Review: "Departures"

A lot of film lovers' heads snapped in surprise when "Departures" won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film this past spring. "Waltz with Bashir" from Israel and "The Class" from France were considered very strong contenders, both with very serious subject matters. So when the little Japanese film about a cellist who becomes an undertaker prevailed, it was viewed as another example of the Academy Awards favoring the heart-warming over the challenging.

But "Bashir" and "The Class" both had fairly big U.S. releases last fall, whereas "Departures" is just now making its way around this country. Now that a wider audience is actually getting to see it, I think most of the carping from cinephiles will cease.

What a wonderfully life-affirming movie this is about death. It's an emotionally resonant story without a trace of maudlin sentiment.

Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) has finally achieved his dream of joining a major orchestra, until it is suddenly dissolved because of poor attendance. Crushed, Daigo decides to move from Tokyo back to his tiny hometown so he and his wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) can live rent-free in his late mother's house while he looks for a job.

He quickly finds a prospect, which requires no experience, and the pay is excellent, too. The ad is somewhat vague, though, and the reference to "departures" makes Daigo think it is a travel agency. But the stern boss (Tsutomu Yamazaki), who hires him after they've only exchanged a few words, explains that it's a typo, and the job entails working with "the departed."

By this, he means the dead.

Japanese custom had long been that the family prepared the body of its loved one for burial, but as times change this service has been taken over by the undertaker. Daigo and his boss come in, clean and dress the body, apply makeup and so on.

Sometimes this is done at a crime scene, with the deceased alone and in a poor, even revolting state. Usually, though, the work entails preparing the body in front of the grieving family members, in a ritualistic ceremony that is utterly beguiling.

Director Yojiro Takita and screenwriter Kundo Koyama approach this material with a smile on their lips, at least at first. There are some funny scenes as Daigo adjusts awkwardly to his new profession. On his first day he is made to dress up as a corpse while his boss performs the rituals on him for a trade video.

But the film gains heft and depth the further it goes. Daigo hides the exact nature of his new work from Mika, and when she finally learns what it is she reacts with shame and revulsion. A childhood friend orders his family to ignore Daigo, and advises him to get a real job.

The lovely musical score by Joe Hisaishi accents the burial scenes without intruding upon them, heightening the connection Daigo feels between himself and the departed. Everyone dies, he reasons, and would want to be treated with such dignity when they go.

"Departures" arrives late, but it's exceedingly worth the wait.

3.5 stars

DVD review: "Waltz with Bashir"

“Waltz with Bashir” was not only one of the best films of 2008 – it was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar – it also represented a cinematic watershed, blending and transcending the genres of animation, documentary and fiction.

Centering on the Israeli war in Lebanon during the early 1980s, “Bashir” is more than writer/director Ari Folman’s diary of his experiences as a young soldier caught in insanity of war. Unable to remember key sections of his time in battle, he sets out to interview comrades and strangers alike in an attempt to recover his own memories.

Folman accomplishes this through hypnotic animation that is somehow both hyperrealistic and dreamlike. The slow-moving images, which resemble cut-out photographs being slowly manipulated, are crude by Pixar standards. But this simplicity lends an evocative note to the horrible events they portray.

The DVD comes with a robust set of extras, which shed light on the process by which a combination of real people and actors were videotaped, and that footage was then animated using a combination of traditional animation, Flash animation and 3-D techniques. In the short but information-dense making-of documentary, we learn among other things that chief animator Yoni Goodman switched from drawing with his right hand to his left because he felt the results were “too pretty.”

For those who want more detail on the animation process, another feature shows the step-by-step transformation of four pivotal scenes from video to finished film. There's also a Q&A with Folman at the Cannes Film Festival.

And Folman supplies an engaging commentary track that adds new layers to the search for his lost memories. In one of the more amazing sections, he talks about how Israeli soldiers on leave would travel by helicopter from the frontlines of battle to quiet Jewish towns in 20 minutes, only to encounter residents who were barely aware of the war.

Movie: 3.5 stars
Extras: 3 stars

Review: "Waltz with Bashir"

For 20 years now, we've enjoyed a second Golden Age of Animation, starting with "The Little Mermaid" and right up through "Wall-E," which was my favorite film from 2008. What I liked most about "Wall-E" was that it wore the clothes of a kiddie film -- cute robot, lots of whiz-bang action -- but it had a lot of sobering things to say about mankind. It employed cutting-edge technology to subtly demonstrate how dependent on gadgets we as a society have become.

I think we're starting to see the beginnings of a new shift in animation, toward movies that are thoroughly adult in subject matter, with no pretense at being appropriate for little kids. Oh, there was stuff like this in the past -- "Fritz the Cat" and "Heavy Metal" -- but they had juvenile sensibilities, replete with sex and violence. They were still cartoonish, in other words.

A couple years ago "Persepolis" made a big splash for its first-person depiction of the life of Marjane Satrapi, who grew up in Iran around the time of the revolution, went to study in France, and returned home again. I liked it but was not blown away by it. The full potential of adult animation had yet to be tapped, I thought.

I believe "Waltz with Bashir" has reached that new threshold. This Israeli movie, written and directed by Ari Folman, is also a first-person account of traumatic events that took place in the Middle East. In this case, Folman attempts to reconstruct his missing memories of the Lebanon War more than 25 years ago by interviewing some of his old comrades.

Right from the start, the animation style grabs you by the throat. A pack of slavering dogs bursts out of an alley and hurtles down the street. The animation looks intentionally unsophisticated, like cut-out drawings that are being slowly moved around. Folman and his chief animator, Yoni Goodman, shot interviews with real people on video, then animated them using traditional animation, Flash animation and 3-D techniques.

In news stories written about this movie, it's been referred to as "an animated documentary," but I'm not sure that description really fits. If it was just straight reporting of the events surrounding the massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila, I might buy that. But the whole premise of the movie is about how memory is unreliable, and is blotted out or reconstructed in different ways by our brain's attempts at rationalization. "Waltz" is essentially an exploration of the consciousness.

The dogs from the opening sequence are a dream of one of Folman's ex-comrades. When he talks with Folman about how the Israeli war in Lebanon changed him, Folman professes not to remember much of anything about his time as a 19-year-old soldier.

Troubled by this, he sets about interviewing more than a dozen people, who describe their own memories of that time. Sometimes they contradict each other -- Folman's only really clear memory is of swimming in the sea with a friend named Carmi, but Carmi insists he was never there. The interviews include grunts, officers and even a television journalist who stumbled across the carnage.

Folman resists turning the war sequences into an indictment of Israeli militarism, or Muslim and Christian extremists. Although the war action is what's on the surface, the undercurrents of this movie are all about the tricky workings of the mind. You get the sense Folman would have undertaken this journey to reclaim his memories even if the gap included events that took place outside of war. It's the loss that haunts him, not just the terrible experiences themselves.

"Waltz with Bashir" is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the upcoming Academy Awards, but not, interestingly, in the Best Animated Film category. I'm guessing the filmmakers decided on that strategy. Theoretically, it could also have been nominated for Best Documentary.

Ultimately, "Waltz" defies categorization, as it represents a watershed in the artistry of animated film. Let's hope some enterprising American filmmakers, having seen what this movie and "Persepolis" have done, will also decide to leave cartoons behind and make animated movies for adults.

3.5 stars out of four