After Burning and Drive My Car, the literary work of Haruki Murakami is again adapted to the cinema, but for the first time in animated film. Brilliant and poetic, Blind Willows, Sleeping Woman is on view from March 22.
Giant frog, furious earthworm, tsunami… Kamoulox?!
Tokyo, March 2011. Japan is struggling to recover from the destructive tsunami that has just hit it. Kyoko, still in shock, cannot break away from the news channels where the dead are counted live. Her husband, Komura, can’t bring her smile back.
One day, when he comes home from work, he finds a letter addressed to him. Kyoko leaves him. He then embarks on a journey to understand who he is, trying to both remember and forget.
Katagiri, a colleague of Komura, has an even sadder daily life than him: in his forties, single, bald and paunchy, he is no more fulfilled in his personal life than at work, where he is exploited beyond reason.
While he finds himself in a bad patch, he meets Frog, a giant frog. The animal needs Katagiri for a crucial mission: to save Tokyo from Worm, a giant earthworm hidden in the bowels of the city and responsible for earthquakes…
All the poetry of one of the greatest contemporary authors
Awarded several times, translated into no less than fifty languages and appreciated by millions of readers around the world, Haruki Murakami is an essential contemporary author.
If some of his most famous works (1Q84, The Lovers of Sputnik, Kafka on the shore) remain exclusive to literature, others have been the subject of notable film adaptations (Burning, Drive My Car).
This is now the case with Blind Willows, Sleeping Woman, a collection of poetry published in 2006. But that’s not all! Indeed, the animated feature film is a real compendium of Murakami’s work, since it is also based on other short stories by the author present in collections such as The Elephant evaporates Or After the earthquake.
Gebeka Films
Polyphonic and poetic, this choral film brilliantly concentrates the themes explored by the writer: self-sacrifice, everyday heroism, the need to escape through dreams…
In this modern fable with dreamlike accents, the characters get lost in their inner jungle, in search of answers. A sometimes brutal and disturbing, sometimes moving incursion into the lives of employees in search of meaning, Blind Willows, Sleeping Woman is an open window on Japan and Eastern thought, on its quirks and wonders.
Japanese talent and poetry sublimated by French technique
Crowned with a Jury Prize at the last Annecy International Festival, this little animated gem combines poetic beauty and technical prowess. If the environments are all handcrafted, reminiscent of the most elegant Japanese prints in their colors and lines, the animation of the characters is the result of a 3D as discreet as it is precise.
Gebeka Films
“As directorexplains filmmaker Pierre Földes, my goal is to make an innovative film, which tells in an original way a delicately magical story, anchored in a banal daily life upset by cataclysms as interior as real.
To show this interiority within a magic realism, animation is for me the perfect medium, because everything must be recreated from scratch, thus resulting in a reinforced shift from reality.”
Conceived as an invitation to an inner walk, and thereby to personal questioning, Blind Willows, Sleeping Woman concentrates all the poetry of a genius of contemporary literature in a jewel of Franco-Japanese animation. A little pearl that will leave you dreaming, to discover at the cinema from March 22.