The 2017 Animated Contenders: "In This Corner of the World"

by Tim Brayton

Of the 26 animated features submitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science for Oscar consideration last month, a respectable five – just the thinnest hair under 20% - came from Japan. Ignoring Oscar eligibility, and throwing Your Name. on the pile (it was a 2016 Oscar hopeful but its commercial U.S. release came this spring), and 2017 has been a pretty fine year for anime in the United States.

Out of all those films, I humbly submit that the best one is In This Corner of the World, director Sunao Katabuchi's adaptation of a 2007-'09 manga series by Fumiyo Kōno. It's actually the story's second cinematic incarnation: in 2011, it was adapted in live-action. I haven't seen that film, but even so, I cannot fathom how it could be anything but a pale echo of the Katabuchi film: In This Corner of the World is an extraordinary triumph of animation as a storytelling vehicle. And this is no less true just because it's telling a mostly realistic story that doesn't "need" to be animated...

This is the story of Suzu (Rena Nounen), who we meet first as an eight-year-old in 1933, in the small seaside town of Eba. From here, we get to see her grow up, always quietly maintaining the dream that someday, she might have a career as an artist.

This dream is put on hold in 1943, when she marries out-of-towner Shusaku Hojo (Yoshimasa Hosya), who takes her to live in his own hometown of Kure with his family, while he spends most of his time working on the naval shipyards. The demands of living with Shusaku's traditionalist family, filling the conservative role of a dutiful Japanese wife, comes as a bit of a shock to her system, and effectively ends her artistic aspirations, though she makes the most of her situation and ends up finding happiness and contentment even in this new world, with at least one openly hostile in-law, Shusaku's sister Keiko (MInori Omi)

That might not seem like very much, but it's an elegant depiction of family dynamics on the homefront during World War II: the Hojo family's increasingly frazzled attempts to keep itself grounded and unchanging as Japan grows more and more resource-strapped is more than enough story to hold one's interest. Where this shifts from "holds interest" to "the year's best anime, and a solid contender for the year's best animated feature of any sort" lies in two other places.

One of these is the setting: Eba and Kure are both very near to Hiroshima, and from the moment it starts in 1933, In This Corner of the World takes great pains to constantly remind us of precisely where we are in time, down to the month and even the day. Though the characters don't know it, then, they're living under a ticking clock, and as life gets harder and harder through the war, the viewer's awareness that August 6, 1945 is coming closer and closer invests everything, no matter how small, with the weight of epic tragedy. When the bomb falls, there's still enough of the film left for it to transform from the story of a family somewhat helplessly trying to keep the traditional ideals of Japan alive, into a story of how the nation and its people had to re-invent itself, with the survivors of the war forced to unify and change if they were to survive the peace.

The film sugarcoats none of this: it's not as gutting and harrowing as the classic Grave of the Fireflies, another animated feature about life after wartime, because that's quite a high bar for harrowing animation, but there's a bluntness and clear-eyed horror here that hits hard nonetheless. Films that unsentimentally grapple with the effect that war has on daily life aren't terribly common, to say the least, and this is a profoundly affecting attempt to fill that space.

Besides this emotional heaviness, the film's other great strength is in the way it deploys style. Suzu wants to be an artist, and film sticks to that, even after she has to make way for other priorities in her daily life. In This Corner of the World tries to very literally depict the world through a painter's eyes, starting with an endless succession of backgrounds that are either watercolors, or extremely adept digital mimicry of watercolors. The character themselves are filled in with soft, shaded colors, depicting a nuanced and thoughtful awareness of how light falls and interacts with shapes; it's some of the most handsome 2D animation to come along in many years, polished and rich. And that's not even mentioning the moments where Suzu's artistic imagine takes over the film's world: a representation of an American bombing raid as a series of colorful paint blotches erupting like a field of flowers in the sky is surely one of the most arresting images in any 2017 film, animated or otherwise.

The result of all this is a film that's tremendously beautiful and tremendously sad. The evocation of Suzu's mindset through the imagery and the racing chronology of the story structure, mixed with the social implications of the narrative and the necessarily grave turn it takes towards the end, is moving, upsetting, and at the end, weirdly hopeful. I've little doubt that my extremely positive feelings towards the film come from a bias towards animation, but if any film this year – or this decade – argues for the importance of animation as a vessel for complex, rewarding adult narratives, this is the one.

Next up: Our five-film tour of some of the year's lower profile animated releases ends with the horror-tinged Spanish import Birdboy: The Forgotten Children.

Reviews of Eligible Animated Contenders:
The Big Bad Fox (France) reviewed by Tim Brayton
Coco (US) reviewed by Jorge Molina
The Girl Without Hands (France) reviewed by Tim Brayton
The Breadwinner (Ireland/Canada/Luxembourg) reviewed by Nathaniel 
The Emoji Movie (US) reviewed by Sean Donovan
The Boss Baby (US) reviewed by Nathaniel R
Loving Vincent (UK/Poland) reviewed by Tim Brayton
Bird Boy: The Forgotten Children (Spain) reviewed by Tim Brayton

Comments

[Dan]

Among the films eligible for animated film Oscar this year, this is probably the best-reviewed movie next to Coco. Apparently critics saw it and liked it, so it is baffling to me that so far it receives only one nomination for Annie awards.

It has been a great year for Japanese animated films.
My top four are:

The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl
Your Name
In This Corner Of The World
Lu Over the Wall