When it comes to Japanese animation, everyone talks about Hayao Miyazaki, Makoto Shinkai, and Masaaki Yuasa.
But today I want to talk about someone else - Shunji Iwai.
Wait, didn't he make a movie?
Shunji Iwai has made many well-known films, and is also known as "Image Writer", "Wong Kar-wai of Japan", "Standard-Bearer of the New Japanese Film Movement" in Japan...
However, in 15 years, this benevolent brother also turned to the field of animation and made an animated film.
As soon as the anime was released, it caused a sensation, winning a bunch of awards at the time, and was also known as the highest-rated animated film in Japan in 15 years.
That's what we're going to talk about today.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > Flowers and Alice Killings</h1>
If you have a small friend who is familiar with Shunji Iwai, you should be a little familiar with this name.
Because the name of the animation is very similar to his self-written and self-directed live-action movie "Flowers and Alice" in 2004-
In fact, the content of this animation also has a lot to do with that movie.
That movie mainly tells the love-hate entanglement between two good friends and a boy, called "The End of Friendship".
This animation is a prequel to the movie, describing how these two good friends met and knew each other when they were in junior high school, which can be called "the sonata of friendship".
Yu Aoi and Apricot Suzuki, who played the two heroines in the movie, also voiced the two heroines in the anime, which can be said to be trying to restore the youth of the year for the audience.
Since the animation is 11 years later than the live-action movie, as Yu Aoi said, it is a little too shameless to play two junior high school students after 11 years as a "big mother".
Therefore, Shunji Iwai uses the [rotoscoping] technique (that is, projecting the captured image picture frame by frame on the ground glass, and then drawing it by hand) to avoid this problem very well.
So let's take a look at today what the highest-rated cartoon in 2015 is about, so that the island goddess can star again with a "sense of shame".
01
Bullying
The story takes place at Ishinomori Junior High School.
The heroine, Alice, is a transfer student who was very unhappy on the first day of class:
As soon as she sat down, the people around her looked at her like she was different.
On the way to school, she was also insulted by male classmates, calling her "demon", and threw chicken wings in her hands.
What is even more infuriating is that during the music theory class, a girl was taken away by a male classmate and did not return it, Alice wanted to lend herself to her, but obviously had some kindness but was cruelly rejected:
All kinds of incidents show that she is isolated, but if it is serious, it is school bullying.
However, she was not the first person in the class to be bullied.
There was another girl before, Mutsu Mumi, who had suffered the same experience.
One day, Mutsumi Mutsumi suddenly went crazy in class and punched and kicked the male classmate who bullied her.
He also called himself Judas to find his killer.
But when she returned to school the next day, Mutsumi Mutsumi looked sober again, but her appearance was completely changed.
She also took a desk from somewhere else and moved it to the back corner.
The classmates were so frightened to see her crazy appearance that they didn't dare to mess with her anymore, and the people who had bullied Mumi Mumi had become her little followers.
In this way, when Alice was later bullied by the whole class, she knew that they were all the same victims.
So with the momentum of the eldest sister,she stepped forward and broke the siege for Alice.
Mutsu Mumi mutsu achieved a gorgeous counterattack in order to get rid of the status quo at the bottom of the food chain.
And out of kindness of heart, helping Alice who also encountered her, this seems reasonable.
But what happened to her crazy self-proclaimed "Judas"?
02
Judas with four wives
It turns out that there is one thing that has been circulating in the school:
Among the previous students was a student named Kotaro Yuda.
During his time at school, he split his legs in four boats at the same time and signed a DIY [marriage application] with four different girls.
A few girls are also real, thinking that on a piece of meaningless paper, pressing the hand poke means "legal husband and wife".
But youth is originally so innocent, and everyone looks forward to love.
They feel that by imitating the behavior of adults, they will really grow up.
So in the course of an exam, the teacher found that a female classmate had added an extra surname to the name of the exam paper: Yuda. (Marrying a chicken with a chicken marrying a dog with a dog)
However, the female classmate said that there was no problem, that she was already a wife, and that her husband was Kotaro Yuda.
Subsequently, the embarrassing scene appeared, and several other wives stood up in turn to show the marriage application.
Several people looked at each other, and only then did they realize that they had been cheated on by the scumbag.
Things got big, it was not good for the school and for Yuda, and Yuda's parents handled the transfer for him.
As a result, a strange thing happened, Yuda was saying goodbye to his classmates at the podium, when he suddenly fell to the ground and fainted.
Then everyone passed out the version: the scumbag's original form will be exposed, and It is determined that he was poisoned and killed by one of his wives.
The rumors of "Judas and Judas' 4 wives" have since spread.
Here's a brief explanation, in the Bible Judas is the great traitor of jesus' twelve apostles, and in the Japanese pronunciation, Yuda's pronunciation is exactly "Judas."
Naturally, Kotaro Yuda's desk became an unknown place.
But anyone who sits in this position will be called "Judas", so the storm bullseye will be transferred to Mutsu Mumi and later Alice, a transfer student.
People's fear of the unknown made everyone wear colored glasses to Yuda's position.
Mutsumi Mutsumi cleverly used rumors to fight back against these bullying, and a Judas soul possession performance scared the students who were afraid of being soft and hard.
03
The secret of flowers
But is there really a so-called "Judas"?
Don't say that the people we watch think the cartoon is ridiculous, even Alice herself suspects that this matter is very strange.
Alice gradually became good friends with Mutsumi Mutsu because of her help.
Of course, there will certainly be no secrets between friends.
So on the day of the school sports day, Mutsumi Mutsumi told Alice the ins and outs of what she knew.
Alice discovers a key character, Arai Hana.
Through Mutsumi Mutsu's account, she and Yuda are front and back tables, and from the day Yuda was admitted to the hospital in an accident, Hana never appeared at the school again.
In order to know the truth of the matter, Alice went to The Flower's house alone to find out.
Alice finds The Flower's house and stages a dead-faced fall to the ground with the Flower.
The intersection of the fates of the two girls begins.
Under Alice's strong trickery, she learned that Hana and Yuda were small from small to large, and they spent various festivals together every year.
The plot of the green plum bamboo horse is either that the boys like girls or the girls who like boys.
This anime falls into the latter category.
Hana loves Yuda and gives each other chocolates every year, and Yuda, as a friend, will naturally return the gift.
On Valentine's Day, the second year of junior high school, Hana sent Yuda a box of chocolates with a letter attached.
love letter?
Of course not, it is [marriage application].
Only this time, Yuda did not reply to the gift, nor did he reply to the letter.
Instead, they find different girls in the class to fall in love and sign marriage applications.
When Hua learned of the incident, she was emotionally excited, and jealousy, hatred, and revenge all poured out for a while.
On the day she said goodbye to everyone in Yuda, she secretly placed a flower wrapped in bees on Yuda's back.
Yuda was stung by a wasp and rolled on the ground in pain, and was finally taken to the hospital.
This incident caused a sensation in the whole class, and the students around the flower were saying that if they were stung by bees, they would seriously go to the Western Heavens.
When she heard these words, she began to worry, worry, even fear.
If Yuda is really dead, then he is a murderer.
Thinking of this, she was awakened every night by the nightmare of being taken away by the police, and she no longer had the courage to walk out of the door for half a step.
In the final analysis, this "killing incident" is not a literal "killing", it represents:
School bullying, Judas rumors, wasp pranks, everyone inadvertently makes all kinds of mistakes.
The objects are different, the results are different, but in essence they are all "small things that concern human life".
As the promo poster says:
This is the smallest killing in the world.
The immaturity of youth, the fabrication of rumors;
Hazy mind, mischievous psychology born of jealousy;
For the distant unknowability of death, but also the fear of death...
But you think that's the end of it?
Of course, as the highest-rated cartoon in 2015, it shows not only the exposure of the "depressive" side, but also the "healing" of youth.
At the end of the film, the two girls wanted to find Yuda and know what happened to him, but they searched all the way to no avail.
Just as they were about to give up and go home, they met Yuda on the way home.
This time, at the strong instigation of Alice, Hana finally plucked up the courage to face Yuda directly.
Yuda also said only one sentence:
"I know it was you who put the bees, and it hurts."
It turned out that The Flower did not kill the boy she liked;
It turned out that Yuda was only worried about the pain of the bee's sting;
The nature of this adventure is not to prove ostensibly that Hana did not kill Yuda, but to kill Yuda again.
Because the disappearance of Yuda means that Hana's love affair is frustrated, for Hana, this is Yuda's "first death".
Although Yuda himself disappeared, he did not really die in the girl's heart, and he hung over The Flower and Alice like a ghost.
Hana is suffering because she can't give up her love for Yuda.
Alice is bullied because of Yuda's influence.
In order to reborn their new selves and continue their lives in the future, they each have a reason to "kill Yuda again", so they become intimate accomplices all the way.
In the end, such a murder is perfectly completed in a beautiful accident, and Hana completely buries Yuda in his memories, leaving him "completely dead".
This is a farewell to the past, and at the same time, the beginning of a new life.