Japan rises
Directed by Masaaki Yuasa and Ho Pyeon-gang Netflix
ONCE AGAIN Masaaki Yuasa put out an anime series (Japan Sinks, 2020, available on Netflix — actually his second after the delightful Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!) and once again he flouts expectations, of both his fans and fans of disaster movies. This time though Yuasa may have fashioned not just a quietly subversive disaster epic but the fiction story summing up our feelings in this disaster of a year, 2020.
Where the source novel (by Sakyo Komatsu) focused on government efforts to cope with the cataclysm, Yuasa (with co-director Ho Pyeongang and writer Toshio Yoshitaka adapting) focuses on the common folk struggling to stay alive. Where the novel had mostly Japanese characters, the series takes extra effort to present a more diversified cast: wife and mother Mari Muto is from Cebu, Philippines; popular YouTube celebrity KITE is from Estonia; hitchhiker and amateur magician Daniel is from Kosovo; submarine pilot turned research scientist Onodera — who predicted Japan’s downfall — is a paraplegic (a source of unspoken embarrassment in everyday Japanese society). A sinister religious cult is introduced, its subplot springing a few surprises (and not a little controversy among viewers); the actual disaster setpieces (the various earthquakes, Mt. Fuji erupting, Japan’s promised submersion) look and feel, well, different from the usual onscreen depiction.
When the first quake strikes, Yuasa cuts to four locations: a girl’s locker room (where middle schooler Ayumu Muto is dressing after track practice); an Olympic stadium (where father Koichiro is installing a jumbotron screen); the Muto home where youngest son Go is waiting; and an inflight jet holding Mari, who is coming back to Japan. The locker, stadium, and home sequences are handled impressionistically; mainly brief shots strung together (perhaps the most effective being Ayumu and her classmates flung against a rushing gray background, to land every which way they can). Mari’s plane crashes against a river, resting its nose against a bridge but the actual crash is skipped over — and you realize that perhaps Yuasa didn’t have the budget to visualize the series properly, hence, the elliptical if not downright frugal approach. He may have decided to pour money instead in unexpected directions: a garden lit at night in spectacular purple, blue, and green, as a signal to draw people together; a panning shot of the Shiba-koen district, dim concrete towers lit from below by what looks like a vast bed of coals (glide past the famed Tokyo Tower, upper half hanging to one side); a quietly spectacular overhead shot of a Tokyo suburb some 10 to 20 feet submerged, the water so clear you can still see the streets, the tops of trees and buildings poking out of the gently lapping waves. The family is happily reunited — with next-door neighbor Nanami having found Go and bandaged his eyes, and track-star-turned recluse Haruo coming along — but Yuasa has one more shock in store: bodies dropping from the sky, and a helicopter spinning out of control to end its trajectory in a nearby fireball. His apparent message: don’t expect the usual disaster movie, with tropes and conventions providing comfort in the midst of the chaos — Yuasa has neither the budget nor inclination. Anything can happen to anyone anytime, and probably will.
Japan Sinks