Tag: Tokyo

Dreams on Fire

Posted on by Paul Risker

The metaphor about the danger of playing with fire is a familiar one to us all. In Canadian filmmaker Philippe McKie’s Japanese urban dance film, the dangerous flames are those that emerge from daring to dream. It’s a spirited tale of the fragility and strength of hope. The title even has an apt double-meaning because fire is a force of destruction, but in the context of the pursuit of one’s dreams, it can be symbolic of a life illuminated by the transformative flames of success.

The young dreamer in this tale is Yume (Bambi Naka), who rebukes her father’s instructions and runs away to Tokyo to become a dancer. The difficult reality of achieving success soon sets in, and penniless, she finds work as a hostess in Tokyo’s red-light district. She continues to study and integrate herself into the dance community, never giving up on her dream.

From the beginning we feel we’re in the company of a storyteller brimming with confidence, who is unapologetic for his vision. Dreams on Fire will not please everyone, and there will be those that will accuse it of being an aspirational story that saunters, failing to explore deeper themes and ideas. This is to perhaps miss the filmmaker’s intention. A stylised story, it’s an unrestrained love letter to the aspirational journey that he chooses to not weigh down. He pays tribute to the arduous pursuit his protagonist undertakes, and the storyteller and character are not completely divisible from one another, as he concludes a significant step in his own creative journey.

At an 120-minutes it’s not short, and what struck me was a moment when I realised the passage of time that had come and gone. Thinking about our own lives, we lose sight of time, coming to realise that it’s passing us by of its own volition. In hindsight, our experiences are not necessarily what we pictured in our mind, and this is true for Yume. Finding a brevity in the time the story covers provokes a feeling that while we’ve been following her, we’ve been lost in a trance.

Emphasising the focus on the human body and its movement, the choreography of a single or group of bodies becomes hypnotic. Watching the young woman dedicated to training her body, perfecting her craft draws us in, and nestles us into the fierce ambition where perhaps dance is more important than life itself. While the world continues to move around her, it feels that she’s on her own plane of existence. The dance and music set pieces add a dreamy layer to the trance like feel, that in one scene conveys a deep eroticism, and in another a surreal nightmare.

A single viewing of Dreams on Fire is not enough, it requires a second viewing to see through this trance, to see clearly what she feels, when she feels it, how and when the journey takes shape.

Ironically, Bambi Naka plays the young and aspirational protagonist, who herself knows what it is to have this dream. Alongside her then romantic partner Aya Sato, she was one half of the duo AyaBambi, the lead dancers for Madonna on a two-year world tour. She plays Yume with a vulnerable shadow, even as she finds confidence and sheds her meekness. When another dancer she replaces in an ensemble warns her about the peril of injury, we find ourselves intermittently holding our breath. We realise that the smallest misstep, whether dancing or not could be disastrous, and we fear for her fragile dream.

Dreams on Fire is about characters on the fringes, but it’s not a cold or lonely space. While she lives in a bare and cramped apartment, she’s integrating herself into a community full of life. The harsher reality would be denying herself a chance at her dreams by remaining at home. With an optimistic eye, McKie shows the warmth of belonging to the fringes. A mature piece of storytelling, it does not play to either the saccharine or cold cynicism, instead it honours that joy and the sorrow go together.

If the film is a love letter to Tokyo, the Canadian filmmaker’s spiritual home having left film school in Montreal to spend 10 years living and working there, for us it’s neither a love letter to a city, nor any fringe culture. For western audiences it’s a look into the Japanese urban dance scene, that only scratches the surface of this cultural phenomenon, and other Japanese subcultures. As an unrestrained love letter to the aspirational journey, it’s also an expression that life is an empty shell we must fill with purpose and meaning, that exposes us to both the fragility and the strength of hope.

Dreams on Fire premiered in March at Glasgow Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It shows at the Fantasia International Film Festival (in Quebec) in August.

Weathering With You (Tenki no ko)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

A bravura opening shot pulls from rainswept Tokyo in through a hospital window to a girl waiting by a patient’s bedside, recalling nothing so much as the heroine of everyone’s favourite anime identity thriller Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1997) reflected against a train carriage window with a Tokyo cityscape visible beyond, but where Kon uses such imagery as an entry point to multilayered realities, Weathering With You’s vision never really extends beyond trying to recreate and repeat the formula that rendered its director’s previous Your Name (Makoto Shinkai, 2016) such a runaway success.

Like Your Name, Weathering With You centres on a teenage boy/girl romance but instead of the gender body swap and time travel devices in the earlier film – which probably shouldn’t have worked but somehow did – Weathering has an equally flimsy plot device about a girl named Hina who possesses the ability to turn rain into sunshine. This is set against a far more interesting backdrop of Tokyo being permanently shrouded in rain with echoes of global warming thrown in for the closing epilogue, two years after the main story, in which large parts of the city have disappeared beneath the rising sea level.

Most of the film centres around 16 year old runaway Hodaka who has come to Tokyo presumably to escape the type of small town existence portrayed in the rural sections of Your Name as Shinkai tries desperately not to repeat himself, a goal at which he succeeds admirably for about the first reel or so, arguably Weathering’s most engaging section. An early highlight during Hodaka’s inbound ferry journey sees him rush onto deck just in time to be caught in an exhilarating downpour only to be saved from being swept away by the swift action of unkempt, grownup Kei who subsequently gives the boy his card and tells him to get in touch if he ever needs help.

Hodaka knows better, so walks away – but after living as a homeless person on Tokyo’s mean and rainswept streets for a while and being unable to secure work to support himself because of Japan’s stringent minimum working age laws, he changes his mind and ends up the technically illegal and poorly paid if housed and fed dogsbody at Kei’s magazine publishing company where alongside a young woman named Natsumi he starts to research supernatural and paranormal stories for possible publication.

Kei sends Hodaka out to investigate the phenomenon of the sunshine girl, who can temporarily cause the rain to stop and the sun to come out, in turn pushing the plot towards boy meets girl romance when Hodaka befriends sunshine girl Hina and her primary school age little brother Nagi. Here Weathering repeats Your Name’s teen romantic clichés without holding the audience’s attention quite as effectively.

Shinkai also falls back on a visual, fantasy device, a temple which turns out to be a portal to another world where Hina floats in the sky as if underwater surrounded by mysterious shoals of sky (or are they sea?) fish. Your Name cleverly wove its not dissimilar visual conceits into a complex tapestry but Weathering can’t quite to pull its various constituent parts together, leaving the viewer to founder somewhat even as he or she admires its more impressive elements.

However the rain and sunshine imagery, while it may be a sideshow to the main romantic event, proves itself a considerable and genuinely captivating asset. Much artistry has gone into animating rain dripping down window panes or splashing in multiple drops onto pavement surfaces – and there are a great many such sequences. Equally, when Hina halts the rain for a few hours which she does with Hodaka as they attempt to earn a little extra money, the blue sky, sunshine and bright light provide a welcome contrast to the constant downpour and drab colour elsewhere.

The final flooding of Tokyo builds effectively on all this, but sadly it’s too little, too late. You can’t help feeling that far more could have been done with this flooding concept in both script and overall design. Despite the promise of that opening shot, Weathering ultimately fails to deliver the multiple reality levels of Kon’s Perfect Blue. Worse, it never integrates its ideas into a coherent whole the way Shinkai’s own, earlier and superior Your Name did while its romance simply isn’t as engaging. A great pity.

Weathering With You is out in the UK on Friday, January 17th (2019). On Sky Cinema and NOW TV on February 3rd (2021).

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:

Your Name (Kimi no Na wa)

Posted on by mjbstaging

In a spectacular and bravura single take, vertical panning shot, a meteor descends from the heavens through the clouds towards the small lakeside town of Itomori. Then, another time, another place: on a train in Tokyo a teenage girl spots a boy and their eyes meet but there’s no time to exchange names. She knows him but he has no idea who she is. As she gets off the train, he asks her… “Your Name?”

Thereafter, Tokyo boy Taki wakes up some days Mitsuha’s body, and the other way round. Soon, each starts writing the other messages on their hands, arms and mobile phones so that the other one knows what he/she has been up to while they swapped bodies. Until one day, her messages stop.

Like the falling meteor which unexpectedly splits into a shower, at once a beautiful display in the Tokyo night sky and an impending disaster in Itomori, this weaves together two ways of looking. Girl and boy. Countryside and city. Celebration and catastrophe. As a ribbon snakes through space and meteor fragments fall through the atmosphere, a thread weaves through a loom meshing separate timelines. When the two teens meet at the beginning, she is near the end of their encounter while he is at its start thanks to subtle storytelling sleight-of-hand. They may not both know each other yet, but they are connected. When finally they meet again on urban Tokyo hillside steps, the moment is poignant.

Although the meteor is expected to fall in one piece, at the last minute it splits into fragments, one of which will wipe out Itomori. After learning through Taki that this will happen, can Mitsuha and her friends alert the town – busy celebrating its annual festival – to evacuate before lives are lost?

Japanese films have dealt with disaster for a long time, most notably in Godzilla (Ishiro Honda, 1954) which turned the devastation of the A-bomb into the eponymous, city-wasting monster. Recent reboot Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno, Shinji Higuchi, 2016) shows the franchise still capable of delivering such myth and metaphor.

Not that Your Name is necessarily about nuclear strikes. Japan has a long history of earthquakes and associated natural disasters, most recently the 2011 tsunami and resultant damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Life goes on but such disastrous events linger in the national psyche and inform popular culture. Even as Your Name absorbs Itomori’s annihilation into its wider culture as a pretty light show over Tokyo, it grapples with the magnitude of the disaster by placing us in the immediate days and hours beforehand.

Elsewhere, Your Name plays out as both teen romance and dual exploration of male/female identity. The two protagonists wake up separately in each other’s bodies to discover with a mixture of delight and embarrassment that they possess the genitals of the opposite sex. As the twin narratives move on to explore more psychological sexual differences, the body swap device proves genuinely affecting. By the time of the impending annihilation of Mitsuko’s home town, you’re completely hooked.

It’s one of those rare movies to watch multiple times. If, like this writer, you saw it last year in a small cinema, to catch the new digital IMAX print on a bigger sized screen is a real treat. While scenes with minimal detail and movement show up the fact, other sequences are all the more effective. This applies not only to the big outdoors vistas where you’d expect it but also more intimate, everyday scenes. In short, compared to much smaller screens, the IMAX format allows Your Name’s visuals the room they need to breathe.

Your Name is out in the UK on Wednesday, August 23rd.

For another animation about Japanese life against the backdrop of impending disaster, click here.