In This Corner of the World

Torre DeRoche
Aug 9, 2017 · 2 min read

I booked in to see In This Corner of the World at the Melbourne International Film Festival only because it was one of the few films that hasn’t yet sold out. I decided to embrace the bubble hopping experience of seeing a film I wouldn’t normally see.

It’s an animated Japanese film set in Hiroshima during WWII, just before the nuke, told from the perspective of a young girl, Suzu, who leaves her small town in Hiroshima to marry a man in the next village of Kure. The story captures a state of calm, meditative domesticity unfolding against violent, senseless war.

Suzu loves to draw and make stories from the events of her day, seeing beauty and excitement where others don’t. Her art is persuasive, causing a grumpy friend to see an seascape differently one day, ruining his cynical relationship with the scene when she paints the white capped waves to look like cute rabbits jumping across the water.

But the cost of her talent is absentmindedness. She’s so focused on dreaming and seeing the world in her imaginative way that she makes clumsy, forgetful errors. She is young and naive, adjusting to married life, her new family and village, and wartime all at once, and yet she stays brightly positive despite the challenges.

One day Suzu is outside tending to her garden when the sky begins exploding with bombs. It’s the first airstrike and an entirely strange vision to her eyes. As she looks up to the sky, the explosions became splotches of paint in a blue sky — yellow! pink! lavender! white! — because, through her vision, she is already turning this awful situation into art and beauty.

“I wish I had my paintbrush,” she mumbles to herself. She’s so preoccupied with making art out of life that she forgets her own safety, and someone else has to help shield her from the shrapnel.

I was moved almost to tears during this scene. We always have the power to turn even the most dark, terrible, meaningless situations into art and even beauty, which is a way to reclaim that which is taken from us, I believe.

Torre DeRoche

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