By Cáit Murphy

This episodic, animated adaptation of several short stories by Murakami Haruki turns its melancholic focus on three characters living in Tokyo following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Komura (Ryan Bommarito) and Mr. Katagiri (Marcelo Arroyo) work in the lending department of a downsizing Tokyo bank. At home, Komura’s unresponsive wife Kyoko (Shoshana Wilder) has been gazing statically in the dark at TV reports about the earthquake. She breaks up with Komura by letter and re-evaluates her past desires. Komura takes time off and finds meaning in encounters with other women.

Meanwhile, lonely and timid everyman Katagiri finds the anthropomorphic, Nietzsche-quoting Frog (Pierre Földes) in his apartment, who is only visible to Katagiri (à la Donnie Darko). The amphibian enlists Katagiri to help him defeat a giant underground worm from causing a devastating earthquake in Tokyo in a week’s time. It’s later revealed that Katagiri has been hospitalized for schizophrenia.  

Using sophisticated animation techniques that incorporate real-life actors and their expressions, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is visually playful,  its array of Kafkaesque, animalistic, and transformative imagery capturing the fluidity of Murakami’s prose. The cigarette smoke and jazz-infused metropolitan settings—grey office buildings, ghostly crowds, a kitschy love hotel, dreary apartments and bars—feel lived in, while the surreal flourishes are grounded by realistic anxieties—earthquake survivor accounts, running death tolls on the news, reports of job loss—that creep in around the edges. The lack of tidy narrative suturing may leave some viewers unsatisfied, but the film’s mood, strangely hopeful despite the darkness, gives it real weight.

Cait Murphy