POMPO: THE CINEPHILE 12A
Screen dazzle…
★★★★★ OUT 29 JUNE CINEMAS
Movies about making movies come in many flavours. Some are deep (8½), some dizzy (Tropic Thunder), others pure delights (Singin’ In The Rain). While director Takayuki Hirao stresses dazzle over depth in his anime entry, he invests this lively love letter to film with droll humour and glee: a giddy affection for cinema pops out of every manic frame.
Pompo (voiced by Konomi Kohara) is a hyperactive and tyrannical overgrown child. She’s also, wittily, a Nyallywood film studios mogul, famed for delivering B-movies with titles such as – ha! – Guns Akimbo to a strict 90-minute runtime. When she commissions super-keen assistant and art-film obsessive Gene (Hiroya Shimizu) to direct her script, he accepts and soon discovers a truism: that would-be filmmakers will accept hell to make movies.
While the connection of suffering to creativity is one of many platitudes Hirao peddles, his direction revels in invention. Glistening images and reels of celluloid stretched into eternity impart a romanticised sparkle to proceedings; elsewhere, Hirao brings knowing reserves of wit to on-set mishaps involving difficult-to-direct goats and hungry wolves. A delirious end stretch about editing, crowd-funding and marketing keeps the energy levels up as Gene’s sleep-deprived eyes droop, with the meta-mischief stretching to one last, playful gag: precredits, the action ends bang on 90 minutes. And, cut!
THE VERDICT Surface-level insights aside, there’s much to enchant in this energetic anime valentine to cinema.