#63: A Branch of a Pine is Tied Up (2017)

Director: Tomoyasu Murata

Screenplay: Tomoyasu Murata

Synopsis: Following on from a major disaster, one half of two female twins contemplates the loss of her sibling.

It seems a rotten thing to cover this short, especially as after I'll praise it, you the reader will curse me as it'll be difficult to see. But to write about anime, I feel you have to step outside that term to also include Japanese animation in general, not only encompassing experimental work but areas like stop motion and puppetry. There's an unexpected delight in seeing eggs made from clay, painstakingly motioned into cooked ones in a tiny handmade pan, and as I hold animation above even most live action cinema, little details like this which have to be relied on to be made from imagination, reference and what materials are at hand are to be admired. To focus an image in movement to life is special in two dimensional animation, and likewise stop motion from any country is a tactile, arduous medium which ultimately rewards the creators.

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And in this particular case, seeing the literal gray sludge hand animated to subsume a model village, director Tomoyasu Murata is using the medium to touch upon centuries long history in Japan of natural disasters, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami one which is immediately evoked by the story of the film. That incident, and all the fallout from it including the Fukushima power plant crisis, has been burnt into foreign viewers' minds just from news images. But imagine actually being Japanese, seeing these images in a place on the other side of your country, or living where one of many entire towns that were swept away into nothingness were, or losing a loved one in such a town. Such images clearly had a direct influence on Murata's short, which uses a fairy tale aesthetic to deal with the loss that such an event would cause. Through two twin girls with doll like appearances - no lips until, when see using makeup in a fail, they're painted on, big eyes and identical appearances behind black hair - they are expressed as archetypes of curious, youthful figures caught in the midst of this.

Enough is painted about them to have sympathy. A mother briefly seen, with a haggard grey doll mask used enough before her disconnected sitting position is, and throwing an ashtray at one of the daughters' head when they squabble over a jigsaw, revealing more of her before that single scene leads to her immediate departure. The crammed, murky home with a full sink and dripping tap, tiny representations of junk food when the girls are left by themselves for a long time, representing their world isolated together before the disaster comes. A sense of playful joy when they spray paint on an outer wall, or when they are in the woodlands. Even a pastiche of the type of anime on their handmade television, involving a giant robot, normally thought of as Japanese animation briefly seen.

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The fantastical elements feel less like escapism but part of the symbolism of loss and Murata's clear interest in the spiritual in terms of the material. A humanoid rabbit who, when we first see him, is actually performing a prayer ritual when the girls find him in a flower enriched woodland field. The giant snow globe of a mountain, connected to a realm one of the girls ends up in after the disaster, becomes as much a fairytale McGuffin as it tragically causes the separation, after a violent argument, between the girls. What the ending actually means, with one being with the humanoid rabbit, and shots of someone between them floating in the air, is entirely subjective but it cannot help but feel like a happy ending in spite of the tragedy that took place.

The resulting short, only seventeen minutes long, is beautiful. The music by Tatsuhide Tado, ethereal with tradition Japanese influences, helps as much as a marriage of visuals to sound, enough spoken without any dialogue. Again, it is a shame the short will be more difficult to find as it is the sort of work that many could love, maybe even find more accessible than more easily available "anime", but gets stuck in a festival cycle and never leaves it. Sad as it touches upon a deeply serious subject matter in a sensitive, exquisite animation style. Enough that I hope Tomoyasu Murata will eventually make a feature work or at least have a healthy filmography even of merely shorts, whichever way getting a wider access beyond his homeland.

From http://voltashow.com/fileadmin/_processed_
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