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In This Corner of the World

In This Corner of the World
Directed by Katabuchi Sunao
Released 28 June 2017
Review by Poppy Cosyns

72 years after US airforces dropped The Little Boy nuclear bomb, former Ghibli employee Katabuchi Sunao explores this devastating historical event through a wonderfully vivid new story. In This Corner of the World – adapted from Kono Fumiyo’s manga – follows the life of Suzu, a hopelessly dreamy young woman more focused on her sketchbook than the spectre of war that looms over her home city – Hiroshima.

The start of the film follows Suzu from childhood through to her marriage to port clerk Shushaku, an event which forces her to leave her tight-knit family and relocate to the neighbouring city of Kure. Katabuchi presents the film in a dream-like, painterly haze, forcing the audience to engage with Suzu’s distracted perspective. This approach is at times disorientating, but as the events of the film unfold, this familiarity with Suzu’s outlook lends real pathos.

Aside from the absorbing and emotionally affecting narrative, this is a film of breathtaking beauty, the sketchy, hand-drawn style reminiscent of My Neighbors the Yamadas and Princess Kaguya.  As in the latter, there is a spirit of experimentation to the animation and during what is perhaps the film’s most harrowing scene, the animation degrades to a scrawl and colour is stripped away entirely.

While constant air raids, food rationing and crippling inflation are reminders of the film’s context, the majority of the scenes are comfortingly banal episodes of Suzu’s daily life, as she negotiates the dynamic of her husband’s family and embraces her new role as housewife.  This is a remarkably human story and the mechanics of war are kept very much to the background.