”Three years ago now I head the intro to Pipeline and I went all numb. For me it was ’electric liberation’… a sign from the Gods in electricity”.
Obayashi understands childhood and the teenage years better than most directors. While this in a way is a time capsule from a very specific time and place – a small Japanese town during the 1960’s – the film also has a certain universality to it in how it depicts what it is like…
Anyone who grew up in front of anonymous chat rooms and message boards will recognize themselves in this film. Haru doesn’t shy away from the loneliness of digital society, but compared to dystopian depictions of the Internet age like Pulse or the deeply alienated youth of Lily Chou-Chou, it is more interested in the genuinely meaningful bonds and friendships which the Internet can also lead to. Yoshimitsu Morita captures quite well how the relations with strangers online can sometimes feel…
Loved this. Setting the stage for his later anti-war trilogy (which I have yet to see), Obayashi here looks at militaristic nationalism and anxieties from the eyes of children growing up in the shadow of World War II. Moods and genres are blended effortlessly: it is nostalgic and socially aware in equal measures, as whimsical as it is melancholic. It draws you in with laughter and leaves you with the inescapable trauma of war.
Swallowtail Butterfly is the second of two films released by Shunji Iwai in 1996, both starring the singer Chara (who would become famous for the theme song of this film). While both films display Iwai’s distinctive style, they are also quite different. Where Picnic is short, bleak, stylistically coherent, and almost a mood piece, Swallowtail is long, sprawling, genre-hopping, and almost feel-good in its tone. I think I prefer Picnic as I found this a bit too messy and all-over-the-place,…
