films show the same control of texture and form as well as story. With Looking for my lost sunflowers, Yuasa dives into one man’s nostalgia as an office drone tries to touch distant memories.
The man whose nostalgia we embrace is Murakami (Bunki Sugiura), a thirty-something who works as a salesman for a pharmaceutical company in Tokyo. As you can imagine his daily routine is work and then drinks after work. We meet him amidst a whirl of activity around what seems to be Shimbashi Station. The visuals are composed by Yuasa into a clamorous and chaotic impressionistic swirl through slow-motion and blurred images of yokocho and main streets full of revellers and office staff who have spilled out of the workplace after office hours.
This week I posted about the 2018 edition of the London International Animation Festival with the many wonderful animated films from Japan. I also posted a review for Vision(2018) which I wrote for V-Cinema earlier this month. I have watched a zombie film from Japan called I Am a Hero (2016). You may have read my manga review which I posted two or three years ago as part of my Summer of Splatter. I also started watching Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind.
Naomi Kawase is a director who translates new age ideas to the screen with ease. Her work evidences an eye for the beauty of the natural world and a knack for getting good performances from her actors. Kawase delivers beautiful paeans to the power of life itself as exemplified here in a story of a French woman who heads to an ancient forest in Japan as she seeks a mysterious herb that can heal many things including, she hopes, an aching pain in her heart.
The 15th London International Animation Festival (LIAF 18) returns to the Barbican for a run between November 30th and December 09th. There will be ten days of talks, forums, workshops and over 200 animated shorts and features from around the world. For a second year in a row there is a focus on the on-screen and off-screen representation of women in animation with the section Female Figures which will showcase works by female animation talent that explore female desire, physicality, and more. In the centenary since the end of WWI, there is a section called Aftermath which is dedicated to animation inspired or rooted in that conflict. There is also a lot of British talent getting the chance to show their works and there will be lots of independent animation to revel in. Heck, there’s even a film featuring Conan O’Brien! (trailer)
As the organisers have written on their press release,
The Festival promises to inspire, delight and challenge the notion that animation is merely for the 3D blockbuster genre, or cute cartoons. Independent animation is an art form that continues to thrive and develop as a breathtaking medley of styles, materials, techniques and production – from hand drawn, paint on glass, collage, sculpture, to some of the more interesting developments in CGI – all of which can be seen at this year’s LIAF.
I’m interested in everything Japanese so here’s what’s on offer:
I have instituted a new sort of learning and writing regime whereby all of the film stuff is done at the start of the week and the end of the week is dedicated to learning languages. This week I posted some news articles about the release of SABU’s 1996 film Dangan Runner and the a series of free events in London dedicated to the actor Kinuyo Tanaka. I watched Triple 9 (2016), Train to Busan (2016) and Inuyashiki (2018) this week and I’m planning on watching something tonight but the list of titles is pretty large so I don’t know what yet. The image above is from Haruneko… I want to watch Seoul Station…
The Japan Foundation have set up a series of free events celebrating the publication of the book Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity. There will be a film screening as well as a book launch. Both will be important for understanding an important figure in pre- and post-war Japanese cinema.
Third Window Filmsare back again with the release of a 90s classic Dangan Runnerby the director SABU (Mr. Long, Happiness, Miss Zombie). It is his directorial debut and is the world’s first Blu-ray and remastered DVD release and it contains a treasure trove of extras including an interview with the director. It gets released on November 12th on Blu-ray and DVD. Here are the details.
Life has been a bit of a trudge recently. I’m in the middle of a 12-day work week with early starts in the morning. I’ve just started doing film festival feedback forms. The weather is getting darker and colder. I managed to get a good dose of sleep last night and keep up my exercise routine so I’m feeling good. I need to get some dynamism back. Anyways, I posted reviews for Vampire Clay(2017) and Re:born(2017) and my review for Naomi Kawase’s film Vision(2018) went live on v-cinema. I hope you guys have managed to watch some great films.
Re:Born stars Tak Sakaguchi, a fighter, action-director, director and actor. Since his debut in Ryuhei Kitamura’s 2000 zombie action film Versus, he has been a staple of the cult cinema scene. Even if the films he acts in are comedic gore-fests from the likes of Yudai Yamaguchi (Deadball) and Yoshihiro Nishimura (Tokyo Gore Police) he tends to make an impact because he has the charisma and martial arts skills needed by a good action hero. He can act and has shown this in works that stretch across genres with Osaka Snake Road: Snake of Violence, Alive, Shinobi: Heart Under Blade and Meatball Machine: Kodoku. His best role was as a failed-actor given one more shot in Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play in Hell? which, if you had to watch one performance, is the one I’d recommend. Re:Born gives him the stage he deserves to show his martial-arts skills.
Genkinahito 