Audient Anime: In This Corner of the World

This is my final of six films in my bi-monthly Audient Anime series.

I haven’t exactly stuck the landing on Audient Anime. It’s not been the result of too few choices. It’s been the result of too many.

For a while I had assumed I would finish my 2017 bi-monthly series with Your Name, the acclaimed Makoto Shinkai film that hit theaters here in 2016, but would count for my 2017 rankings because it didn’t receive a theatrical release in the U.S. until 2017. That’s the kind of killing of two birds with one stone I try to accomplish in December. Unfortunately, the film is not available for rental from iTunes, and I’m not sure how I’m supposed to get my hands on it short of piracy.

Then I also came into possession of two other Miyazaki films, since I’d considered concluding with anime’s most celebrated director, having started the series with three of his films. In fact, I still have rented from the library both Howl’s Moving Castle, which I’d wanted to make my June film before settling on Castle in the Sky, and Miyazaki’s “final film,” The Wind Rises, which has since become his penultimate film at worst, as he has un-retired and will be releasing another new film in 2019. But in my rush to watch 2017 films in the month of December, neither of them has made it into the DVD player.

Part of the reason I haven’t felt that urgency is that I did see an anime film this month, one that I was not planning on at all, and in fact had not even heard of prior to watching it. Back on December 5^th I watched In This Corner of the World, Sunao Katabuchi’s film that feels like a thematic cousin to Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies. The distributor had sent a vimeo link to my editor and he shared it with me so I could review it for the site prior to its Australian theatrical release. I thought the movie was great, but I already briefly wrote about it in this post, and given my wealth of other options and prospective options, I thought I’d include it in a possible anime smorgasbord to end the series. As it turned out, on December 28^th, it’s the only one of my choices I’ve actually watched.

I might still watch Howl’s Moving Castle with my kids when we’re having a beach holiday to close the year, but given that we’re leaving tomorrow and won’t be back until January 3^rd, it’s time for me to just get down to business and write my final Audient Anime post.

So that final film is indeed In This Corner of the World, which is a doozy, but not quite as much of a doozy as Fireflies. Both films feature characters living (or failing to live) through the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, which is why they earn a direct comparison. It could be that there are other anime movies that overtly wrestle with this period of Japanese history, with its tragedy on an epic scale intermingled with the shame of its imperialist agenda, but given that many anime films are aimed at or at least appropriate for children, I suspect there aren't a ton of them.

Corner follows its characters up to and slightly beyond the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, and Grave kind of starts just before and follows them afterward. But both deliver images that can't be unseen, which befall characters we would never expect them to befall. Corner is probably slightly less gut-punchy, and slightly less good. But both films earned a 4.5-star rating from me, which is still high praise even though I give those out a bit more freely than I once did.

Dang it, after two paragraphs I already feel like I'm out of fresh things to say about this movie. Which could be because I already said them. So without forcing myself to adhere to some preconceived format that I'm the only one who probably cares about, I will instead link to my review of the movie, which has most of what I want to say about it anyway. Go take a look at that here.

So even though this isn't quite the end to the series I wanted -- writing about the film more than three weeks after I saw it can't help but feel like a bit of a whimper -- it's been a phenomenally successful series, one that has opened my mind to anime just as I'd hope it would. I'm not sure that I was completely closed off to anime, but I'd taken the worst parts of some anime movies I'd seen and conflated them to somehow representing most examples of the genre.

I couldn't have been more wrong. Of the six films I watched, two received a perfect five-star rating from me, two received 4.5 stars, and the "worst" two were still all the way up at four stars. And this is without consciously selecting the cream of the crop. Half of the movies I saw were not even on my radar when the series began, including both 4.5-star movies (Only Yesterday and this movie).

If I want to extrapolate out from there, that means that not only are there some legitimate masterpieces in anime, but that even the "average anime" is at a very high level of quality. I'm disappointed in myself for ever assuming less than that.

The really good thing is that this has stoked my thirst for more. That's no guarantee. I had an incredibly positive experience during my 2016 monthly series of watching one silent film per month, but you know what? The entirety of 2017 has passed without me watching another one. I seriously doubt that will be the case in 2018. I'm eager to see as much more anime as I can. I'm motivated.

I know what my 2018 bi-monthly series will be, and damn does it have a clever name. But I may make that the subject of its own post sometime in January before my first post in February. Stay tuned for that. I know you can't wait. 

The value in the build-up

I’ve seen two movies this week that run in excess of 130 minutes, both of which expend the majority

of their running time on the lead-up to a major event in which people burned to death.

That sounds pretty grim for two movies that celebrate the human spirit, but there it is.

There are very different types of fires at the climaxes of Only the Brave and In This Corner of the World. In the former, it’s an Arizona wildfire that claims 19 brave firefighters; the latter, the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which killed as many as 80,000 more than that.

Rightly or wrongly – and I’ve determined it’s rightly – neither event is the focus of the film in which it appears. That focus is squarely on the people, a decision which may at first seem frustrating, but gradually proves its worth as the movie goes on.

 

I probably need to explain that a bit. As I agree with Roger Ebert’s idea that film is the ultimate empathy machine, I certainly can’t quibble with any time a film spends on developing its characters. But both of the films in question meandered more than I expected on their way to a very powerful denouement. As the anime film, Corner both meandered more and contained the more powerful denouement. The Hollywood film did a little less of both, but enough of each for me to note the discrepancy.

Although I’m generally in favor of a tight script when all else is equal, a flabbier script with better character development is certainly a welcome, er, development. It may be the only way for film to take back some of the ground it’s lost to TV. When a character dies in a TV show, you may have been following that character for a couple seasons rather than a couple hours. A great film will accumulate two seasons’ worth of emotional impact in two hours, but in general you’d think that developing such an investment in the characters would be more a matter of time. It’s invariable, to some extent.

Both of these films gave that the time – at least within the limitations of their status as feature films. Enough time is spent living with these characters before the event that defines them befalls them. They are really flesh-and-blood souls when we lose them (or don’t lose them, as the case may be).

I don’t know that I’m saying anything particularly profound here, only that seeing two movies like that on consecutive nights really made me notice it. The anime movie might have always been made that way, but Only the Brave didn’t need to be, and probably wouldn’t have been just a few years ago. As I wrote in my review, the comparative quickness of the fire that did kill them gave the filmmakers no choice but to shift focus elsewhere. Still, they could have easily made a 110-minute film rather than a 134-minute one.

And though I stopped short of actual demonstrable emotion – no tears – I felt myself on the verge of being choked up by the ends of both movies. You might say that’s just good old-fashioned cinema. I say, I don’t mind pausing to celebrate it nonetheless.