English Dub Review: BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN

My entire life I’ve always been enamored when beauty arises from catastrophe. After 9/11/01, I recall almost EVERY car being driven featured American flags and a common sense of togetherness in a time of uncertainty and constant changes. Three years ago, my hometown of NJ had a pretty serious Nor’easter that forced me to flee and live with my girlfriend a couple of states away. Apart from a couple of weeks of me going home to get my stuff, I haven’t been back since and am happier now. Enter the massive Tokyo earthquake of 2011, had it not happened, a feature film like Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman may not have happened.

The hallucinogenic animated feature using a ground-breaking animation style that also utilizes a live-action 3D motion-capture process, comes by way of director, writer, producer Pierre Földes, son of famed cg-animation pioneer Peter Foldes. Pierre wove us a tale that follows a lost cat, a giant talkative frog and a tsunami that help a bank employee without ambition, his frustrated wife and a schizophrenic accountant to save Tokyo from an earthquake. The script is based on stories by acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami (Drive My Car).

Regardless of the impetus of the idea for the animated feature, the execution is largely a win here. While “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” is in fact the name of one of the stories by Murakami, the entire collection featured in the book of the same name becomes the pathos of this feature-length film. Linking all of the stories together through whatever was the commonality appears to be the challenge here, quite evident in the back-and-forth pace between the different starring characters, a common trait of French adaptations of any foreign media, in this case Japanese. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman may have felt more at home with a Japanese anime adaptation than a French-made one due to the fact that French films prefer a bunch of dialogue whereas in anime the dialogue is hardly the point because it is going to be adapted into a hundred of languages anyway, so focal points are usually on big scenes, tense action, and romantic set-pieces.

Still, Pierre Foldes sticks the landing here. At a couple of points of the movie I was definitely feeling the hurt of this near two-hour tale thinking, “what the hell is going on here?”, but the characters and a lot of their stories were enough for me to stay entertained and engaged. I’m not sure the connections between each of the stories being adapted were legitimate, kind of the same feeling I had after seeing Cloud Atlas, but a solid piece nonetheless.