THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
The name of Masaaki Yuasa is no longer as closely kept a secret as it once was, and the man is now recognized, after more than twenty years of activity, as one of the most stimulating multi-media creators of Japanese animation. contemporary. In France, it’s the series Devilman crybaby (2018), broadcast on Netflix, which helped familiarize the public with its psychedelic paw, doped with the dynamism of the line, the extravagance of the colors as with all kinds of protean inventions.
With him, animation is a psychotropic experience that can be tasted with dilated pupils, connoisseurs still remembering the film’s highly perched delicacies. Mind Game (2004) or from the series The Tatami Galaxy (2010). Ride Your Wave, presented at the Annecy Festival in 2019, is the second of his feature films to reach French cinemas.
After Lou and the siren island (2017), aimed at children, this new film in turn targets a wider fringe of the adolescent audience, taking the path of romance. Hinako moves to a coastal resort to combine business with pleasure, that is to say to pursue higher studies while going to tease the wave from time to time on his surfboard. Following a fire in her apartment building, she falls in love with Minato, an apprentice firefighter who came to save her on his providential basket.
Together, they form a little blue flower couple, with their regressive codes and tics, like chirping together a goofy song. But the day comes when Minato dies at sea after rescuing a vacationer. Mourning, Hinako falls into a lifeless daily life, but discovers that all she has to do is sing the famous song to reveal the spirit of the deceased in the slightest bit of water.
Traces of delirium
From a more commercial invoice, Ride Your Wave lets himself be approached like a bland and inconsequential bluette, before his funeral turn reveals a sicker film. Split by the disappearance of Minato, the story passes twice through the same places, the same situations, to give them, alternately, either the shade of “marshmallow” happiness, or that of dead loss.
The main subject is the work of mourning, the metaphor for which lies in the reappearances of Minato, a watery ghost, and the manic relationship his girlfriend has with him. The animism that justifies the fantastic here does not prevent mourning from being designated as madness, a solipsism: Hinako becomes desocialized by dint of talking to water bottles, puddles, inflatable toys and all kinds of receptacles where she sees floating the soul of her beloved. The Yuasa-style romanticism retains traces of delirium in him.
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