In This Corner of the World (2016)

[Jake Lipson]

Title: In This Corner of the World

Tagline: Torn apart by war. Brought together by love.

Genre: Drama, Animation, Romance, War, History

Director: Sunao Katabuchi

Cast: Non, Yoshimasa Hosoya, Daisuke Ono, Minori Omi, Natsuki Inaba, Megumi Han, Nanase Iwai, Shigeru Ushiyama, Mayumi Shintani, Tsuyoshi Koyama, Masumi Tsuda, Kanata Omori, Kotone Tachibana, Hiromi Seta, Kikuyo Semi, Nozomu Sasaki, Tomoko Shiota, Hisako Kyoda, Mina Meguro, Yuine Ikeda, Kenta Miyake, Yukitomo Tochino, Takumi Lavernhe, Hinako Kogure, Tomoki Lavernhe, Kohei Kiyasu, Masaaki Sekine, Asuka Ohgame, Manami Tanaka, Manami Sugihira, Tsubasa Miyoshi, Yuki Yoshida, Kazuko Mine, Shota Tateishi, Kosuke Sakaki, Daishi Kajita, Miki Hase, Rio Kawakami, Kouki Saho, Kaya Kimura, Saori Ogino, Risa Sakurana, Kei Tomoe, Yuuki Hirose, Aoi Mizuki, Nao Yagi, Tengai Shibuya III

Release: 2016-11-12

Runtime: 130

Plot: Japan, 1943, during World War II. Young Suzu leaves her village near Hiroshima to marry and live with her in-laws in Kure, a military harbor. Her creativity to overcome deprivation quickly makes her indispensable at home. Inhabited by an ancestral wisdom, Suzu impregnates the simple gestures of everyday life with poetry and beauty. The many hardships, the loss of loved ones, the frequent air raids of the enemy, nothing alters her enthusiasm…

I'm not really sure if this should go in the movies forum or the Blu-ray forum or the bargains forum, since there are elements of what I want to talk about that would apply in all of the. So, I'll just post it here. Moderators, if you feel like this would be more appropriate in one of the other places I mentioned, feel free to move it for me.

I did a search and wasn't able to find anything about this film on the forum yet, or in many places at all, honestly. I was fortunate enough to see it last Saturday at my local art house, but its theatrical run seems to be extremely small, since its box-office gross is not even being tracked by Box Office Mojo.

In This Corner of the World is an anime film about a young girl living in Japan during World War II. She gets married to a boy she barely knows at 18, and it's really just about her adjusting to that and learning to love him and keeping their family together throughout the period of the war, including all the air raids and bombings, and her family lives in Hiroshima, so, obviously, you know where that's going. There aren't a lot of twists to it really, it's just her life and how she is affected by the presence of the war. I don't want to say very much else because I think it should be seen, and in creating this thread my goal is to bring it to everyone's attention, since it doesn't seem to have a big campaign. The only reason I know about it is because the trailer ran ahead of something else at my theater and it looked good.

Trailer: .

I'll also say that if this exact same movie were made in live-action, it would likely be the kind of thing that the Academy goes absolutely nuts over. As-is, because of their long-held bias against animation breaking into the wider race, they will likely ignore it outside of the animation category, where I think it is a shoo-in for one of the nominations that typically go to foreign/indie/general-public-unknown films.

Here is a list of the handful of theaters that booked it. http://inthiscorneroftheworld.com/seeit.html. Unfortunately, its run seems to be winding down (my theater closes it on Thursday), but if it is still at one of them near you, I would highly recommend seeking it out. If it's not near you, head over to Amazon; as of this writing, they are taking pre-orders for the Blu-ray for $14.49. I was expecting to pay a lot more for it, so I was pleasantly surprised to see it hit that price point. If the film sounds interesting to you and you can't get to a theater for it, then I would certainly recommend a blind buy at that price.

https://www.amazon.com/This-Corner-...&keywords=in+this+corner+of+the+world+blu-ray

I really thought this film was just extraordinary and was very moved by it. Especially in what has so far been a weaker year for animation in general, it was a wonderful surprise and gorgeous to watch. I hope some of you find it.

 

[bujaki]

My wife and I caught this film the same day we saw Logan Lucky and Wind River. Quite a marathon. All were worth seeing. In this Corner of the World is a story of growing up, marrying, living through a terrible war and a rebirth through love of family found in the ashes of Hiroshima. It's really worth a blind buy.

 

[Edwin-S]

I had seen the trailer for this film earlier and was going to post about it until I saw that the opening date for the US theatrical run. I thought it was out of the theaters there quite a while ago. It was supposed to run in Canada on August 25, I believe.

I really would have liked to see this in a theater, but it was not running in one anywhere near me. Unfortunately, there are only so many 2000 km round trips I can make to see a film. For this year, it was two.

Edit: Correction, the play dates in Canada were from Aug 18 -24. Shout!Factory and Funimation on teamed up to distribute this and couldn't manage to do a better job than GKids could alone. Kind of unusual for Shout!Factory and Funimation to license this. This type of film is normally right up GKids's alley.

 

[Vic Pardo]

I saw this at the AMC Empire in Manhattan on August 11. I had a pretty favorable view of it and wrote it up on Facebook, although I won't post that here because it might be considered spoilerish. It's a low-key film, beautifully animated and designed and an honest portrayal of everyday life in the provinces during the war, but it lacks the emotional punch of other Japanese animated films set during the war, e.g. BAREFOOT GEN and GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES. I did have some reservations about the film's treatment of the war, which happen to be concisely summed up in this paragraph from Teo Bugbee's New York Times review of the film:

"Compared with the fine detail of her home, though, Suzu is drawn with broad strokes. She has the artistic eye to see bombs burst like flashes of colored paint, and the emotional depth to recognize death as a crude scrawl of white pencil on black, yet Suzu asks fewer questions of war than she does a marriage proposal. Bombs drop and cities fall, but Suzu never wonders why Kure needs its navy, or why she should support the war effort. As our window into a world lost to violence, Suzu gives us the chance to see rabbits in rivers, though her rosy view obscures history’s shadows with a preponderance of golden light."

 

[Jake Lipson]

I know this particular post may belong in the bargains forum, but I thought I'd put it here instead rather than create a brand new thread just for this over there since it is in relation to this movie. I just noticed Amazon dropped the price of the Blu-ray+DVD combo to only $11.99. If anybody is on the fence about a potential blind buy, I would go ahead at that price. I can't believe it's that cheap, especially considering its nothing reception at the box office, but will be delighted to get it for that price. Release date is November 14.