Fresh and Exciting

Expected more

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

4/2/18. Though it's animated movie, it is a serious look at the Japanese survivors of Hiroshima. Experience what it's like to survive nuclear bomb.

Covering the lives of ordinary people in Japan during WWII through their mundane lives In This Corner of the World is successful in making the audience cry without being melodramatic. Without relying on any political side of the war or the graphic nature of its effects it's the life of ordinary people that is focused here, those who have to live through all the horrors in their own home itself. How the whole world around you is cruel and you can still keep your innocence pure is not shown in a supercilious manner but it can be felt through all the light moments.

Reviewers want this exquisite and heartbreaking film to be a tightly focused wartime narrative but that it is not. We follow Suzu through several of life's terrifying (and often involuntary) leaps of faith. We leave home with her, just a girl, and to marry a boy she never recalls having met. We live with her in a marital house that is at times welcoming and at others rank with hostility. We see her reforge her attachments to family and become part of a new one; we see this house become her home, her place of work and something she will fight furiously to defend. There is the numbness and then bottomless acceleration of grief; the desensitisation to loss; a distance, a cold strength by the time more former intimates are gone. An honesty to the development of her marriage, the elements of loving warmth and explosions of tension. The imperfections of characters brought into proximity and friction. A nuanced portrayal of a perceived love-triangle and the way it is both uncharacteristic of stereotypes about this era but also entirely plausible in light of how wartime fatalism shapes emotional experience. Suzu is completely charming in her tirelessly hardworking and yet creatively daydreaming tendencies. Though her life is brutal at times, her perspective on her lot, and on the natural and human beauty which surrounds her, makes the idea of a now forgotten life of domesticity in prewar Japan almost seem appealing! To look back on her, the world that she sketched and painted in her mind's eye, the characters with whom she was co- dependent, feels like looking back with tearful nostalgia toward real friends now lost in time - the same emotions felt at the close of any great film, and in particular, most of the grown-up output of Studio Ghibli (apologies for the predictable reference). Really priceless.

I have previously seen the harrowing Japanese anime Grave of the Fireflies (1988) which depicted the horrors of World War II on Japanese civilians. This brilliant film remains the only Studio Ghibli film to not be distributed by Disney – it was too disturbing for them. With In This Corner Of The World we have a new take on the subject of life in wartime Japan. While this one did not have the impact of the earlier movie for me, it was still a very impressive bit of work. It specifically follows a family in the year leading up to the 6th of August 1945 when the Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The action, however, takes place in Kure, a city nearby.The war is very much in the periphery of the story. Ominously hovering in the background with battleships silently moving into the harbour, military police active on the ground and air raids occurring regularly by the American military. While the horrors of war do escalate, much of the run-time is devoted to the family drama and this is perhaps the one weakness of the film, as the domestic drama isn't entirely compelling and a bit meandering. It means that we don't get as involved with the characters as much as we should and it could perhaps have been trimmed down a little at the very least. However, this negative has to be offset by the positive in the way that the story does examine the lives of ordinary people during this time. We also have the constant advance of time towards what we know to be that fateful August day and knowing what is to come actually generates even more tension than not knowing. When the moment finally arrives, it is understated in a way that is incredibly sinister. A silent white flash, a tremor and then a huge odd-looking cloud in the distance. It is a far cry from the usual way in which nuclear strikes are depicted in films but its very distance and unspectacular presentation creates a curious melancholic and depressing feeling which was quite powerful I thought. The artwork throughout is beautiful – this is a film which could easily pass itself off as a Ghibli product – and it doesn't pull its punches when it depicts some of the horrors of the aftermath of the 'new bomb'. Overall, this is another powerful and artistically strong bit of animation from Japan.