Coicent (コイ☆セント, 2011)

The year is 2710 and the city of Nara is celebrating the 2000^th anniversary of the relocation of the capital city of Japan to Nara.  A larger-than-life hologram of the legendary Queen Himiko (170-248AD) of Wa (ancient Japan) welcomes visitors in the style of a modern day tourist group leader.  Teenager Shinichi (Kensho Ono) and his buddy are enraptured by Himiko’s beauty and hope that they will meet girls as beautiful as her during their stay in Nara.  Before he can get very far, a strange white shika deer (Kappei Yamaguchi) steals his bag and Shinichi gives chase.

In a parallel story we learn that Himiko has been brought back to life by Madame President (Masako Isobe) using a mysterious robotic technology for a purpose that is equally mysterious.  But as in many a sci-fi story (Chobits, Yokohama Todaishi Kikō, Time of Eve), this android-human hybrid develops her own feelings and desires.  Himiko tries to escape her creator and her two henchmen sons (Aniki is voice by Testsu Inada and Otōto by Takehito Koyasu) who resemble clowns seem more powerful because they are riding on red and blue oni (demons).  Our heroine climbs out of the giant President’s building and through the bumbling of one of the henchmen brothers gets knocked falls from the tower onto the back of the white shika deer where she is inadvertently “rescued” by Shinichi.  Himiko disguises her identity by transforming herself into a teenage girl called "Toto" and Shinichi is awestruck.  They tour Nara together and begin to fall in love.  Will this teenage romance have a happy ending or will Himiko be recaptured by her creator Madame President?  It’s a wild and unpredictable, but thoroughly entertaining journey easily enjoyed at just 26 minutes.  Be sure to watch the end credits or else you will miss out on the dancing shika!!

When Sunrise animation studio announced Coicent (コイ☆セント/Koi☆sento, 2011) back in 2010, they dubbed it a “super science-fiction romantic comedy” (ANN), and it certainly does have a smattering of each of those genres.  It’s a fantastic blend of old Japan, new Japan, and future Japan, with skyscrapers, shrines and Buddha statues cropping up close together like the layers on a pop-up storybook.  Viewers unfamiliar with the historical and mythological figures and symbols might be scratching their head at the goings on, but die-hard anime-fans are used to head-scratching.  The central character, Shinichi, scratches his own head quite a bit as he is thrown from one surprising scenario into the next and we as the audience go through a similar range of emotions from bemusement to surprise and delight. The character designs and backgrounds are all spectacular.  

Shinichi's inadvertent rescue of Toto aka Himiko

The only drawback to Coicent for me is its unfortunate official “English” title.  I would have much preferred Koisento or Koi☆sento to this nonsense pseudo-English.  The title is a bit ambiguous in katakana, but I would presume that the “koi” is meant to be “love”.  “Sento” could be a number of things, but my educated guess from the context of the film is that it refers to the moving of the capital (遷都).  The capital city of Japan has moved many times throughout history – its location was traditionally dependent upon where the emperor was living.  Tokyo has been the capital since 1868 (the beginning of the Meiji era).  Before that it was in Kyoto for nearly 7 centuries.  Nara was the capital during the reign of many emperors, the last being during the Nara Period up until the death of Emperor Kammu in 794. 

 

Cast dance sequence from the closing credits

Director Shūhei Morita (森田修平, b. 1978) was nominated this week for the Oscar for Best Animated Short for Possessions (九十九/Tsukumo), his contribution to the Short Peace (2013) omnibus.  Morita grew up in Nara – which would explain the wealth of imagery from both the historical and mythological past of the region – and graduated from Kyoto University of Art and Design in 2001.  He has done animation work for MTV Japan, the NHK, and Studio 4°C.  Since forming his own studio Yamato-Works in 2003 he was been developing his own independent animation vision in collaboration with other production companies. 

Coicent can be found on Hulu in the US.  In the US it also shares a Blu-ray with the short anime Five Numbers! (ノラゲキ！, Hiroki Ando, 2011): Coicent / Five Numbers [Blu-ray]. The film has its own stand-alone DVD and Blu-ray in Japan:

Koisento DVD or Blu-ray (JP only, no EN subs or dubs)

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2014

The Undertaker and the Dog (葬儀屋と犬, 2010)

“Mukashi mukashi.  .  .” (Once upon a time. . .), begins Shin Hashimoto’s 2010 animated short The Undertaker and the Dog (葬儀屋と犬 /Sōgiya to inu, 2010) in the age-old opening of a Japanese fairy tale.  The story continues in the style of a typical fairy story, telling us that in a land far, far away there lived a beautiful princess.  But, if the shaky aesthetic with smeared black ink on an unevenly paint-washed background wasn’t enough to suggest that all is not what it seems in this “fairy tale”, the sight of the madly grinning princess with darkly stained lips and cheeks will surely tip you off that this is no ordinary tale.  Particularly when she runs off towards a modern cityscape and is unceremoniously run down by a taxi cab. 

This is the story of Snow White turned into a horror story.  The dwarves, painted with a smear of yellow gather around her body as flies circle around the red flower that has grown from her belly.  We then see a montage of brief vignettes: the quiet cemetery, a violent mob attacking an object (perhaps a turtle?) with sticks, a close up of a turtle, a large man dragging a cart through the mob.  The large man is the undertaker, who approaches the corpse of the princess but the dwarves try to keep him away from her so he brutally attacks them.  The scene is shot from interesting perspectives including the “camera” itself being punched “in the face” and one dwarf falling on his face with the legs of another fallen dwarf looming in the foreground. 

As the undertaker passes a fence he spots a mangy bitch walking upright on her hind legs with her overlarge breasts heaving as she leads her litter of scruffy, half-starved pups in a somber march.  He reaches into his cart, now teaming with the corpses of the dwarves and offers the bitch one of their bones.  An odd moment of kindness from a man who a moment earlier demonstrated only cruelness and heartlessness.  The atmosphere of this grotesque short is accentuated by the strangely captivating music of Hiromi Ohta. 

Shin Hashimoto (橋本新, b.1979) is a member of the CALF animation collective.  A Tokyo-based artist, Hashimoto did his undergraduate and graduate studies at Tama Art University (aka Tamabi). Hashimoto is known for his nightmarish animated shorts such as Beluga (2011), which played widely at both domestic and international animation festivals and received a Special Jury Mention at Animafest Zagreb 2012.  Check out his work on Vimeo.  To see the film in full resolution check out the new DVD/Blu-ray L'Animation Indépendante Japonaise, Volume 1.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2014

Beluga (ベルーガ, 2011)

Hans Christian Andersen’s pitiful Christmas tale “The Little Match Girl” has inspired several animators from Charles Mintz’s colourful 1937 cartoon to Roger Aller’s sentimental The Little Matchgirl (2006) for Disney.  There was even a kawaii anime short as part of Mushi Pro’s 52 Hans Christian Andersen Stories (アンデルセン物語) for Fuji TV in 1971.  Yet, no matter how hard one tries to make “The Little Match Girl” lovely, there is no avoiding the fact that it is a truly grim story. 

Thus, it is fascinating to watch Shin Hashimoto throw sentiment aside in his film Beluga (ベルーガ, 2011), which opens and closes with the traditional tale of the girl with the matches - but with a surprising, open-ended twist at the end.  Bilingual intertitles at the opening inform us that the girl could not sell any matches and so “takes shelter in a nook and lights the matches to warm herself.”  We see her hand, drawn almost as if scratched away from black celluloid, as she reaches into the box for a match.  As she lights it, instead of being warmed by memories of happier times from the past as in the original story, we are plunged into the stuff of nightmares. 

A man appears to be hanging in terror upside-down, chicks peck rapaciously at a worm brought by their mother, a barely dressed women runs frantically through a blood red forest possibly in search of her lost child.  It is a series of grotesque scenes of desperation and horrific violence with a short reprieve in the middle in which a prickly little creature and the young child stroll together in the sun.  But this moment of cheer is short lived.  They come across a man urinating on a tree and are moved to commit acts of violence on him.  The film crescendos, with the aid of an impressively dark piano and violin score by Marei Suyama (NGATARI), into an orgy of senseless violence before returning us to the cold world of the match girl alone on the street. 

The biggest mystery of this film is its title.  There are no sea creatures depicted in the film and the imagery in my mind of belugas are quite sweet à la Raffi.  I suppose it can be a brutal world for beluga as well – particularly if they encounter a polar bear or an orca. Yet the world depicted in Hashimoto’s dream sequence are not those of natural predators in the wild.  They are terrifying acts of violence for the sake of violence.  There is no denying Shin Hashimoto’s talent as an animator, but be warned, his subject matter is not for the fainthearted. 

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2014

Shin Hashimoto (橋本新, b.1979) is a member of the CALF animation collective.  A Tokyo-based artist, Hashimoto did his undergraduate and graduate studies at Tama Art University (aka Tamabi). Hashimoto is known for his nightmarish animated shorts such as The Undertaker and the Dog (2010).  Beluga played widely at both domestic and international animation festivals and received a Special Jury Mention at Animafest Zagreb 2012.  Check out his work on Vimeo.  To see the film in full resolution check out the new DVD/Blu-ray L'Animation Indépendante Japonaise, Volume 1.

Director:

Shin Hashimoto

Script:

Nobuaki Doi

Shin Hashimoto

Music:

Marei Suyama (NGATARI)

Piano:

Taro Honma

Violin:

Eyuko Suzuki

Sound:

MIMICOF aka Midori Hirano