The Death Lullaby

After watching Midori the other day the thing that impressed me about it above all, was the fact that behind all the grime and animated sleaze that appeared on my screen was one man, a man named Hiroshi Harada. He apparently did some other stuff and I decided to check them out. This one was on YouTube so I watched it first. LET'S ANIME IT UP DUDES AND DUDINES!



What Happens
This is a bit more artsy and less straight forward than the other stuff I've watched here but the gist of the movie is that there's an elementary school aged boy with some freakish large protruding teeth (like a beaver but on the bottom). He lives in an old industrial town whose frequent fog saved it from being firebombed by the US during World War II. His mother is sick with some sort of disease (they might have specified in Japanese what it was but the subtitle just said "disease") and the boy is constantly harassed by a trio of larger boys from his class. The boy's life is one of isolation and loneliness.

The boy's mother eventually commits suicide and the boy goes to live with relatives becoming even more lonely and depressed while his classmates harassment also intensifies. Eventually the boy comes to the end of his rope and kills the three bullies with a knife after they beat him up one last time.

This pretty simplistic tale of schoolyard bullying is juxtaposed with bullying on a national scale as interspersed with the boy's story is the story of his town getting destroyed so that the government can build a highspeed railroad and the Narita Airport much to the dismay of the people who live there and all of it comes to a head with a bullet train tearing ass through the old town, causing buildings to implode and people to be sucked into the vortex of progress as the boy with the protruding teeth runs from the bullies he knifed to death.

Thoughts
In a weird bit of serendipity I actually just read about how the Japanese government basically seized a bunch of land from people in order to build the airport and the protests that followed. The reason I read about it: I saw the cover to the 1979 heavy metal album Narita by the band Riot and was trying to find out what the creature on the cover was supposed to be. I ultimately failed to determine what the thing on the album cover was, but did read all about the massive protests that surrounded the construction of the airport so it wasn't a total bust.

Seriously though, what is this thing supposed to be?

Footage of those very real protests actually make it into the movie. A lot of live action footage does to be honest. Over the course of the movie we get shots of real factories and pollution intermixed with traditional animation and still images giving the entire thing a weird fever-dream quality. This other worldliness is further enhanced by the minimalist Moog synthesizer soundtrack.

I did not find this to be soul crushing as Midori was, but it is still a sad story that will make viewers feel bad, though I supposed that depends somewhat on how often you were bullied as a child or how many times your hometown was bulldozed to make way for an international airport.

Giant Robots: Only a toy giant robot in a shop.
Lesbian Subtext: Nope.
Boobs: Yup. The protruding toothed protagonist bites a woman's breast years before Pearl Jam would sing about Jeremy doing something similar.
Body Horror: Only if freakish teeth count as body horror.
Magical Teen Girls: Nope.