Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman review – pleasant but empty Haruki Murakami animation

This new entry into the MCU (Murakami Cinematic Universe) comes not long after the widespread acclaim and success given to Lee Chang-Dong's Burning in 2018 and Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car in 2021. But where those live-action adaptations took individual short stories from Haruki Murakami’s deep and varied catalogue and turned them into sprawling, lengthy dramas (both are over two-and-a-half hours long), this international animation headed up by writer-director Pierre Földes goes the opposite direction, cramming six separate Murakami stories into a single interlinked narrative, barely coming up to 100 minutes.

The rotoscope animation does, at the very least, allow more visual freedom. Murakami’s work is often defined by a shaggy-dog surrealism, seemingly inconsequential matters turning into essential quests for meaning. To this end, we follow two office workers at a bank: one is a depressed middle-aged busybody who is drawn into a fight to save Tokyo, courtesy of a life-sized frog (called, helpfully, Frog) who keeps badgering him to join the battle; the other one is listless following a failed marriage, throwing him into a existential crisis with casual sex thrown in (Murakami, lest we forget, is a frequent entrant into the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Awards, though I’ve always been appreciative of his horniness).

In the moment, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is diverting and amusing enough, the animation team effectively capturing the ghostly urban alienation that sits at the heart of these stories. Melancholy abounds everywhere, assisted by transparent figures populating the urban topography, or criminal figures drawn as buzzing, angry lines.

But a series of missteps scupper the film. We’re in a nervous and tetchy Tokyo in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear power plant failure. But the texture of that background fear goes undeveloped in the stories themselves – they exist merely as set dressing. It’s crude, particularly given Japan’s unique and painful history with nuclear technology, the only country to date to have been attacked with a nuclear weapon.

This is exacerbated by the decision to draw the characters as specifically Japanese and then dub them into Queen’s English or generic American voices. This isn’t a children’s animation – this just leads to a sense that the specifically Japanese cultural context of Murakami’s work is being used as mere iconography, lending the whole thing an air of Orientalism and divorcing these themes from their original contexts. It certainly does not engage these themes with the depth they deserve (by contrast, Burning may have shifted the work to South Korea, but it did so with respect to both the Korean and Japanese cultural contexts).

In adaptation, Földes doesn’t seem to have done much more than merely transplant the central images of these stories to the screen, not really paying attention to the elusive subtexts underpinning them, nor their strange sense of levity. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is pleasant enough, but ultimately empty.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is released in UK cinemas on 31 March.

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