War’s harsh reality drawn in soft tones
“In This Corner of the World” is a Japanese animation that tells the story of a young woman who comes of age just as World War II is beginning. It starts as a pastoral tale, and then gradually the war starts pressing in, first with rationing and food shortages and later with aerial bombing.
Most of the film takes place in Kure, a naval port that was the site of a major sea battle in 1945. To give you an idea of where the story goes, Kure is less than 20 miles from Hiroshima, the first city destroyed by an atomic bomb.
The animation is handdrawn and delicate, with a color palette made up mostly of pastels, pink and light blue. The characters are delicate, as well. Though the movie ultimately turns on the violence wreaked on a war’s innocent bystanders, the characters are uniformly gentle, almost meek. And so we watch in a kind of dread as 1945 gets closer.
Yet in another way, 1945 can’t arrive fast enough, in that “In This Corner of the World” is 129 minutes, an eternity for an animated film, especially one so wispy in look and so sparing in plot. By the time the movie’s halfway over, viewers may have the paradoxical sensation of wishing the war would get going already. In this way, the film feels very much a cultural artifact not quite making the translation from Japan to America.
Still, there are moments that leap out with a touching quality of poetry, as when the young heroine looks out at a cloud forming in the direction of Hiroshima. It’s elaborate and looks like a mushroom cloud, but it’s years before the atomic bomb. This time it’s just a rain cloud, prefiguring the calamity to come.
There’s also an interesting moment when the heroine gets word of the Japanese surrender. Instead of the reactions that we, within our culture, might expect — such as relief, or resignation, or a sad acknowledgment at the inevitable finally happening — she is bitter with rage, as if ready to take on the U.S. Army single-handedly. It’s a curious moment and gives insight into a people known and feared at the time for their willingness to fight until the last person was standing.