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This is 28 years later, the animation once again won the best in the late ten-day newspaper. (The last winner was Miyazaki's "My Neighbor Totoro" in 1988)
I watched "In This Corner of the World" at the Tromso International Film Festival in Norway.
It is neither from the three heroes of independent animation (such as Makoto Shinkai, who broke into the mainstream audiences in China and Japan last year).
Nor did it come from Hayao Miyazaki, who retired at an old age but issued a comeback statement (Studio Ghibli, which has been guaranteed by the box office reputation for years).
Director Pianyuan Xuzhi, there should be not many people who have heard of this name. He has worked with masters such as Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, and is well-known in the circle.
As far as Pianyuan himself is concerned, "In This Corner of the World" is a brain-opening, rich imagination, the audience can finally arrive at the daily story of the war years together with the creator, reflect on the reality on the basis of perceiving the present, and transcend time and space. .
In the dual form of painting/animation, the film presents the key scenes of a past time and war, constantly synthesizing a new world.
The protagonist did not show the enthusiasm for engaging in or embracing the war, and she did not have the anti-war awareness and three-view consciousness of the latecomers. She was a housewife who was comfortable with life and had a little hobby of literature and art. However, she showed incredible courage at the end. , shouting cathartic: how can the war end like this.
Yeah, the damn war.
Before discussing the new approach the film took, I knew exactly when In This Corner of the World hit me.
This is an overly heavy film, but the director consciously made it light and clear, like an omniscient perspective that travels nine days away.
Before World War II, the girls who entered the city were exposed to the civilized and modernized Hiroshima market, which was refreshing and full of senses. Suddenly, she fell into an unstoppable sadness.
When looking up at the sky, the movie suddenly inserted a cappella version of "Unbearable Sadness". ("Sad しくてやりきれない")
Listening to the words, this song sounds familiar, it is nostalgic. After singing a piece, I'm sure that it appeared in a certain Japanese movie, and it's one of my favorites. Because I don't usually listen to Japanese movie soundtracks. With such a guessing urge, my movie viewing LAN started to work.
After ten or twenty minutes, I suddenly reacted! It turned out that the guy Zhou Fangzhengxing used it.
Unbearable sadness, something is passing away, this is the emotional tone of "In This Corner of the World".
You can literally assume that sadness is the tone of this movie. But I want to emphasize more, why is it a cappella, why when looking up at the sky, I was caught off guard and put in an episode - after all, this is not "Your Name".
Like a comet falling from outer space, "In This Corner of the World" swayed the girl's eyes and the camera, and fixed it on the faint, thick and soft cumulonimbus clouds. If you follow the bombing and the atomic bombing in the second half of the movie, you will understand that this unpredictable episode and the unpredictable sadness are actually for a reason.
Coincidentally, I have also seen another work written by Shiro Kono: " Sakura Country in the Street of Xilan ". It was also shortlisted for the top ten of the year in Japan's "Movie Xunbao". I also remember the headline of the review at the time called "Political Allergies".
Yes, not as politically sensitive as many take for granted (the term will also be applied to "In This Corner of the World").
The reason why I use this title is because the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is an important symbol of ending World War II, has different views on China, Japan, and the United States. Just as Japan was the victim and the US was the perpetrator, China became the victor. But this is a war after all. As long as the war is killing people, killing one person and killing hundreds of thousands of people is evil.
It is war, it is evil.
It is a pity that it is difficult for the Chinese to stay out of the matter and face the mushroom cloud rising into the sky. Just as the issue of World War II should be a historical issue, but under the disruption of the geopolitical situation, this historical issue has always appeared as a political issue.
Whether, in addition to knowing the power of the atomic explosion, we still have the ability to face the atomic explosion.
Whether, we should believe that the creator stands on the human emotions and has a deep love for Hiroshima.
"In This Corner of the World" is an artistic animation with a literary appearance that actually ignores mainstream audiences at all.
It has been indulging in the heroine's wandering and confusion. In the space of time, she sees the needle, looks at the mountains and rivers, and follows the trend, suddenly revealing the sadness of life.
Everything seems to be in the dark, the protagonist predicts that there is a powerful and irresistible force that will break the family life in front of you step by step, change the fate of many people, and take the lives of many people.
The heroine has an expressive and imaginative hobby, using painting to process subjective reality into third-perspective, highly pure abstract paintings—even if the style of those paintings has nothing to do with the abstract genre. She paints the sea, the sky, and beautiful things playfully, stroke by stroke, innocently, and turns ugly, violent and terrifying memories into a part of the art of painting.
This is an artistic animation on par with the work of Studio Ghibli.
The movie will have the technique of flying subtitles on a black screen, and will also use the scroll painting to expand and traverse, and there are also sudden interruptions, which are completely free from the emotions of the characters in the melodrama story.
The emotions of the film are completely presented in fragments, refusing to bluntly incite, but following good manners, leading the audience to a corner of the hillside overlooking the military port of Wu City, receiving sentimental signals from a distance.
Just as animation is the processing of film/reality, the film constantly revolves around this rhetoric, with little or no traditional representation of war. The thread running through "In This Corner of the World" can only be the flow of time.
It's cold and hot, and the whole movie is like a diary of a girl. Sometimes the weather is sunny in this part, and the rice balls in the other part are delicious, without deliberate prompts or marked stops.
The director provided a reference statement. He hoped that the audience would feel the dynamic and emotional tension of the characters by watching the cartoon frames on the paper that do not actually move. What "In This Corner of the World" does is to enter. To that imaginary time and space where dialects are spoken.
This film may also be a Japanese film that shoots the Yamato, but is the most distant from the Yamato. In my opinion, this battleship, known as the world's No. 1, eventually became a symbol of the failure of World War II, is ultimately just a steel prop in the background of the film, which appears and disappears like a joke.
What "In This Corner of the World" repeatedly wants to explain is probably that our lives are all given by death. No matter rich or poor, men and women, young or old, skin color, ethnicity, ideology, and values... Living in the world is not because you are more important, more worthy of survival, more gifted, talented, and courageous, it is only because you have not died yet. take you.
The catastrophe of the war of books and video materials has been processed and edited for more than two times. Some descriptions have become bloody, more deceptive, and more likely to incite emotions.
When many people go to the rivers of memory to explore and testify against the stones in the water, especially the major events recorded in history, the witnesses often have a psychedelic illusion of being absent, or this kind of reaction: those events , it just happened.
On that day, the sun may be more dazzling, and the white clouds may be thicker. You feel like you don't belong in that world, but you are there.
Want to end with a short poem by Abbas:
this road
many years ago
abandoned
But wildflowers seem
know nothing
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