Special Kaboom Anime Series

Children Who Chase Lost Voices (2011)

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wo 21 okt

21:00 EN subs

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The most Miyazakian film by Makoto ‘the new Miyazaki’ Shinkai (Your Name., 2016) is slightly less romantic than usual, instead focussing more on learning to cope with death and solitude. We enter a gorgeous, multicultural underworld, to which our young female protagonist Asuna and her kawaii cat Mimi are irresistibly drawn.

Credits

Regie: Makoto Shinkai
Genre: anime, fantasy, adventure
Speelduur: 116 minutes
Land: Japan
Taal: Japanese
Ondertiteling: English

Storyline

Of all Makoto Shinkai’s films, Children Who Chase Lost Voices (sometimes continued with From Deep Below and sometimes titled Journey to Agartha) has done the most to strengthen his reputation as ‘the new Miyazaki’. Especially Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky (1986) and Princess Mononoke (1997) seem to have inspired Shinkai’s subterranean Agartha, into which our young female protagonist Asuna, without truly knowing why, follows her substitute teacher Mr. Morisaki, who plans to retrieve his dead wife.

So, Orpheus and Eurydice, except that writer-director Shinkai based his story on the similar Japanese myth of Izanagi and Izanami, while plucking the name Agartha from 19th-century European occultism and populating his multicultural underworld with Aztec Quetzalcoatl, among others.

Romance does play a role, but relatively subdued, just as the art direction is less flamboyant in terms of colour, light and settings than we have come to expect from Shinkai. This fits the overarching themes of mourning and loneliness, accepting death as part of life, and learning to truly say farewell. With important supporting roles for cat Mimi and a crystal radio receiver.

The film premiered in May 2011, two months after the gigantic earthquake which would inspire Shinkai’s following ‘Disaster Trilogy’, Your Name. (2016), Weathering with You (2019) and Suzume (2022). But even though in Children Who Chase Lost Voices the earth remains unshaken, we already find the metaphysically transgressive, desperate love stories with which those films would break international box-office records.

Other films in this program:

Relationship drama? Demonic massacre? Romcom? Supernatural adventure story? It’s the nineties, so: it’s all of the above! Toei Animation’s adaptation of Yuzo Takada’s manga series has something for everyone: from budding teen romance to bloody dismemberment – luckily, our Yakumo is immortal. Now, he only has to help that kawaii three-eyed demon become human.

Anthology project with three stories by Katsuhiro Ōtomo (Akira, 1988), who himself directs final short Cannon Fodder (about a world built around cannons), after Tensai Okamura’s comedic Stink Bomb (about someone unknowingly becoming a chemical weapon) and Kōji Morimoto’s highlight Magnetic Rose, combining space adventure with creepy psychological horror – and opera.

Successful coming-of-age story by anime giant Mamoru Hosoda follows nine-year-old runaway Ren and gruff beast Kumatetsu fighting, arguing, and slowly discovering the true meanings of strength, anger, and loneliness. After which, Ren will have to choose between romance in modern-day Tokyo and a beast kingdom rather resembling feudal Japan.

Groundhog Day meets video game. Each time the aliens kill Rita, her day starts over again. As if she wasn’t depressed enough already.

The Great Adventure of Horus Prince of the Sun (1968)

Wonderfully energetic adventure story marked the first collaboration between director Isao Takahata and his protégé Hayao Miyazaki – later founders of Studio Ghibli. With its mythological source material (an epic of the indigenous Ainu) and socialist message (well received by 1968’s students), Horus became known as the first ‘grown-up’ anime.

Even though narrator Yuki fears this might get laughed off as a mere fairy tale, director Mamoru Hosoda has given us a grounded and deeply empathetic film, drawn from his own childhood and mother, who raised him as a single parent.