Fantasia 2016, Day 11, Part 2: Devils and Heroes (If Cats Disappeared From the World and Superpowerless)
Impossible to predict some things. Notably: you can’t know how you’ll react to a work of art until you’ve experienced it. Looking at the movies Fantasia offered on Sunday night, July 24, I thought I’d try If Cats Disappeared from the World (Sekai kara neko ga kietanara), which promised a tale about a terminally ill man who makes a surreal Faustian bargain. After that, I decided I should watch Superpowerless, as it was a genre piece about an aging superhero who’d lost his powers. In truth, I had my doubts about both movies; Cats looked it might suffer from excess of romanticism and forced whimsy, while Superpowerless seemed like some kind of mumblecore satire treading ground comics had worked over decades past. In the event, I was wrong to doubt. If Cats Disappeared from the World would be likely the best movie I saw at Fantasia, and probably my favourite. Superpowerless, meanwhile, turned out to be the festival’s most pleasant surprise, the film which most greatly exceeded all my expectations.
If Cats Disappeared from the World, which played the large Hall Theatre, was directed by Akira Nagai and written by Yoshikazu Okada from a bestselling novel by Genki Kawamura. It follows a young postman (Takeru Sato, of Rurouni Kenshin fame) who as the film opens is diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor. His death could come at any moment, the doctor tells him, but when he returns home he’s met with a double of himself who is, evidently, the devil; and the devil guarantees the unnamed postman he’ll die tomorrow. There is another option, though. The devil will give the mailman another day of life if the postman will allow the devil to remove a given thing from the world, retroactively changing events so that the thing never existed — removing as well all memories and feelings to do with that thing. Every day the devil will take another thing from the world, with each thing taken giving the postman another day of life. He agrees, and the devil announces the first thing he’ll take: telephones. Which, we soon see, is a problem as the postman’s ex-girlfriend (Aoi Miyazaki), the great love of his life, met him due to a wrong number.
I’d marked four screenings on the Fantasia schedule to attend on Sunday, July 24. The first two were both at the small De Sève Theatre: a presentation of the 1983 Shaw Brothers film Holy Flame of the Martial World (Wu lin sheng huo jin), followed by a short film showcase. The showcase, Fragments of Asia 2016, promised half-a-dozen pieces from across Asia, both animated and live-action. Afterward I’d have time for food, and then two more movies would follow. Before all that, though, came one of the films I’d immediately highlighted when I first saw what was playing at this year’s Fantasia.
The evening of Saturday, July 23, was going to be busy for me, with three shows at the De Sève Theatre. First, a showcase of short films called Born of Woman, which the Fantasia program told me would feature nine films by women directors “centred largely around themes of the body and interpersonal malaise.” Then after that two science-fiction features. The first would be Realive, about a man from our time (or close to it) who dies and is cryonically revived in 2083. The second would be Tank 432, about a squad of soldiers seeking shelter from a surreal battle within a battered tank. It looked like a promising night, and it got off to a good start in the late afternoon with the Born of Woman showcase.
Saturday, July 23, was going to be a long day for me at the Fantasia film festival, filled with some tough choices about what to watch. Some of those choices were clarified early on, when thanks to the good work of the people at Fantasia I was able to watch a screener of Assassination Classroom: The Graduation. That resolved a schedule conflict later in the day, and just after noon I’d see my first theatrical screening: Nova Seed, a Canadian animated feature that was playing with an almost half-hour-long short film from Mexico, Revoltoso. After that I had a couple hours until the next set of movies, and I planned to get a good meal. This did not happen. Instead I’d end up taking a test drive of the future — or what seems to me like the future, or at least like a future.