Black Gate

I like to make out a rough schedule for Fantasia well ahead of time. But things always change. You hear things about movies as the festival goes on. What seems important a few days out seems less important in the moment. And then some choices are just hard to make. On Sunday July 22 I had one of those tough choices, which I’ll walk through here for the sake of recreating a bit of the subjective experience of Fantasia.

The Hall Theatre would host Our House, a science-fictional horror film, at 4:45. Then The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion, an action-superhero film, at 6:45; then I Am A Hero, a Japanese zombie film, at 9:15. On the other hand, starting at 4:20, the J.A. De Sève would host a five-hour-plus screening of a near-future boxing story called Wilderness, a two-film series playing here back-to-back with a brief intermission between the two parts. That would be followed by a science-fictional suspense film called Parallel at 9:45.

I was initially planning to stick with the movies at the Hall. Then I began to reconsider. The Witch and Hero had second screenings. Parallel did not. That meant it made more sense to watch that one, and catch Hero on its second screening on the 23rd. Witch had a question-and-answer session afterward, which I wouldn’t get at the second screening. But I found myself intensely curious about Wilderness. It was a bold programming choice to schedule a five-hour block. And I wondered how its setting would inform its story; it was adapted from a novel written and set in the 1960s. I decided at the last minute to choose Wilderness over Our House. I missed what I later learned was a touching question-and-answer session, where the lead of The Witch was surprised with the festival’s award for Best Actress. But in terms of the movies I ended up seeing, I was quite pleased.

Wilderness (Ah, kôya, あゝ、荒野) was directed by Yoshiyuki Kishi and written by Takehiko Minato based on the novel by Shuji Terayama. Terayama’s Ah, kôya was published as a serial in 1965, and in one volume the year after; the film’s set in 2021, imagining a near future filled with social unrest. As the government mulls over legislation imposing a kind of conscription on Japan’s youth, and the numbers of suicides spike upward, two different men are drawn to take up boxing. One, Shinji (Masaki Suda, who voiced the lead in Fireworks and appeared in Gintama, Death Note: Light Up the New World, and the Assassination Classroom movies), is looking for revenge on a former friend, Yuji, who himself has taken up boxing. The other, the introverted stuttering Kenji (Ik-joon Yang), finds boxing is simply something he can do, something in which he can take confidence, something that might help him stand up to his abusive father. Both men are trained by gym owner Horiguchi (Yûsuke Santamaria, the voice of Hideo in Giovanni’s Island) as they learn how to box and go pro. A subplot sees a group of college activists planing an art project about the rise of suicides across the country.

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I knew Sunday, July 22, was going to be a long day for me at Fantasia. That was a good thing: it meant I’d be watching a lot of movies. At a certain point, I knew I’d have to make a choice about which ones I’d be seeing. But at least the first two were set in my mind, both playing at the Hall Theatre. The first was Fireworks, an anime tween love story with a time-twisting aspect. The second was Lôi Báo, a Vietnamese super-hero movie.

Fireworks, or to give its full title, Fireworks, Should We See It from the Side or The Bottom? (Uchiage hanabi, shita kara miru ka? Yoko kara miru ka?, 打ち上げ花火、下から見るか？横から見るか？), was directed by Akiyuki Shinbo and Nobuyuki Takeuchi from a script by Hitoshi Ohne, and is based on a 1995 film of the same name written and directed by Shunji Iwai. It follows youngsters Norimichi (Masaki Suda, Gintama, Death Note: Light Up the New World, Assassination Classroom, Princess Jellyfish) and Nazuna (voiced by Suzu Hirose, the lead in Laplace’s Witch), schoolmates in a seaside Japanese town. One morning, the morning her mother plans to leave town with her, Nazuna finds a strange glass sphere. Norimichi has a crush on her and had been planning to ask her to watch a large fireworks display with him that evening, but things go awry and Nazuna chooses to go with Norimichi’s friend Yusuke (Mamoru Miyano) instead. Only, at about the halfway point of the film, everything changes: a secret property of the strange glass sphere emerges, and the day begins again with Norimichi given another chance to get together with Nazuna.

Stylistically, this is a very realistic-looking movie with a few departures into fantasy sequences. Lighting effects, as you might imagine given the title, are extensive and often beautiful. This is a bright film in general with highly saturated colours. The design and direction works with the animation to create a strong sense of place — the village feels like a real hillside village, laid out in three dimensions. You get the idea swiftly where everything is relative to everything else, and a few shots of the town as a whole help. The character animation is mostly effective; I didn’t notice especially subtle touches to Norimichi or the boys he hung around with, but their body language does do a decent job of establishing who they are. The coltish Nazuna’s a little more distinctive, with a dream sequence near the end giving a sense of her character through movement (as well as through exposition and imagery).

Narratively, the movie uses a setup not unlike Groundhog Day, with a protagonist who gets to live through a day and change things as needed. Fireworks presents a useful twist, though, in that the world around Norimichi gets a little smaller and a little more deformed each time he does this. You can see that the final version of the world won’t be stable. But then you can also see that there are limits to how much the young people in this film can affect the world in any case; their ability to connect with each other is limited by circumstance, and in a way that’s what the movie’s about. If one of the characteristics of a fireworks display is its intensity, another is its transience: however beautiful, fireworks fade.

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