Shiki-Jitsu

This felt a good 20 to 30 minutes too long for me, which holds it back from greatness in my eyes. That being said, I still liked a good amount of this film, and there were moments throughout that were very effective and powerful.

It's clear to see it as a personal film for Hideaki Anno, and it's different to anything else I've seen from him. I think with this, he proves he can do grounded drama without the sort of sci-fi elements found in his best known movies/shows... but I just wish this had been assembled and edited to be a bit tighter, because to me, it didn't feel like it needed to be more than two hours.

This movie is closer to a character study that to a conventional story. The minimal plot we have is about a struggling director who returns to his hometown and meets a young a girl who lives in her own fantasy world and follows strict rituals seemingly just to get by every day. Their unconventional love runs its course over 30 days and sees the girl confront her deamons and the director get more involved than he wanted.

The girl is so desperately runs from her past that we would believe something extraordinary and horrible happened to her but as we find out what happened was horrible yes but all too ordinary. The main similarity between this movie and Hideaki Anno's other more famous work Neon Genesis Evangelion is that personal trauma is given subjective significance, it is shown as dramatically as it is felt. We we think of family trauma most of the time we think of the death of a loved one or serious physical/sexual abuse but as it is shown it this film verbal abuse and neglect alone can have absolutly devastating effects on a person. Despite what she tells herself the girl's family is alive she probably hasn't been touched in any way but throughtout her formative years she was insulted, blamed and compared, hasn't been given the respect or even validation as a person she deserves, which collectively let to her current state.

Anno's roots in animation are felt as the movie is beautifully shot, I especially like the contrast between the lush imagery of the girls place and the bleakness of the industrial town representing her fantasy and the outside world respectively.

Ayako Fujitani portrays madness very believably, while Shunji Iwai is subtle and precise. My only grievances are that it may be needlessly complicated and long.

I must say, I was really not expecting this film... I gave this film a view without any idea of the plot or basic info to back it up and I finished the film with an uncomfortable feeling. From a personal perspective I can assure you this isn't simply the story of a "crazy" girl and a washed out filmmaker...this is the story of a profoundly sorrowed girl and exploring how she deals with this sorrow in her day to day life. The reason she may not have jumped that ledge on the roof may very well be due to those lies she kept telling herself and her whole "ritual", she only needed someone to appreciate her and stay with her and teach her life isn't as painful as she was brought up thinking it was.

I can't believe how well fujitani played this role...As someone else mentioned, why hasn't she done more film? She was even TOO convincing in her role...I could have filled a litre of water with my tears.

The uber-emotional plot and performances aside, the visuals were equally wonderful, especially her "secret" basement filled with red umbrellas, water, and her bathtub. I haven't seen such unique and beautiful set designs for a while.

I'll wrap this up...AMAZING movie 10/10 getting a DVD copy soon, i HAVE to. You definitely HAVE to watch this movie.

When I say this movie is for "fans of poetry", I mean simply that it is for people who enjoy delving into the subtlety and brevity of thoughts, for people who enjoy symbolism and are unafraid to dive into a challenging puzzle of seemingly disjoint ideas, for people who can appreciate the fantasy in--as Anno puts it--"the ennui of everyday life".

And if you were bored by the first sentence of my review, then you're probably not the person I'm describing. If you haven't guessed, I'm trying to scare off most of the crowd. ;)

Yes, people who rely heavily on plot shouldn't bother. But I'm not saying that this film lacks in plot. On the contrary, it has one of the most complicated plots if you manage to piece it together. This is not a movie to be taken lightly, and its beauty & meaning runs not on the surface but somewhere deep beneath--as in the movie where her innermost thoughts are stashed away in the "secret basement" of a 7-story building.

I would compare this movie to Fellini, Godard and Tarkovsky--except that I generally don't like any of those directors at all. In this case, however, Hideaki Anno is able to take all the brilliant elements of those classic directors and fuse it with vivid colours, imagery, a spectacular dialogue, and phenomenal acting, which is something those European directors may have overlooked in their unidirectional approach to "New Wave" cinema back in the 60s-70s. This is a film unlike any I have ever seen, because it challenges the mind while keeping the senses alive. It can be taken either philosophically or simply as a feast for the eyes, whichever you like.

The dialogue, which I've already mentioned, bears further mentioning. Unfortunately I had to rely on the English subtitles, but even that was a work of literature. It's as if the philosophical works of Confucious, Descartes and Kant had been given a real-world, human voice. Heady stuff. And the script is expertly delivered by Ayako Fujitani in a performance that ranks up there with the best portraits of creeping madness I've ever seen.

On a final note, I just want to touch on the ending--don't worry I won't ruin a thing. I've read some criticism; apparently people have been disappointed. I admit that I, too, had been expecting something different. But now, having watched the film several times over (a requirement!), I see that the ending couldn't have been more perfect. I can't find a single flaw in this movie. 10/10.

If you're interested in this film, it's probably because you're a Hideaki Anno fan. This is probably his most obscure film: it only ran in a museum of photography and a few other small outlets in Japan, and in some scattered film festivals worldwide. And for good reason: this is also certainly his most self-indulgent piece so far. You wanted Anno-style work, well Shikijitsu will give it to you, but in all the bad ways as well as the good.

First, the good: the sets and cinematography are stunning. For the shooting, an entire unused building was rented out and filled with strange, colorful objects. The shapes and contrasts are beautiful: a water-filled basement inundated by blue light, a white table with four bright red phones.

There are some brilliantly original set tricks: for example, the windows on the different sides of the building are of different-colored tinted glass, so that when lightning strikes, it appears as sometimes red, sometimes blue or green. The camera work feels distinctly anime-style.

But beyond this, I felt the film didn't have much to offer. Remember the psychedelic and baffling last two episodes of Anno's Evangelion? Take those and lengthen them to 2 hours, and remove the previously established context and character development that gave them some amount of meaning. The film's entire dialogue is an abstract, mostly incomprehensible mishmash of pseudo-philosophizing about love, loneliness, the boundary between fantasy and reality, family feuds and a bunch of other random themes Anno likes to wax poetic about. It keeps flipping from one theme to another, making meaningless over-generalizations about life ("The world is filled with cruelty and malice", etc), never cohering into any kind of sensible system that I was able to understand. All this, frankly, was boring. By the end I was squirming in my seat for the thing to end.

Shikijitsu is packed with symbols that don't symbolize anything. One line that sticks particularly in my mind in this respect is a comment about train tracks: they go on forever without ever once touching, and yet they are part of a single unit. A touching, beautiful metaphor, surely --- but for what? It is never made clear what this is meant to represent. A metaphor with no referent is empty and weak, no matter how beautiful it sounds.

Shikijitsu gives the appearance of depth, but doesn't really have it. Or if it does, it was impossible to discern in the general confusion (at least for me). What's left is a beautiful, superficial film, full of angst and color.

Recommended for photography lovers or die-hard Anno fans.