Dis­cov­er this avant grade war dra­ma 40 years in the making

Based on the first book by Kazuo Dan, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Hana­gata­mi caps off a tril­o­gy of anti-war films which began with Cast­ing Blos­soms to the Sky and was fol­lowed by the director’s final film, Labyrinth of Cin­e­ma. As one char­ac­ter remarks towards the end of Hana­gata­mi, it’s a tes­ta­ment to ​“life in Japan dur­ing the war, [that] was for­got­ten after the war.”

Although derived from a lit­er­ary source, a lot of Obayashi’s own child­hood is tied up in Hana­gata­mi. Speak­ing in an inter­view includ­ed in the film’s home video release, the direc­tor speaks of his generation’s wil­ful avoid­ance of pol­i­tics, and will­ing­ness to go along with what their gov­ern­ment defined as jus­tice. His film cre­ates a fas­ci­nat­ing ten­sion between the care­free­ness of his main char­ac­ters and the know­ing doom on the hori­zon, per­sis­tent­ly sup­pressed until it’s sim­ply too late.

Con­ceived even before the director’s West­ern break­out, Hausu, Hana­gata­mi remained in devel­op­ment for 40 years, with Obayashi receiv­ing his ter­mi­nal can­cer diag­no­sis just as the film was leav­ing pre-pro­duc­tion. It’s fit­ting, then, that Hana­gata­mi is a long and leisure­ly reflec­tion on life and its val­ue, and how eas­i­ly it escapes us. The sto­ry fol­lows 16-year-old Toshi­hiko, played by Shun­suke Kubozu­ka, who is some 25 years Toshihiko’s senior but brings plen­ty of youth­ful earnest­ness to the role.

Yet no mat­ter how peace­ful the land­scape or how much peo­ple try to sup­press or ignore it, war looms. The old-fash­ioned back­drops and colour-tint­ing bring a sort of height­ened arti­fi­cial­i­ty; every moment wit­nessed feels like a con­tained, rose-tint­ed act of remem­brance. There are no flashy spe­cial effects at play, every­thing feels appro­pri­ate­ly ana­logue in keep­ing with the French New Wave tech­niques that first inspired Obayashi in the 1960s. In the afore­men­tioned inter­view, Obayashi speaks of the New Wave as a response to war, to the last­ing wounds inflict­ed, so it makes per­fect sense both the­mat­i­cal­ly and per­son­al­ly for him to revis­it this style of filmmaking.

Even his more laid­back and less sur­re­al­ist works have more than a touch of the exper­i­men­tal, such as his roman­tic com­ing-of-age sci-fi The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. In that film, Obayashi uses colour – and the absence of it – as an expres­sive tool, rep­re­sent­ing some­thing going wrong with the pass­ing of time.

Threads can be drawn from The Girl Who Leapt Through Time through to Hana­gata­mi, which shares a sim­i­lar­ly lan­guid pace and idio­syn­crat­ic visu­al style. Obayashi was always inter­est­ed in the poten­tial of film not just as a tem­po­ral medi­um but as a tex­ture to be altered and played with, using com­posit­ing, over­lays, tint­ing and crude ani­ma­tion via draw­ing on frames. Hana­gata­mi feels like anoth­er evo­lu­tion of the director’s fre­net­ic surrealism.

Both a show­case of and ele­gy for the youth stolen by war, Hana­gata­mi is epic in length and scope but inti­mate in focus. It’s a film that mix­es a sense of child­like inno­cence with the deep fore­bod­ing of Japan’s nation­al­ist war as it creeps over the hori­zon – though we nev­er see the phys­i­cal effects of that war, the men­tal scars per­me­ate every frame.

There’s a con­stant, inter­gen­er­a­tional mourn­ing run­ning through­out the film, too. Not just one for Obayashi com­ple­tion­ists, Hana­gata­mi is a mov­ing sto­ry of remem­brance, for the boys who died fight­ing in Manchuria, and the boys who are about to go and die fight­ing the Amer­i­cans; all of the life that was tak­en and is about to be taken.

Hana­gata­mi is avail­able on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK via Third Win­dow Films on 6 July.