The Hiroshima girl Suzu is a bit naturally dumb and often daydreams. She loves to paint, and the ordinary scenery in front of her eyes can be turned into colorful pictures; she loves fantasy, the big and small things in life are like shuttle between reality and dream, full of magical fun. Ling, who has a simple personality and is a bit rash, accepted the words of a matchmaker and married from Hiroshima to Kure City, which is about 25 kilometers away. The daily life of chai, rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar and tea needs to be more troublesome because of the war. Fortunately, she has a husband who loves her. And new friends to make life still full of laughter. It's just the reality of war, still cruelly approaching Suzu's life little by little...
For Japanese animated films about war, Taiwanese fans should reflexively think of Studio Ghibli's "Grave of the Fireflies" (Fireflies るの Tomb, 1988). When the description of life felt lingering fears. It also describes the wartime life from a perspective that is completely close to the common people. In contrast, "Thank You, Find Me in the Corner of the World" is a light weight. Yuling, a naive and a bit off-line character, is a lot of unreasonable wartime characters. The events of the film add interesting colors and gimmicks. Although there are inevitably cruelty, sadness, and separation of life and death, the characters in the film can always see the light in adversity, and the overall look is much brighter and gentler.
Due to insufficient rationing resources during the war, Ling had to find a way to pick weeds to add vegetables to the table, and the rhythm was as light as watching the cooking section of the variety show "Legend of Gold". Ling, who loves to paint, was taken home by the military police as a spy when she was sketching a battleship, but her mother-in-law and sister-in-law kept laughing like they were watching a funny skit. As enemy fighter planes bombed, Ling looked up at the sky stained by anti-aircraft artillery paintballs, and imagined that she had painted such a colorful scene with watercolors. The battleship the first love of her childhood was on was destroyed and sank into the harbor, but Suzu saw the white waves transformed into a rabbit and the egret bird of her hometown taking the ship into the sky.
"From now on, I want to live with a smile, and I can't cry and cry all day long. It's a waste of salt."
It is this kind of hopeless romance, and the positive thinking inspired by being crushed by the times, and having to continue to live no matter what, people can't help but raise the corners of their mouths, but tears well up in their eyes.
This film is adapted from the manga of the same name, directed by Nao Katabashu of "Shinko and the Millennium Magic" (マイマイ新子和Millennium の Magic, 2009). He pays attention to details and thoroughly collects detailed information, including photos from 70 years ago. , weather records, what was sold in the store at that time, the time when Wu City issued the air raid warning, the color of the anti-aircraft guns, the appearance of the Yamato battleship entering the port, and the semaphore on the battleship. Feel the same. Non (Reina Noen), who is famous for "Little Ocean Girl", also practiced dialect hard for this film, and used Hiroshima dialect to chat with friends every day, so as to achieve natural and vivid dubbing.
The film encountered a shortage of funds during the production. In order to raise enough personnel costs to convene the crew and the budget for the production of the leading film, the film was put on a crowdfunding platform hoping to raise 20 million yen, but it was supported by 3,374 people. , a total of 39,121,920 yen was raised, breaking the record for the largest number of supporters in Japan's crowdfunding and the highest amount of film-related fundraising. American playwright and director Charlie Kaufman also used crowdfunding to obtain production funding for the R-rated puppet animated film "Anomalisa" (2015). An alternative way out of compromise.
Katsushina's previous work "The New Son and the Thousand Years of Magic" was originally withdrawn after 4 weeks of release due to poor box office, but it was later returned to the theater due to the co-signature of fans, and the final release period was as long as 2 years. Similarly, "Thank You, Find Me in the Corner of the World" had only 63 theaters at the beginning, but after 4 consecutive weeks of box office growth, it expanded to more than 300 theaters, and finally wrote that it squeezed into the Japanese box office for 15 consecutive weeks. The top 10 on the chart, more than 2 million people watched, and the box office exceeded 2.5 billion yen. The enthusiastic support of movie fans and the power of word-of-mouth have surprised many filmmakers and theater owners in recent years. Perhaps this is a positive example of the ease of information flow in the Internet age.
This film uses a humorous tone to make the cruel war less terrifying. This does not mean that the director turned his head and ignored the people who were killed in the war, except that the protagonist suffered a serious blow in the latter part of the plot, which made the mood a little heavy for a while. In addition, in fact, the whole film also hides many bloody facts in small details. The director chooses not to cut open the scars severely, but to gently embrace the soul in the shadows of all times.
The following author attempts to provide background knowledge for the details in the film, I hope you can pay attention to the meaning of these details in the film.
"Monster Uncle and Zashiki Douji"
When Ling was a child, he encountered two monsters that only appeared in legends. One is an uncle who wants to put the bell in a basket and take it away. If the child is lost and disappears, the ancient Japanese would interpret it as a "God Hidden" or "God Hidden" or "God Hidden". The "human snatch" who was captured by the monster, blamed the loss of the child on supernatural powers, diluting the grief. However, the real reason is likely to be abducted by human traffickers, caught and sold. In addition, when Suzu went to play at her grandmother's house, a child quietly crept out of the ceiling. Suzu thought that she was seeing the guardian deity of the house, "Zashiki Doji". According to legend, those who saw him would be lucky. However, its origin is that in order to lighten the burden of life, poor families killed the extra children and buried them in the soil, but accidentally exposed the body of the child to be seen by outsiders, or because there was a ghost in their heart who saw it at home. In order to cover up the child's soul, he made up the story of the Zashiki-douji. In other words, the Zashiki Douji in the film is likely to be a symbol of orphans. Although Bell said:
"It's good to be a child, you can see a lot of things that adults can't see"
But these small plots, which are as interesting as fantasy stories, actually reveal the dark side of prewar Japanese society.
"Scented Girl"
In the film, there is a scene where Ling gets lost because she is going to buy something in the black market. She goes to a mysterious place. The girls in it are all from other places and are forbidden to leave this place, and they are all fragrant. These girls are likely to be "girls" (prostitutes) working in "youkor" (brothels), or comfort women who were forcibly recruited. In addition to taking girls from South Korea, China, and Taiwan during the war and making them military comfort women, Japan also had local comfort women. Akihiro Miwa sang a song "Motherland and Women たち", which satirized the Japanese militaristic government and the so-called patriotic sentiments from the perspective of women being sacrificed.
"Fortunately I didn't hide in a bomb shelter"
After wave after wave of air raids, relatives of Suzuo's family came to borrow because their home was burnt down. At that time, they said, "Fortunately, I didn't hide in the bomb shelter." ? In the late World War II, after the Allies switched to bombing Japan with incendiary bombs, many of the simple air-raid shelters dug in the courtyards of private residences became hell. , or suffocated due to insufficient oxygen, and some burning bombs directly penetrated the simple wooden cover of the air-raid shelter, directly burning everyone inside to coke. So bomb shelters are not necessarily 100% safe.
"Purple spots on the skin"
The protagonist of the story, Ling, was born in Hiroshima. When it comes to Hiroshima and the Second World War, one must think of the nuclear bomb dropped on August 6, 1945, which caused at least 70,000 to 80,000 people to evaporate or evaporate directly due to the high heat and storms of the nuclear bomb explosion. Being burned to death is a very low-key but painful depiction in the movie, so I won't explode here. However, among those who were excluded from the records, there were many people who were exposed to nuclear bomb radiation in vitro or in vivo, got "Atomic Bomb Syndrome" and were slowly tortured to death. After the U.S. took over Japan, it denied the atomic explosion, and even classified it as a secret, not allowing doctors to talk about it or write about it. The initial stage of Atomic Blast Syndrome includes high fever, purpura, general weakness, diarrhea, hair loss and other symptoms. Although only one character was brought to have purple spots on the hand in the film, in fact, the character's later tragic fate has been faintly revealed.
"Turn on the lights to see the shiny white rice"
At the end of the film, Ling, who experienced the war, finally got the rice and made white rice for the family to eat. The father-in-law sighed:
"Such shiny white rice, of course you have to turn on the lights to see it clearly."
At first glance, this detail seems to describe the lack of resources at that time, which made turning on the lights a luxury. In fact, it is directly related to the war. Remember when the air raid siren was issued, Ling Nian said something: "Attention to the air raid siren, turn off the fire, and remove the door"? Of course, during nighttime air raids, the lights should also be turned off, so as not to make your home a conspicuous target. Therefore, when every household lights up the lights at the end of the film, it is not only to see the white rice clearly, but also to light up the light of peace.
Beautiful hand-painted brushstrokes, humorous plot, well-inspected details, sincere and warm emotions, all of which make this film so moving. However, when the director described the war, he chose to hide a lot of great pain in the details, and embraced the sadness tenderly, showing the splendor of the common people's life still trying to survive under the giant wheel of the times, which enhanced the artistry of the film. In this year when the Abe regime implemented the new security law, it seems that it intends to re-engage in international military activities. Japanese movies looking back on the history of World War II are not purely nostalgic, but have a sense of mission to learn from the past.
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