Text|Zhiyong
In March, the cold schedule was completely detonated by "Journey to the Bell Buds".
Director Xinhai Cheng rushed to the hot search every day during the promotion period in China, driving the film to achieve the amazing result of pre-sales exceeding 100 million in the cold schedule. The film broke the box office record of the premiere day of a Japanese film when it opened in the mainland, and is very likely to attack the total box office record of a Japanese film (575 million) held by Makoto Shinkai's phenomenal predecessor "Your Name". The audience followed and fulfilled another three-year contract with Shinkai Makoto.
In terms of word of mouth, although the audience evaluation of "Journey to the Bell Bud" is not as good as "Your Name", it has significantly rebounded compared with Makoto Shinkai's last work "Weather Child". The three films just make up Makoto Shinkai's "disaster trilogy", and "Suzuya Journey", which is known as the director's masterpiece, does bring together many classic elements from his works: boys and girls desperate for love, the "world system" setting that closely links personal emotions with the fate of the world, modern mythological stories born from Japanese folklore, beautiful atmosphere, delicate pictures like wallpaper, and so on.
However, this film is significantly different from Makoto Shinkai's previous work in theme, the story no longer stops at pure love, but in the protagonist's journey to prevent the earthquake disaster, retelling the national traumatic memory and healing the wounds of each survivor who has experienced the disaster. This social care, combined with the ultimate conceptual setting and audiovisual performances, makes "Suzuya Journey" perhaps the most completed work of Shinkai Makoto to date, and also sends the first healing of spring to all audiences who have gone through these difficult years.
The evolution of the "World System" Mad Demon
When it comes to Makoto Shinkai's works, the concept of "world system" is undoubtedly one of the most prominent features. The so-called "world system" is a common setting in daily comics, and the emotional relationship between the male and female protagonists in such works is directly connected to the fate of the entire world.
Makoto Shinkai has always been keen to write the pure love story of the male and female protagonists in the grandeur of the "world system". From the untouchable love across the universe light years in the early work "Voice of the Star", the youthful mood in the background of science fiction war in "The Other Side of the Clouds, the Agreed Place", to the "disaster trilogy" with meteorite impacts, heavy rain, and earthquakes as the core events, and the catastrophe as the visual representation of the bond between the male and female protagonists, "World Series" has always been the core setting of Makoto Shinkai's works.
Such a setting makes his films often show beautiful and shocking pictures to the extreme, but the mood of the story is easy to appear thin. Simple pure love stories are often difficult to support an extremely grand world view, and Makoto Shinkai once fell under the title of "wallpaper director" who could not tell stories.
"Suzuya Journey" is still a work set under the "world system", and the hero and heroine travel all over Japan to close the door between the world and the world after death, and strive to avoid the release of the "vermido", which is a direct visual symbol of the earthquake. Although it is extremely large and conspicuous, only the male and female protagonists can see its existence, and the bond between the two determines whether the "vermido" will smash into the world and cause a major earthquake.
But as Makoto Shinkai himself mentioned in his creative notes, there are three main lines of this film, in addition to the love story of the male and female protagonists, the road story of the two walking through Japan, and the growth story of the heroine Suzuya healing the inner wounds after the disaster, are also crucial. The extension of the main line makes the plot richer, and also makes the "world system" setting more realistic.
In terms of road stories, this is Makoto Shinkai's second attempt at road movies after the mediocre "Children Chasing Stars". After many years, the director is obviously more able to master the rhythm of the genre, the customs and customs of various parts of Japan, the mutual help of female group portraits and Suzuya along the way, and the tension with the protagonist's disaster resistance are just neutralized. Although the rhythm of the passages can be more compact, the concept of "world system" in the highway genre is no longer limited to a grand setting that can be summarized in one sentence, but really derives the memories and daily life of group portrait characters, which is undoubtedly a great improvement in Shinkai's narrative ability.
In terms of coming-of-age stories, since the male protagonist Kusanagi was turned into a chair shortly after the opening, Suzuya had to run around with the chair. Although Suzuya and the "objectified" Kusata also stage a fairy tale love story like "princess and frog", the interaction between the two is basically limited to the curious interaction between people and talking and running chairs, without much CP sense. The chair male protagonist is more like Suzuya's partner on her growth path, although the film still defines the relationship between the two as love at the end, but for most of the film, the main line of love is obviously weaker than the growth line and the highway line.
After no longer clinging to pure love above all else, the "world system" is set in the road and growth story, and the friendship and family affection around the protagonist are more solid. The completion of the film has been greatly improved, and it has also made it easier to move the audience with the real theme of the story, mourning and healing.
Trauma is at war with everyday life
The entire country of Japan is in the Pacific Rim earthquake zone, which makes encountering earthquakes a daily life for Japanese people. In "Journey to the Bell Bud", with the outbreak of "Vermido", the earthquake alarm that may sound on the mobile phones of all passers-by at all times is exactly this daily display.
But the 311 earthquake of 2011 was far beyond the daily endurance. The 9.0-magnitude earthquake, the fifth-strongest earthquake in history, triggered a massive tsunami and a nuclear power plant leak, eventually killing and missing tens of thousands of people. The great trauma caused by the 311 earthquake to Japan's national memory laid the foundation for the earthquake metaphor and mourning atmosphere common in Japanese film narratives in the post-311 era. The meteorite falls and heavy rain in the first two parts of Makoto Shinkai's "disaster trilogy" are often interpreted as the screen aftershocks of the 311 earthquake.
In "Journey to the Bell Buds", Makoto Shinkai directly wrapped the earthquake in the framework of folklore mythology, transforming the protagonist's process of stopping the earthquake into a conceptual system of closing the "door" and preventing the "vermido" from gushing out. The visual simile of the earthquake makes the film the most "blockbuster" of Shinkai Makoto's works, and every time the "vermicom" slowly rises into the world, the film presents a devastating explosion audio-visual and has a strong impact on the audience.
The impact is not just on the senses, but truly shocking to the soul. The film sets the protagonists "to the gate" through five ruins to be closed in Japan, and is set at the site of five major earthquakes in Japan over the past century. The journey of closing the "door" again and again has become a tour and retrospective of the traumatic memories of the Japanese national earthquake.
Makoto Shinkai's wisdom is that he does not directly point out the film's review of Japan's earthquake history, making the film a drama of crying misery and abuse, but instead sets the ruins as more tangible daily places such as schools and amusement parks. People's memory of trauma is not heart-wrenching grief, but vaguely forgetting the existence of the scars of the ruins, unable to remember the daily life in those places, but inadvertently faintly showing a sigh, which is also more in line with the psychological state of those who experienced trauma in reality.
The process of the protagonist closing the door to fight the disaster is set as a confrontation between daily memory and traumatic memory. The traumatic memories that rush out with the "vermicom" are embodied in yellow threads woven into a net, rising into the air and covering the earth. The bell buds that confront it kneel and connect with the ruins, feeling the warm daily memories experienced by the people here, drawing energy from them, and creating sinking blue and yellow lines entangled.
This is the most wonderful stroke of "Journey to the Bell Bud", the abstract battle of two emotions in the national memory, which is embodied as a physical duel between the yellow line and the blue line, rising and sinking. The sinking of daily memories accumulates as the "weight of human hearts" for earthquake victims, calming the earth, and making the "world system" setting truly point to social care for mourning and healing.
Give you a small chair
Shinkaicheng's social care is also reflected in the duality of the identity of the male protagonist. He is both the object of Suzuya's attachment and possessed by a chair with only three legs. This chair is the relic left by Suzuya's mother, who died due to the earthquake.
The lack of a leg does not hinder the hero who is attached to the chair from running with all his strength and his determination to prevent the earthquake. The male protagonist of the chair has become a symbol of the strong will of the earthquake survivors here, and the bond gradually established by the male and female protagonists is no longer just a simple love relationship, but also points to the growth path of Suzuya as an earthquake survivor.
After the male protagonist sacrificed himself to suppress the "vermi", if he wants to regain his bell bud, he must face the traumatic memories that he has deliberately erased, and open the "door" to the location of the earthquake. At the end of the film, the film reveals that the earthquake that happened to Lingya was the real 311 earthquake.
Although Makoto Shinkai's "World Series" works have always been grand, the direct connection between the end of the film and reality only really opens the social pattern of his works for the first time in the opening of the 311 earthquake trauma "to the door". Suzuya's seal of the "vermi" behind the door also carries the mission of healing the spiritual wounds of the entire Japanese nation 311.
From the closing journey of the first two acts to the opening of the door in the third act, the film's method of healing trauma is no longer just a blind suppression of grief memories. Shinkai Makoto encourages the audience to open the door of his heart that has been tightly closed due to injury like a bell bud, which will not be swallowed by trauma, but only by calming the scars that may crack at any time with courage can he truly return himself to peace and safely close the door and embark on a new journey.
This courage and strength do not need to be found in others, but come from oneself. At the end of this film, Suzuya rescues the male protagonist from the chair and meets his childhood self who mistakenly entered the "door" during the earthquake. She gave chairs to her childhood self to encourage her to keep going. The chair here becomes a symbol of the emotional reincarnation of the story, and it is Suzuya's own belief in the future that drives this reincarnation. This self-healing through time and space is the biggest tear point of this film, and it is also the real landing point.
Although the trauma healed in the film is the Japanese national trauma caused by the 311 earthquake, it is also in the landing point of self-healing, expanding from a special reference to earthquake trauma to a general reference to all psychological trauma. The film was born at the beginning of the post-pandemic era, and it may be the medicine that traumatized people urgently need. We must not forget the past, but we do not have to dwell on the pain of the past, this is not a self-touch, but a thousand sails of relief.
Perhaps to the surprise of all Shinkai Makoto fans, "Journey to the Bell Bud" has gone a step further in the style of the "world system" and has become a masterpiece of the healing "crying film". The last "crying film" that exploded in the mainland market was "Send You a Little Red Flower", and "Journey to the Bell Bud" may also be summarized as "Send you a small chair". In the retrieval of daily memories and the belief in self-healing, this chair with one leg missing can also go into the distance.