A Gentle Breeze in the Village (天然コケッコー, 2007)

A noticeable trend at Nippon Connection this year was films that favoured atmosphere and character development over plot. Like Naomi Kawase’s The Mourning Forest and Yosuke Fujita’s Fine, Totally Fine, Nobuhiro Yamashita’s A Gentle Breeze in the Village (天然コケッコ/Tennen Kokekko) devotes a lot of attention to setting just the right tone through his careful attention to setting and community. This results in a heartfelt picture of the life of a young woman growing up in rural southern Japan.

Yamashita is skilled at creating realistic portraits of the lives of teenagers, as he demonstrated in his hit film Linda Linda Linda (2005) which told the story of a group of girls preparing a punk-rock number for a high school talent show. Gentle Breeze moves from the more urban high school setting of Linda Linda Linda to a rural school in the mountainous prefecture of Shimane. Screenwriter Aya Watanabe adapted the award winning 1996 manga Tennen Kokekko by Fusako Kuramochi.

The central character is Soyo Migita, played charmingly by the model turned actress Kaho. Soyo is the eldest student of only six children in a combined primary and junior high school. The children have all grown up together and function like an extended family. It may seem unrealistic for a school to exist with so few students, but it is not uncommon in rural Japan. I have visited such a school at the opposite end of Japan – the town of Toyotomi in northernmost Hokkaido – which had 40 students and even had an American on staff teaching English. Like Soyo, who will have to travel by train to high school the following year, the students in Toyotomi have to become boarders in Sapporo, five hours drive away from home, in order to complete their high school education.

Yamashita introduces us to the rural school, with its roosters in the playground (the kokekko of the Japanese title is an onomatopoeia for sound of a rooster crowing), through the eyes of Soyo. Thus we see her motherly care of young Sa-chan, who is prone to not making it to the toilet in time, and her sisterly relationship with the girls closer to her age. The only boy in the school is Soyo’s brother Kotaro.

The harmony of the group of children is disrupted by the arrival of Hiromi Osawa (Masaki Okada), an attractive boy Soyo’s age who has transferred from his school in Tokyo. Hiromi has moved in with his grandfather because his parents are in the middle of a messy divorce. Thus begins the slow, awkward, but completely realistic, first romantic experience for Soyo.

Hiromi’s arrival also instigates the development of several different storylines and themes. The film ponders the contrast between urban and rural life in Japan and the difficulties for children in rural communities to have a romance without the whole town knowing about it. Soyo must learn to deal with the jealousy of her girlfriends at her budding romance with Hiromi.

I don’t want to give the impression that the film overly romanticizes country life. There are many suggestions of darker things going on behind the scenes. Soyo becomes aware of the fact that Hiromi’s mother may have been sweethearts with her father when they were younger, and she speculates that they may still have feelings for each other. Yamashita handles these subplots deftly. As we only see the world through Soyo’s perspective, these background stories are suggested but Yamashita leaves it up to the audience to fill in the details, much in the same way one would in real life. The chatty postman, who embarrasses everyone with his gossip and speculation, adds a dash of humour to the proceedings.

Films about young love often come off too stagy because the actors lack the maturity to pull off romantic scenes convincingly. At other times, comedy is used to distract from the awkwardness of young love. In A Gentle Breeze in the Village, Yamashita leaves the awkwardness in and allows the two young actors to fumble their way through the early stages of teen romance with charm, tenderness, and the real discomfiture that attends such moments. The resulting film is a real pleasure to watch. Here the trailer to give you a hint of why you should watch this film:

Filmography: Nobuhiro Yamashita　（山下 敦弘）

* 1999 Hazy Life (どんてん生活/Donteneikatsu)
* 2003 No One’s Ark (ばかのハコ船/Baka no hakobune)
* 2003 Ramblers (リアリズムの宿/Riarizumu no yado)
* 2004 Cream Lemon (くりいむレモン/Kuriimu Remon)
* 2005 Linda, Linda, Linda (リンダリンダリンダ)
* 2005 Ten Nights of Dream (collaborative film; ユメ十夜/Yume juu-ya)　
* 2006 The Matsugane Potshot Affair (松ヶ根乱射事件/Matsugane ransha jiken)
* 2007 A Gentle Breeze in the Village (天然コケコー/Tennen kokekkō)© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2008

The Mourning Forest (殯の森, 2007)

There is an old Japanese saying (Nihon no kotowaza) that says “Iwanu ga hana” (言わぬが花) which literally means “to not speak is a flower” and is roughly equivalent to the English proverb “silence is golden.” While a few filmmakers can get away with using a lot of dialogue in their films (Woody Allen would be a rare exception), the best films are the ones the privilege the image over dialogue. The Mourning Forest is just such a film.

Naomi Kawase’s poignant The Mourning Forest (殯の森, 2007), which won last year’s Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, tells much of its story through character expression, mise-en-scene, and its subtle use of sound. Set in the Nara countryside that Kawase grew up in, the film tells the story of Machiko (Machiko Ono), a young woman who works in a senior citizen’s home and has recently lost her young son. One of the elderly residents in the home, Shigeki (played by non-actor Shigeki Uda) is drawn to Machiko because he reminds him of his wife, Mako, whose name is only one syllable different from Machiko’s.

Their relationship is rather awkward and uncomfortable at first. Shigeki behaves in an unpredictable manner that often throws Machiko off-guard. With time, however, they grow closer and their friendship is established in a beautiful scene in which they play hide-and-go-seek among the rounded rows of tea bushes.

Machiko and Shigeki also bond over their shared grief for their loved ones. Machiko’s grief is very fresh and Shigeki’s mourning for his wife is heightened by his senility. In Japanese Buddhism, ceremonies are performed to celebrate the karma of the deceased taking on a new form. The first such ceremony takes place on the 49th day after a person’s death. The Buddhist priest in the film reminds Shigeki that the 33rd anniversary of his wife’s death is approaching which means that she will undergo her final transformation and become a Buddha.

It is with this spiritual set of circumstances that Machiko takes Shigeki out for a daytrip in the countryside. The day is going well until Machiko runs the car into a ditch. She wavers about leaving Shigeki alone with the car, and shouts out towards the neighbouring farm for help. When she receives no response, she decides to risk leaving Shigeki for a few moments in order to find assistance. When she returns, she discovers that Shigeki has run off into the woods.

Machiko follows him but he resists returning to the car and heads ever deeper into the forest. At first, Machiko pleads with him to come with her, but after a while she acquiesces to fate and follows him silently through the trees. The forest, with its looming trees and floor thick with sasa (dwarf bamboo), gives the film its emotional centre. It is mostly dark, with the sun occasionally breaking through the thick canopy of leaves. At the end of the film, a title card explains that the term ‘mogari’, or period of mourning comes from an older expression ‘mo agari’ meaning the end of mourning. Thus the forest takes on a symbolic meaning as the site for of the resolution of the mourning process.

When The Mourning Forest won the Grand Prix last year against some stiff competition from internationally established filmmakers like the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino, there were grumblings from reporters that it was a compromise choice or a political decision to reassert Cannes’ reputation for honouring art films. The film also made it into the Shukan Bushan’s list of ten worst movies of 2007, where they criticized the film as being ‘boring.’

To be sure, the film does move at a slow pace and requires a spectator who is willing to open themselves up to the spiritual journey of the protagonists. Coming in at 97 minutes, it’s not nearly as slow-paced as an Andrei Tarkovsky film though it is just the kind of poetic film that Tarkovsky would have enjoyed watching. The use of a location as the site of an emotional journey reminded me of Peter Weir’s haunting Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and a moving little film, perhaps little known to those outside Canadian film studies, The Company of Strangers (Cynthia Scott, 1990). Like The Company of Strangers, Kawase also blurs the lines between documentary and fiction modes in that the characters have the same name as the actors playing the roles. If you like the films of Abbas Kiarostami, Krzysztof Kieslowski, or Kenji Mizoguchi, then The Mourning Forest is most definitely for you.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2008

Nippon Connection

I found a great interview with Marion Klomfass at Deutsche Welle (English version) that gives an overview of the history of the Nippon Connection film festival. It includes a lot of interesting statistics and mentions some of the highlights of the festival. I have already written about some of the films I saw at the festival including the Open Art Animation, experimental animation Salt Lake Screaming, and the film that one the audience choice award at the festival Fine, Totally Fine. I am still working on reviews of other films that I saw at Nippon Connection including Ying Li's controversial Yasukuni documentary, Shinji Aramaki's Appleseed: Ex Machina, Eiji Uchida's Sisterhood, Naomi Kawase's The Mourning Forest, Makoto Shinkai's 5 Centimeters per Second, Nobuhiro Yamashita's touching films Linda, Linda, Linda and his latest film A Gentle Breeze in the Village, and Ichiro Kataoka's benshi performance of Kinugasa's Page of Madness. Needless to say, it may take me a wee while to get through all my notes from the festival!

For my research for a book I am writing on Japanese art animation I also watched almost all of the Nippon Retro films. This included selections of films by Yoji Kuri, Taku Furukawa, Renzo Kinoshita, Kihachiro Kawamoto, and Tadanari Okamoto. It was really great seeing these films on 16mm and 35mm as for the most part I have only watched digital copies of these works. I am really impressed by the films in available in the The Japan Foundation library.

I may have caught a lot of screenings, but I did miss out on a lot of films I really wanted to see due to problems with scheduling. Films screened at Nippon Connection that I hope to have the opportunity to watch in the near future include Osamu Tezuka's Pictures at an Exhibition, Nobuhiro Doi's Nada Sou Sou, Shinji Imaoka's The Tender Throbbing Night, Yasutomo Chikuma's Now, I..., and Koji Wakamatsu's United Red Army.

My biggest regret was that I couldn't make Hirono Yamada's benshi performance. I don't think he performs overseas very often so I may have to wait until the next time I'm in Japan to catch one of his performances. Yamada has modernized the benshi practice in an exciting way. He shoots his own silent films, influenced by the aesthetic of 1970s exploitation films. I would love to hear from anyone who saw his performance at Nippon Connection or elsewhere.

If you can read German, there are some great reviews of films from the festival already posted on Janik Liebt Nachrichten. Jason Gray has also written an extensive article detailing his experience of Nippon Connection. There is some interesting debate in the comments section about Yasukuni.

Update (20 April 2008): here is the link to the Midnight Eye article Jasper mentions in the comment below giving the background to the Nippon Connection festival. Mark Nornes gives some interesting insight into the politics of film festivals in general.

Salt Lake Screaming (舞いあがる塩, 2007)

I always like to check out any student films or unusual collections of short films at festivals. Although one risks sitting through some pretty dire films before finding any gems, the risk is worth it. There is nothing more exciting at a film festival than the feeling of discovery when watching a film demonstrates an originality of vision and a freshness of subject matter.

Among the films on offer at the Waseda Musabi Student Film Explosion session at Nippon Connection on Saturday, an 18 minute animation by Hiroyuki Mizumoto stood out for me as a director with promise. His film, Salt Lake Screaming (Maiagaru Shio, 2007) uses a daring mixture of animation styles including stop motion and cel animation, as well as incorporating elements of experimental filmmaking. The programme synopsis gave this analysis of the film’s meaning: “All of us live with products manufactured in different countries: the familiar always holds something alien. How does this influence the reality of things?”

I am not really sure what to make of that interpretation. My own understanding of the film was that Mizumoto was trying to express something about our relationship to the environment. In Shinto, salt is used in purification rituals. Salt is, of course, essential to life, but an excess of salt can be destructive. In my view, the film explores this ambiguous relationship between people and salt, and suggests larger questions of environmentalism and community.

My only criticism of the film is that it relies too heavily on the voice-over narration. The images that Mizumoto created demonstrate that he has an amazing talent as an artist. He needs to allow his visuals to speak for themselves and to use narration only minimally. His readiness to take risks in his use of images and the experimental way in which he used montage suggest that there will be many exciting films to look forward to in the future career of this young artist. Check out Mizumoto’s webpage for stills from his earlier films and for examples of his photographic work.

Hiroyuki Mizumoto (水本博之) Filmography

* The Nightmare of the Radish (Chinurareta Daikon / 血塗られた大根, 2002)

* HAMETSU (2003)

* The Place of the End　(Koura Bijyon Saihate no Henkyou / 甲羅ビジョン最果ての辺境, 2003)

* Two Trips and a Coffee(Futatsu no Tabi to Kouhii / ２つの旅とコーヒー　, 2003 )

* Home, Movies, and from Outer Space (Ie to Eiga to Yūsei / 家と映画と遊星 , 2005 )

* The Destruction Sounds of the Monster from the Deep Sea (Shinkai kara kuru Oto / 深海から来る音 , 2006)

* The Long Journey (Nagai Tabi / 長い旅, 2006)

* Salt Lake Screaming (Maiagaru Shio / 舞いあがる塩, 2007)

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2008

Fine, Totally Fine (全然大丈夫, 2008)

The funniest film at Nippon Connection this year was unquestionably Yosuke Fujita’s Fine, Totally Fine (Zenzen Daijobu, 2007). The film put such a delightful spell on its spectators that the film managed to beat out some pretty stiff competition from competing films to win the top prize at the festival.

Unlike most comedies, which immerse audiences in a storyline and move from plot point to plot point, Fine, Totally Fine works its magic through character development. We are introduced to a set of quirky characters who delight with their unusual hobbies and personality quirks. Taking centre stage is Teruo Tōyama, played with comic finesse by the irrepressible Yoshiyoshi Arakawa. Teruo loves scaring his friends and complete strangers with horror gags. By day he works in parks management and in his spare time he creates elaborate horror models and gags. He also helps his father, who is experiencing a mid-life crisis, run the family second-hand bookstore.

The bookstore becomes the focal point for the eclectic cast of characters who wander in and out of the narrative. Conflict eventually arises when Teruo’s best friend Hisanobu Komori (Yoshinori Okada), a medical center manager with a soft heart, and Teruo both fall for the shy, horrifically accident-prone artist Akari Kinoshita (Yoshino Kimura). Each of the characters has a personal issue that they need to work through. Teruo dreams of creating the most spectacular haunted house in the world so that he can prove to his friends and family that his hobby is not childish. Komori finds that his staff are trying to match-make for him and needs to overcome his shyness to find the romantic relationship he desires to have. Akari also needs to overcome her shyness and connect with people instead of only connecting with the world around her through her art.

The film completely fascinated me in the way it kept me fully engaged through comic gags and character development. Yosuke Fujita, who both wrote and directed Fine, Totally Fine, has worked in theatre comedy for many years working with the Otona Keikaku comedy troupe. The impeccable timing of the 2-part gag set up was reminded me of the films of the three greats of the silent era: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. The first gag would start you laughing, then Fujita would hit you with a second, even funnier gag that would escalate the audience laughter even further. Like Chaplin, Fujita also adds sentimentality and romance through crushes that Komori and Teruo develop on the beautiful Akari. The bittersweet ending also has a Chaplinesque charm about it.

Other things to like about the film include the endearing performances of the supporting cast. Fujita’s script allows each character to shine long enough to make a solid impression on the audience. The horror dolls designed by expert movie model-maker Hiroshi Sagae are priceless. Examples of Sagae’s horror dolls done in Arakawa’s likeness can be seen at ryuganji.net. You can also see them pop-up on the official homepage for the movie, where you can also listen to a sample the relaxing soundtrack music.

Although this film hasn’t even made it onto the Internet Movie Database yet, perhaps because it is the feature film debut of Fujita, I have a feeling that it will make it onto the international art house circuit. Fine, Totally Fine is a real comic gem.

Fine, Totally Fine (Zenzen Daijobu) [Regular Edition]

Japanese Movie

Fine, Totally Fine (Zenzen Daijobu) Special Edition

Japanese Movie

Fine, Totally Fine (Zenzen Daijobu) Original Soundtrack

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2008

Open Art Animation

Last night at Nippon Connection I watched the Open Art Animation shorts from Open Art TV. Here’s a run down of what they showed. I will definitely do follow-up pieces on a couple of these films that were real stand-outs, like Sakamoto’s The Dandelion Sister (蒲公英の姉). The films were all presented via projected DVD.

The Fisherman (Saku Sakamoto, 2002, 14 min.)

A surreal vision in which talk, thin human figures hunt oversized fish that swim through the desert. This was the first time that I have seen a CGI film in which they were able to give the effect of a hand-held camera in certain scenes.


Slide 002 (Takahiro Hirata, 2005, 4 min.)

This piece begins with the slow view from the elevator of a skyscraper of a Canadian urban scene. The view contains no hint of the natural world. The only clues to its location are a Canadian flag flying on top of the first building we see, and a Scotia bank symbol on a skyscraper. From the smogginess, I would guess this film was shot in Toronto, but it didn’t contain any famous features of the city (ie no SkyDome, harbour, or Queen Street views). It did not look like it had been shot from the CNTower, but perhaps from a building in the business district. After a couple of vertical trips up and down, the shot then moves horizontally, and soon the filmmaker begins to break up the image into different sections and plays with perspective and geometric patterns in interesting way. My only criticism of this film was that the insistent ‘thump thump thump’ of the soundtrack is quite monotonous and by the end of the film was detracting from my enjoyment of the film. I am guessing that Hirata chose such a soundtrack to create a sense of unease, instead of choosing music that might romanticize the beauty of the ‘slide show’ he was creating on the screen.


Kleenex-man, The Terrorist (Shuhei Shibue, 2005, 1:56 min.)

This film won me over from beginning with its hilarious representation of one of these girls that hand out Kleenex outside major train stations in big cities in Japan. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this (I think much of the audience didn’t get it because I was the only one laughing), in Japan they found that people are reluctant to take flyers that are handed to them on the street. So, advertisers decided to put the ads onto something useful - a small bag of portable tissues – because they found that the public was more likely to take something useful for them. In the flu and allergy seasons (cedar pollen!!!) in Japan, it really is quite a handy thing.

The girl in this film has her hair covering her face and is standing in the countryside instead of an urban setting. Business men and cars still come by, and are dealt with by her in surreal and absurd ways. I haven’t worked out the meaning of the food flying around after she trips a car with a futon (I told you it was surreal) but it is a visual delight and I always enjoy it when art films have a sense of humour.


Piece (Yusuke Koyanagi, 2006, 2:27 min.)

This film plays with digital images and seems to be making a statement about globalization.


Around (Ryu Kato, 2007, 3:12 min.)

I was quite impressed by this surreal cel animation. The way in which figures morph into one another and the soundtrack reminds me of some of the work done by Koji Yamamura and Tomoyasu Murata. This animator shows a lot of promise and I will be keeping an eye out for his future work.


Mr. Cloud and Mr. Rain (Tomoyoshi Joko, 2007, 6:34 min)

This looked like it may have been done using Flash animation. It’s a kind of a fable about the relationship between a man made of cloud and a man made of rain. A beautiful and humorous flight of fancy.


The Kinrakuen (Daisuke Hagiwara, 2007, 6:30 min.)

A very clever film that at first just seems like a graphic playing with i images taken from a wide variety of currencies, but soon transforms itself into a political statement on the relationship between money and political power, war, and imperialism.


The Dandelion Sister (Yusuke Sakamoto, 2007, 20:30 min.)

This claymation film was a delightful discovery. It tells the tale of the difficult relationship between two sisters. The younger sister struggles with her feelings for her older sister, a talented artist who is ill. By adding the surreal touch of the ailing older sister being a dandelion, Sakamoto is able to lesson the sentimentality of the story and transform it into an artistic rendering of the younger sister’s journey through sorrow that ends in her discovering herself as an artist herself. A real gem of a film.


A Story Constructed of 17 Pieces of Space and 1 Maggot
(Isamu Hirabayashi, 2007, Video, 13:32 min.)

An amusing exploration of what it means to be an artist and a human being. The witty voice-over narration leads us through the main protagonists transformation into a maggot who has retained his human consciousness from his former life. Beautifully shot and cleverly written, this film was a pleasure to watch from start to finish.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2008