Tag: manga

River’s Edge (Ribazu Ejji)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

A Tokyo high school. Haruna Wakakusa (Fumi Nikaido) is seeing Kannonzaki (Shuhei Uesugi) but not sleeping with him. So behind her back Kannonzaki looks around for someone more compliant and finds Rumi Koyama (Shiori Doi) who, with the aid of a line of coke or two, is as enthusiastic about having sex as he is.

Kannonzaki is also a bully who frequently targets the quiet Ichiro Yamada (Ryo Yoshizara) with whom Haruna strikes up a friendship. Despite the fact of his dating Kanna Tajima (Aoi Morikawa), more as a cover than anything else, Ichiro is actually gay.

Ichiro is full of surprises. He’s raising a couple of kittens in a cardboard box outside a local building and deigns to show Haruna his “hidden treasure”, a skeletal corpse lying in the reeds near the river that runs through the city. He’s only shared this secret with one other person, Kozue Yoshikawa (Sumire), who takes time off from school as a working child model for photo shoots. She’s also a binge eater who throws up after overeating, thus maintaining her figure.

When a rumour spreads that there may be money buried in the reeds, Ichiro enlists Haruna and Kozue to help him bury the corpse so that none of school’s treasure hunters will discover it.

As much as the movie is shown from any one character’s point of view, it’s Haruna’s. But it’s a film punctuated by character vox pops, as if it were a documentary, wherein a character is responding to questions both trivial and large. The large questions leave most of the characters with nothing to say.

There are also hints of plot to come, as for example with Haruna’s explaining in an early vox pop why she saved her teddy bear from a fire, an event which doesn’t occur until the closing minutes, although then we only see its aftermath and that only briefly. These little interviews to camera appear to have been conducted long after the events depicted have taken place.

Although it contains graphic scenes of teen sex as well as occasional bursts of violence, this is primarily a drama about teenagers relating to one another in a world where adults, while they impinge on it, are outsiders and never more than minor characters. It’s based on a manga by Kyoko Okazaki.

The characters remain fascinating throughout and if a variety of relationships straight and gay are to be found both within and on the fringes of the proceedings, at its core this concerns a deep friendship between a straight girl and a gay boy. There’s something really refreshing about that.

River’s Edge played in the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) in 2018, when this piece was originally written. Available on Netflix in March. Watch the film trailer (Japanese, no subtitles) below:

Little Forest (Liteul Poreseuteu)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Raised in the countryside by her mother (Moon So-ri) but dissatisfied with life there, Hye-won (Kim Tae-ri) moves to Seoul and acquires a boyfriend. But after both of them have taken their exams, she returns to the village in which she grew up to get some space and think about her life.

The boyfriend has passed his exams and is hoping she has done the same, leaving messages on her voicemail to this effect, but she’s still waiting for her own result to come through. She doesn’t respond to his messages.

For reasons that aren’t immediately apparent, but which surface to a degree in the course of the narrative, her mother has left, presumably to start a new life now that the job of raising a well adjusted daughter is complete. She very much exists in Hye-won’s memories though, in which psychic location we she quite a bit of her onscreen, often interacting with Hye-won’s younger self as a little girl.

We also learn that her mum was a single parent after her husband died of an illness when Hye-won was small.

The girl doesn’t really miss the big city and there are compensations. There’s a boy Jae-ha (Ryu Jun-yeol) around her age who has returned from his travels to become a farmer and absolutely loves what he now does. And a girl Eun-sook (Jin Ki-joo) who works at the bank in the nearest town. The latter confesses to Hye-won her designs on the former and good-naturedly warns her to keep her hands off. The three of them spend a great deal of time together, either in pairs or as a trio.

The three-way friendship is genuinely engaging. It could very easily have been played as a love triangle but director Yim Soon-Rye never goes down this route and the film is arguably all the better for it. That was one of the reasons I personally liked this film even more than critical favourite Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018) which has a UK distributor whereas, at the time of writing, this one sadly doesn’t. Running through the whole thing as a non-narrative thread is Hye-won’s cooking, a series of episodes of mouthwatering Korean food porn to make you drool. There have been other movies in this select category over the years: the Danish period drama Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987) and Taiwanese outing Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994) spring to mind.

In fact, the whole film is like a little taste – or numerous glimpses, culinary and otherwise – of paradise. That’s not just the food either – the three characters occupy a very attractive world that you can’t but help to want to live in. The pace of life is slow and moves with the seasons, the film starting off in Winter with snow on the ground and slowly working its way through the rest of the year. There’s something deeply satisfying about watching this in a movie, at least the way it’s done here. It’s a total slap in the face for the ‘get a steady boyfriend, conform’ ethos that to Western eyes seems to underpin feminine notions of Korean social mores.

The property was originally a 2002 manga in Japan by Daisuke Igarashi which spawned a two-part, Japanese big screen adaptation Little Forest: Summer/Autumn and its sequel Little Forest: Winter/Spring (both Junichi Mori, 2014). Judging by the new Korean version, it translates well between different Oriental cultures.

The result is gem which deserves to be picked up for a proper UK theatrical release. (Did I mention this before?) Not least because it may help more accurately redefine notions of manga here. Which in this case denotes rural existence, the passing of the seasons – and cookery.

Little Forest played in the 62nd BFI London Film Festival (LFF), where this piece was originally written. It can be seen again in the London Korean Film Festival (LKFF) on Saturday, November 3rd, 18.30 at the Rio Cinema, Dalston. Tickets here. Watch the film trailer below:

Tokyo Ghoul (Tôkyô Gûru)

Posted on by victorfraga

A little zombie, a little vampire, a little alien and extremely Japanese, that’s probably a succinct way of describing the flesh-eating ghouls in the Japanese manga series Tokyo Ghoul, which has now been made into a feature film with real actors, and very plush, colourful and nimble CGI effects. These creatures are “above human beings in the food chain”, a voice-over explains in the beginning of the movie. Worse still, these ghoul are virtually indistinguishable from human beings except that when they are excited or hungry, their scleras turn black and their irises red. Plus they unleash an enormous tentacle from their back. Their must conceal their identity in order to evade pursuit.

Their tentacle comes in all lengths, shapes, forms and colours. Some are three-pronged, some resemble an octopus, some are more reminiscent of a cacatua. These devices are enormous and provide the ghouls with a very striking individuality. They also make the man-eating creatures far more agile: they can use the appendages in order to jump, fight, grip and kill their prey. In fact, it’s these bizarre body parts that make Tokyo Ghoul a very effective blend of fantasy and action flick, with flavours or horror.

The story revolves around Ken Kaneki, a university student who barely survives an encounter with Rize Kamishiro, as his gorgeous date reveals herself as a hungry ghoul. He is taken to the local hospital in a serious condition. He then finds out that he has mutated into a half-ghoul, as some of Rize’s organs were unwillingly transplanted into his body. From now on, he must feed on human flesh in order to survive. Everything else tastes foul and acrid. He’s now faced with a moral dilemma, as he’s still half human. Should he engage in cannibalism in order to satiate his hunger and survive? Coming to term with his new man-eating identity is not going to be an easy ride.

This is an entertaining fantasy movie, with some subtle social commentary. Just not a very dirty movie. The ghouls are forced to live in an underworld, and they are also subject to a hierarchy. There’s also a very tragic humanistic element, as Kaneki realises his inevitable fate. The beginning of the film has references to Franz Kafka’s The Methamorphosis, but then the individual’s plight slowly morphs a societal drama, as humans and ghouls engage in violence (against each other and also between themselves).

All in all, this is a movie likely to please lovers of the series, and might also convert a few new fans. Tokyo Ghoul is out in cinemas across the UK on Wednesday, January 31st.