Despite Haruki Murakami’s worldwide popularity, it’s only recently that film adaptations of his work have taken on real prominence, with acclaimed films like Burning (2018) and the Oscar drive my car (2021). Now, an animated film is taking an omnibus approach, combining half a dozen of its short stories into one fuzzy, alluring new tale. The first feature film by director Pierre Földes, Blind willow, sleeping woman skillfully captures Murakami’s combination of understated magical realism, sexual neurosis, and loneliness.
The script is a deft act of remixing. Rather than a simple anthology of vignettes, each inspired by a Murakami story, this tale combines them into episodes from the lives of three related characters. Komura, the main character of the “UFO in Kushiro” story, therefore also experiences the events of “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” and “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women”. Katagiri, the leader of “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo”, is his colleague and now also participates in “Dabchick”. Komura’s wife, Kyoko, is reconfigured as the protagonist of “Birthday Girl”.
News collections are neatly curated and rearranging them can be risky. “UFO in Kushiro” and “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” both come from the 2000s after the earthquake, whose six works each deal with the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake in Japan in 1995 in their own way. unsure of their life. The film is set immediately after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, in which the characters’ shared boredom means a giddy collective traumatic response. When the Earth itself is in literal upheaval, why wouldn’t do it a human-sized talking frog suddenly appears in front of you?
That’s what happens to Katagiri, a sad-bag employee whom the frog enlists to help fight a giant worm that will supposedly cause another earthquake in a few days. Far from a fantasy epic, most of this narrative thread sees the unfortunate stubbornly refusing the call to adventure. Meanwhile, Kyoko is transfixed by the news of the devastation caused by the earthquake, leaving Komura to watch TV undisturbed. A listless Komura drifts between encounters with various other characters – from a doctor’s appointment with his young, philosophically-minded cousin to a wacky trip out of town, where he can’t stand up for a sexual partner. eager potential, to a failed attempt to find Kyoko’s cat.
All of this is rendered through an animation technique reminiscent of rotoscoping. Földes shot live performers playing all the scenes, but rather than plotting these shots, the animators simply used them as references. The result is a deliberately eerie vibe that matches the film’s mercurial, liminal world. A scene can go from realistic to fantastic or vice versa in the same shot; a ghostly apparition of a memory might appear in a bar or the illustration of a pansy might float above a bed. Murakami’s fiction can often operate on dream logic, and this adaptation inhabits this space perfectly.
Blind willow, sleeping woman hits theaters on April 14.
