15/06/2023 - This fatalistic, optimistic and hilarious Murakami adaptation successfully translates the author's idiosyncratic style through inventive use of animation

The new animated feature film by writer-director Pierre Földes takes us on a mesmerizing journey, contemplating – there is no way of putting this nicely –how it feels to be a loser. This is not surprising, given that this is an amalgamated adaptation of six short stories by Haruki Murakami who is well-known for his explorations of the anti-ideal male psyche. Földes manages to narrow the thematic overflow from all these tales by trimming and ingeniously interweaving them into an organic whole. He transforms Murakami's prose into a more accessible poetic language, injecting laugh-out-loud humour into even the most ponderous moments and producing a clear message: Wake up! Don’t be an empty, nothing-person! But also: even if you are, that's fine – we are all just different flavours of flavourlessness.

The protagonists of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman are as uncool as they come. Devoid of colour, cultural taste or anything that would enrich their lives in any way, they are less than basic, running on autopilot, slowly descending into a spiral of despair. Komura (Ryan Bommarito) is a miserable bank employee whose life is as empty as a trashcan on the evening after rubbish collection. His wife (going-on-ex-wife) Kyoko (Shoshana Wilder) is even sadder, so much so that she suddenly vanishes without a trace, except for a message telling a numbed-up Komura "You are good and kind and handsome, but living with you is like living with a chunk of air." And then there is Katagiri (Marcelo Arroyo), Komura's co-worker, a balding, near-sighted, astigmatic, pot-bellied, meek, and – you guessed it – miserable bureaucrat to whom nobody would give a second look. While Komura's revelations are cued by his wife leaving him and the spark for Kyoko's emotional transformation is an earthquake, Katagiri is woken out of his slumber by a frog, an anthropomorphic amphibian who insists on being called Frog, not Mr. Frog, who is voiced by the director himself and who takes Katagiri on a journey to save Tokyo from a giant earthquake-inducing worm.

The Japanese author's trademark, passive yet somehow still endearing characters are at it again, therefore; that is, going with the flow and letting other, more dynamic people bring about change. But, for the first time ever, they are animated in so doing. One wouldn’t think it would amount to much given their depressive tendency towards inactivity, but Földes makes great use of animation's flexibility to loosen up the static nature of a film composed of little else but melancholy conversation. He does this by submerging us in a muted colour palette while using intermittent hallucinatory sequences to convey the characters' confused perception of their emotional states. Furthermore, the use of rotoscoped character models on water-coloured environments results in an inventive fusion of uncanny realism and dreamlike enchantment. The uncomfortably familiar faces and awkward body movements of our loser protagonists exist alongside surrealist imagery, challenging the idea that beauty is confined to a realm of its own, fenced off from the desert of the banal.

Echoing Ryusuke Hamaguchi's approach in Drive My Car, Földes takes advantage of the uniformity of Murakami's characters to channel multiple short stories through a single protagonist: Komura. This keeps the film from feeling like an overly fragmented, constantly restarting anthology, but the experience of reading a short-story collection is nevertheless preserved thanks to Földes' decision to intersperse Komura's struggle with the stories of Katagiri and Kyoko. And though the lack of direct connection between their plotlines does affect the pacing sometimes, they complement each other satisfyingly, offering explanations for otherwise puzzling events.

The character of Frog is emblematic of this. He lifts everything to another level. Despite appearing only in Katagiri's storyline, his presence permeates the entire film, providing us with a down-to-earth but ultimately optimistic view of the protagonists and of life's sometimes painful banality. Through a frog's words of wit and wisdom, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman communicates how easily we humans can become lost inside of ourselves, but it also celebrates the fact that we are only ever one step, one person or one decision away from finding our way out.