Hans Christian Andersen’s pitiful Christmas
tale “The Little Match Girl” has inspired several animators from Charles Mintz’s colourful 1937 cartoon to
Roger Aller’s sentimental The Little Matchgirl (2006) for Disney. There was even a kawaii anime short as part
of Mushi Pro’s 52 Hans Christian Andersen Stories (アンデルセン物語) for Fuji TV in 1971. Yet, no matter how hard one tries to make “The
Little Match Girl” lovely, there is no avoiding the fact that it is a truly
grim story.
Thus, it is
fascinating to watch Shin Hashimoto
throw sentiment aside in his film Beluga
(ベルーガ, 2011), which opens and closes with the traditional
tale of the girl with the matches - but with a surprising, open-ended twist at the end. Bilingual
intertitles at the opening inform us that the girl could not sell any matches
and so “takes shelter in a nook and lights the matches to warm herself.” We see her hand, drawn almost as if scratched away
from black celluloid, as she reaches into the box for a match. As she lights it, instead of being warmed by
memories of happier times from the past as in the original story, we are plunged
into the stuff of nightmares.
A man
appears to be hanging in terror upside-down, chicks peck rapaciously at a worm
brought by their mother, a barely dressed women runs frantically through a
blood red forest possibly in search of her lost child. It is a series of grotesque scenes of desperation
and horrific violence with a short reprieve in the middle in which a prickly
little creature and the young child stroll together in the sun. But this moment of cheer is short lived. They come across a man urinating on a tree
and are moved to commit acts of violence on him. The film crescendos, with the aid of an
impressively dark piano and violin score by Marei Suyama (NGATARI), into
an orgy of senseless violence before returning us to the cold world of the
match girl alone on the street.
The biggest
mystery of this film is its title. There
are no sea creatures depicted in the film and the imagery in my mind of belugas
are quite sweet à la Raffi. I suppose it can be a brutal world for beluga
as well – particularly if they encounter a polar bear or an orca. Yet the world
depicted in Hashimoto’s dream sequence are not those of natural predators in
the wild. They are terrifying acts of
violence for the sake of violence. There
is no denying Shin Hashimoto’s talent as an animator, but be warned, his subject
matter is not for the fainthearted.
Catherine Munroe
Hotes 2014
Shin Hashimoto (橋本新, b.1979)
is a member of the CALF animation
collective. A Tokyo-based artist,
Hashimoto did his undergraduate and graduate studies at Tama Art University
(aka Tamabi). Hashimoto is known for his
nightmarish animated shorts such as The
Undertaker and the Dog (2010). Beluga played widely at both domestic
and international animation festivals and received a Special Jury Mention at
Animafest Zagreb 2012. Check out his work on Vimeo. To see the film in full resolution check out the
new DVD/Blu-ray L'Animation
Indépendante Japonaise, Volume 1.
Director:
Shin
Hashimoto
Script:
Nobuaki Doi
Shin
Hashimoto
Music:
Marei Suyama
(NGATARI)
Piano:
Taro Honma
Violin:
Eyuko Suzuki
Sound:
MIMICOF aka
Midori Hirano
