Kensuke's Kingdom is pitch-perfect film-making

Initially premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2023, before being seen at last October’s BFI London Film Festival, this film based on Michael Morpurgo’s children’s book – originally published in 1999 – has now made its way to a more general release.

It tells the story of Michael, an 11-year-old boy, who sets off with his parents and older sister on a sailing trip around the world, after Mum and Dad both lose their jobs.

But Michael is less than happy – not least as his beloved sheepdog, Stella, has had to stay at home, or so we are initially led to believe.

One night, as a storm rages, Michael and Stella are washed overboard, only to wake on an apparently uninhabited desert island.

However, they find help – albeit reluctantly – from Kensuke, an elderly Japanese man who was washed up on the island decades before. Gradually their relationship evolves, as Michael learns to respect and value the environment he finds himself in, together with its wildlife, which Kensuke helps to protect. And as we discover, there are varied reasons it needs protection.

It's an excellent screenplay by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, who has changed aspects of the original novel, but which certainly make sense here. For instance, in the book, the two central protagonists learn to speak each other’s language. Here, they learn only each other’s name, with communication being based more on emotion and expression.

There is also a love of art that they share and helped them learn about each other.

And their art allows the animators to be incredibly creative, from Michael’s log-book drawings coming to life on an origami boat that moves around a map of the world, to an extraordinary sequence of Japanese-inspired ink works that give the audience an insight into Kensuke’s own past.

The animation is superb – hand-drawn and combining 2D and 3D styles, which hark back to early Disney: think the 1937 Snow White and Bambi, both with lush painted backgrounds and 2D characters. As touched on above, here, there is a melding of different approaches throughout and including some simply beautiful vistas.

Directed by Neil Boyle and Kirk Hendry and with a super score by Stuart Hancock, it comes in at a very pleasingly trim 85 minutes.

In terms of the voice cast, Sally Hawkins is Mum, Cillian Murphy is Dad, and Raffey Cassidy is Becky, Michael’s sister.

But the film rests firmly with Michael and Kensuke, and Aaron MacGregor and Ken Watanabe get it absolutely nailed on.

Kensuke’s Kingdom is a beautiful film – both to look at and in terms of its humanity, compassion, exploration of what family/community means, and its advocacy for the natural world.

Very, very much worth seeing.

Evil Does Not Exist – or perhaps it does, in Hamaguchi's enigmatic eco-parable

Single father Takumi – we’re led to believe he’s a widower – lives with his eight-year-old daughter Hana in the peaceful village of Mizubiki, not far from Tokyo. Takumi is an odd-job man, who primarily acts as a woodcutter, and as the collector of water from a pristine stream for a local restaurant to cook its noodles in. He also spends time teaching Hana about the environment – how to identify trees, plants and animal tracks.

But his life – and those of the rest of his community – is suddenly disrupted when a Tokyo company plans to create a glamping site in the area, for Tokyoites to chill.

 

The company is racing against time to get construction started, so that it can claim a post-pandemic financial grant, and it sends two members of a talent agency that has branched out into PR to go and address a meeting in the village and smooth the way and be able to claim, in a totally perfunctory way, that it has undertaken a consultation.

 

But the villagers are not impressed. Top of their list of concerns is that the planned sceptic tank is not remotely adequate and will, given where it is to be sited, pollute the water for the village itself and for villages further downstream.

 

The two company apologists are taken aback both by the level of objection to the scheme and the sophistication of those objections, but essentially deflect the questions.

 

However, we learn that, while their direct bosses fit the bill of rapacious capitalism, they are both deeply discomfited by it – and their roles within it. But when they head back to Mizubiki, ostensibly to offer Takumi the job of caretaker at the glamping site, events take a series of unexpected turns.

 

Writer and director Ryusuke Hamaguchi has produced an absorbing, meditative film that both engages and, ultimately, confuses. The ending is an enigma squared and then squared again.

 

The lengthy opening has the camera looking upward toward the trees as it moves through a winter woodland. Yoshio Kitagawa’s cinematography is superb: wonderful, lingering shots of nature are beautiful and make clear what we are (ultimately) looking at, while Eiko Ishibashi's score adds to the sense of something haunting.

After this opening, the film focuses on Takumi’s work and routine. In many ways, this is reminiscent of the first part of Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days. There is something almost hypnotic about it.

 

It’s a slow film, but that is not bad, because it has meditative qualities. The cast is excellent. Hitoshi Omika as Takumi manages to combine gentle and dark. Ryo Nishikawa as Hana gives a remarkable performance.

 

Ryuji Kosaka as Takahashi and Ayaka Shibutani as Mayuzumi the corporate employees, are very good.

 

Hamaguchi does not provide easy solutions. But this is an eco-parable that will live long in the mind – whatever the ending means and however you personally interpret it.

New poem: Cold etchings

 

Cold etchings

 

The house faced east across the valley,

Stoic against the Pennine winters of childhood

When bitter winds would blast across the space

to bite at fingers blue and

Clog the arteries between towns

with snow that

Drifted and swirled and blotted out the view.

 

A plug-in Dimplex made bearable

the move from day to night,

Wan warmth radiated out to battle goosebumps

Until safety was reached

under flannelette and honeycomb and eiderdown,

With a piping bottle for frozen feet.

 

By morning, the large bow window would be frosted fast.

Frayed old towels folded on the sill below

Set to mop up when it thawed at last.

But before then

I’d dare to etch my initials on the glass.

 

This year, the cold snapped late.

But it was sharp enough when it arrived

To save some bees from neonics intended to beat a beet pest.

 

Locked down locked in I only saw

the rime through slatted blinds.

No early morning walks to the bus stop

Diverting slightly to surreptitiously

            etch messages on frosted cars

Under cover of decaying dark

As a fox barks in the nearby park.

 

 

8 March 2021

Flights of glorious nature writing

In May 2018, on a brief sojourn to Margate as part of my extended recuperation following cancer surgery, The Other Half and I found ourselves visiting the Turner Contemporary, taking in an exhibition about the relationship between animals and humans.

In the shop, we came across copies of H is for Hawk, signed by author Helen Macdonald, who had (presumably) been at the previous evening’s opening and had either been asked to sign them or had undertaken a Gaimanesque exercise in guerrilla autographing.

 

Finding that the book was about the author’s struggle with grief at the loss of her father – and the role of a goshawk in dealing with that – I picked it up. The sentiments might have been different, but my own father had died exactly a week before my surgery and exactly 50 weeks after my mother.

 

Reading it was a difficult emotional journey, but its impact was such that, when I saw that Macdonald had a new book out, I wasn’t going to wait for the paperback.

 

In her introduction, she explains that Vesper Flights is intended to be a literary version of 16^th century Wunderkammer – usually known in English as a ‘cabinet of curiosities’, but far better understood with a literal translation from the German of ‘cabinet of wonders’. Boxes and cabinets that were, in effect, small museums/galleries, they could contain anything from bones or fossils to works of art.

 

These essays, new and collected, are Macdonald’s effort to combine both science with the power of literature to inspire in readers a better understanding of the magical nature of nature, and what we stand to lose in the environmental calamity that is already befalling our planet.

 

But there’s a thing: “our planet”? One of the threads that runs crystal clear through Macdonald’s book is that we neither own ‘nature’ nor the lives of Earth’s non-human residents.

 

She wants to use literature to awaken (or reawaken) a sense of awe at the natural world – and with it, a greater sense of urgency at what is at risk in terms of the environment.

 

From considering the class nature of attitudes toward watching or keeping birds, to the relationship created by hides and feeding birds and mammals, Macdonald is determined to make us think with more detail about our relationship with the rest of the world.

 

Indeed, one of the points that comes through is that humanity is not apart from nature – but part of it. And there is a disconnect and massive problem in not realising that.

Some of my own shelves

Since Macdonald is such a very good writer, she succeeds: the essays capture a sense of the ephemeral and the mysterious; of the lives of birds and creatures that we do not understand, but are no less real, lived lives.

And with all this, a sense of the extraordinary, beautiful, mysterious world that we are already losing – and will lose altogether, if we do not act soon.

 

It is a collection that also has the power to feel deeply personal.

 

For instance, there is one moment when the author describes how, as a child, she collected her own Wunderkammer – using her nature findings to decorate the shelves of her burgeoning nature library.

 

Reading it was a sort of jolt, as I realised I’ve been doing the same thing in recent years. A personal Wunderkammer.

 

This is a deeply serious book, with a deeply serious purpose. Don’t let that put you off. It will haunt you, but it is wonderfully written and a joy to read – and will hopefully inspire many to increase their contributions to saving this extraordinary planet and the incredible, awesome range of life that lives on it. 

 

Do buy (or get your library to do so).

Ad Astra: cinema that reaches for the stars

In the near future, the Solar System is being hit by power surges from an unknown source, causing increasing damage and loss of life on Earth. Surviving one incident, astronaut Major Roy McBride is assigned a secret mission.

McBride’s father, H Clifford McBride, had long been thought dead, together with the Lima Project that he was commanding on the journey to Neptune to look for alien life.

But now Roy is told that the surges may be coming from the ship that carried that team – and that his father might still be alive. His mission is to travel to Mars, from where he will try to make contact and find out what is happening and what (if anything) can be done to stop the surges.

Inspired by Heart of Darkness, Ad Astra has inevitably drawn comments about its similarity to Francis Coppola’s 1979 epic, Apocalypse Now – hardly surprising, though, given the shared starting point of Joseph Conrad’s novel.

But written and directed by James Gray, this is light years from being some sort of a remake. 

It is a very different kind of space opera: there are few explosions and plenty of time – it’s excellently paced – to give us a sense of the infinite vastness of space and the almost choking awareness of our own smallness. 

 At once an intimate portrait of a parent-child relationship and also an existentialist meditation both on the meaning of our own, individual lives and also our world, there are myriad threads here. Gray’s targets include our insatiable desire to desecrate nature and and crass consumerism.

The first leg of Roy’s journey is to the Moon, via a commercial space flight. One wonders if Virgin Atlantic knew, when they (presumably) gave permission/paid to have their branding used at this point, that a scene would have flight crew charging rip-off prices for the additional comfort of a blanket and pillow.

While Gray doesn’t over-egg the idea, science is perceived as only offering humanity so much: it comes with dangers, while many of the answers lie within ourselves. Indeed, one can also see the nods here to another iconic Coppola film, in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Ad Astra is the antithesis of macho adventure films, taking on ideas of emotional engagement, vulnerability and mental health. Indeed, the casting of Tommy Lee Jones and Donald Sutherland in the same film for the first time since they starred in Clint Eastwood’s 2000 astronaut romp, Space Cowboys, could be viewed as a comment that the time for such a view of masculinity is over.

On a rather less intellectual level, cult film junkies will spot a reference fo John Carpenter’s 1974 sci-fi comedy-drama, Dark Star.

Visually stunning, it’s hard not to imagine Hoyte van Hoytema’s name not being in the frame for cinematography gongs come award season, while Max Richter’s score is pitch perfect.

The performances are excellent: Brad Pitt is really at the top of his game as a the emotionally crippled son, all coiled control and desperate restraint, while Jones never goes into panto territory as his father. Sutherland’s cameo is enjoyable.

If I have one regret it’s that we see so little of Ruth Negga. Her role as the director of the Mars base is small but important, and she gives it the heft required.

But that aside, Ad Astra is a really fine, grown-up film – and one that will stick in the mind for a very long time.

A cast to die for as Jarmusch takes on zombie consumerism

It’s not over-hyping things when the tag line for Jim Jarmusch’s latest work, The Dead Don’t Die, says it has “the greatest zombie cast ever disassembled,” but the question is whether the film itself lives up to that.

Set in small town Centerville, the film opens as police officers Cliff Robertson and Ronnie Peterson confront one Hermit Bob about a missing chicken he’s been accused of stealing by redneck farmer Frank Miller.

As they drive back from the woods, they muse on how things seem strange – it’s light for much longer than it should be, for instance. Speculation is rife that such things, being reported across the world, are because polar fracking has shifted the world off its axis.

And with the moon glimmering in suitably weird colours, so the first re-animated corpses push their way up from their graves in the local cemetery.

What can Cliff and Ronnie do? They have only fellow officer Mindy Morrison to help, together with Zelda Watson, the new owner of the Ever After funeral home, a Scot who, when not making up the corpses in her care like drag queens, wields a katana.

Executed in the most deadpan style imaginable, The Dead Don’t Die has threads all over the place and tries to do myriad things. Possibly too many things – and certainly, not everything comes off. For example, it’s debatable whether breaking the fourth wall adds much – if anything.

But just as you ask yourself that, then you start wondering if if you’ve missed something.

It’s this that is part of what makes The Dead Don’t Die worth the effort: not only comment, but nods to other films – including those of zombie giant George A Romero etc. And it’s pretty certain that’ll miss things.

Then there are the performances from the stellar cast.

Bill Murray and Adam Driver as Cliff and Ronnie are ridiculously funny – in a very dry, slow, understated way.

Steve Buscemi makes for an excellent redneck farmer, complete with he red ‘Make America White Again’ baseball cap. Tom Waits growls his way through the film as Hermit Bob, maintaining an occasional commentary on unfolding events.

Danny Glover as Hank, the hardware store owner, and Chloë Sevigny as Mindy both turn in beautifully nuanced performances.

But the one that will stay in the mind is Tilda Swinton as Zelda, out-wierding everyone else on screen in a way that only she can do.

A special note on the casting of Iggy Pop as a coffee-obsessed zombie – a great touch. Sturgill Simpson’s title track also adds to the plus column.

The main theme is the environmental crisis facing us and its link to zombie consumerism, but there’s much more going on.

The Dead Don’t Die is a lot of hit and a bit of miss, but it kept my attention throughout – and my sense of intrigue – and if one thing is certain, it’s that I want to see Jarmusch’s latest again.

A World Cup-sized waste of plastic

The bottle

On most working days, I like to step outside the office and take the air, sipping a peppermint tisane outside the delightful Albertini, which is just off Euston Road.

On Fridays, the Chalton Street market provides additional people-watching possibilities.

A stall that is set up almost directly next to where I tend to be sitting sells a variety of curtains and cushion covers and various similar items, but I’m always most amused by the handwritten notice in one crate, proclaiming that the contents are “‘Genuine’ plastic tablecloths”.

Does the use of single quote marks around the “genuine” mean that we should take the claim with a pinch of salt? Has someone invented a type of ‘fake’ plastic? Is it a costermonger’s joke based on the common conflation of ‘fake’ and ‘plastic’?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but it remains amusing.

Plastic tablecloths – red and white check, of course – have a place. Nothing else is acceptable or appropriate when consuming proper fish and chips in a proper northern chippy that knows how to do them properly.

White mugs of tea – complete with a chip on the side – are also obligatory, as are proper mushy peas, Sarsons vinegar and plates piled high with thick slices of factory bread.

There is a possibility that such a table adornment would be appropriate in a down-to-earth Italian restaurant too, on which could stand a bottle of white, a bottle of red, perhaps a bottle of rose instead …

There are, indeed, myriad uses for plastic that range from the plastic as tacky to the plastic as high-quality material.

It’s a versatile material without which it would be difficult to contemplate modern life as we know it.

But given that substantial amounts of plastics are derived from petrochemicals, which are not an infinite resource, and given that many plastics are not particularly good at biodegrading, one might be forgiven for thinking that it would be sensible to be ... well, sensible about how you use it.

Recycling is sensible too – and not just in terms of sticking things in a bag or crate for collection once a week, but also by using a plastic object more than once.

Yes – even that plastic cutlery that gets divvied out in sandwich shops can be washed and used for more than a single lunch.

Similarly, I doubt I’m the only person who has a bag full of plastic bags in the kitchen. Some are used over and over again, but all have at least a second use, while if I know I’m going shopping, I take a bag or bags with me.

But there are times when you look at something and find yourself musing on the utter stupidity of it – and the absolute waste of resources.

A particular example occurred the other day, when my shopping order included, as expected, a bottle of Listerine mouth wash.

This time, however, something was different.

The cup

It usually involves a plastic top on a plastic bottle – the former of which can be used as a cup. This is sealed in place by, err, plastic.

A spanking new ‘limited edition’ version still sees that – but with the addition of the extra plastic cup, that is then held in place by a further plastic seal.

And by way of explanation, the extra little plastic cup bears the legend “Official oral care sponsor – FIFA World Cup Brasil [sic]”.

Come on brand owner Johnson & Johnson – is this doubling up of a cup (and seals to hold the extra one in place over the usual one) really a responsible use of a resource?

But that little plastic cup actually tells another story that is, in it’s way, just as depressing or soul destroying.

Someone, somewhere, is paid to come up with promotional ideas such as this.

And someone, somewhere, is paid to design such things.

Is that really productive work?

Well presumably it is – in terms of creating profit for the companies in question, but that begs questions about what constitutes productive work and how we add value to society as a whole.

Now I understand the need to design and produce containers for, say, mouth wash. And I understand that design can both be about aesthetics and for rather more utilitarian reasons. And that design can, for instance, reduce the amount of plastic used and thereby save money and resources.

But this little ‘freebie’ has nothing to do with any of that.

To some free market fundamentalists, designing something like this would be more valuable – assuming it increases units sold – than someone who is a nurse in a public health system.

Yet it reflects something that it’s hard not conclude isn’t downright bonkers.

And that bonkersness extends to anyone who might buy a bottle of Listerine simply because it’s got a “limited edition” World Cup cup strapped to it.

For goodness sake – who in all hell is impressed by a company proclaiming that it’s the “official oral care sponsor” of a sports tournament?

Yes – I know how advertising works: I know that even major brands spend fortunes in order to maintain levels of brand awareness, for instance.

Gratuitous picture of Joe Hart

And I get that companies want to have their products associated with success – so you can see the logic of Proctor & Gamble paying Manchester City and England goalkeeper Joe Hart to advertise Head & Shoulders shampoo, just as past generations of men were, presumably, tempted to splash on a bit of Brut by ’enry Cooper.

Those, however, relied on the sportsman promoting an actual product – not offering a ridiculous and inelegantly-branded little plastic cup as an enticement to buy.

Is there really anyone out there who is dozy enough to start using a product or to change the one they use because of such a claim and because of an extra bit of entirely superfluous plastic?

Presumably there must be – but then there are plenty of people out there who have, over the years, fallen for buying one variety of fast food crap over another so that their children can walk away with a bit of plastic tat (which helpfully ties in with marketing a film) or a sugar-laden cereal so that their offspring can have some freebie.

There are, presumably, people who buy a brand because it is advertised that, for every unit sold, a penny will go to some cause or other.

Just buy the product you need/want – and then give 10p to a charitable concern you care about, for goodness sake!

But in Listerine’s single, small marketing scheme, you have an indicator of so much that is wrong in the world today.

And while there’s no guarantee, what’s the betting that the US owners of Listerine, Johnson & Johnson, are far from being particularly interested in Association Football?

Bloody corporate plastic fans.

An epic, green fairy tale for the here and now

Illustration by Günter Grass

Just over a year ago, on my first trip to Lübeck, a little mystery confronted me on a visit to Günter Grass-Haus – why was one of Grass’s sculptures of a rat displayed alongside a trio of Smurfs?

As we prepared for this spring’s trip to Schleswig-Holstein, this question popped into view of the little grey cells once more.

Now I knew that Grass had penned a book called, simply The Rat – his art has frequenyl been directly connected to his writing – so I looked it up and, having found it to be out of print, bought myself a second-hand copy.

Thus it was that it accompanied me on the journey to Travemünde. And on the evening on 2 May, as we lounged in our railway cabin, heading from Paris to the German border, I let out a yelp.

For there in the pages of the novel were not only to be found plenty of Rattus rattus (not forgetting Rattus norvegicus and others), but myriad Smurfus smurfus too.

The Rat was first published in German in 1986, at around the time that Grass himself settled in Lübeck.

But while knowing this connection, I hadn’t realised that the book would itself be partly set in Lübeck and Travemünde, and encompassing the wider Baltic.

If last year’s trip had had, quite deliberately placed at its heart, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, then it became clear that this year was going to have a literary theme too – whether I’d planned it that way or not.

Grass brings so many strands together into a coherent whole – he weaves together the Brothers Grimm and their fairy tale characters, the infamous German painter-forger Lothar Malskat, who repainted the frescoes of the Marienkirche in Lübeck after WWII, and industrialists and corrupt politicians and bishops.

We also get the chance to catch up with characters from his first novel, The Tin Drum, and from the later The Flounder – it helps to be familiar with at least the first of these.

The overarching theme here, though, is an environmental one – of humanity’s crazed destruction and despoliation of the planet.

Early on, he gives an idea of the scale of the garbage that humans leave behind them – the endless mountains of trash – but in this apocalyptic novel, what eventually kills of humankind is a nuclear accident.

And who would be the natural replacement for humans once the dust has died down?

Here, it is the rats, one of whom talks constantly to the author in his dreams, relating rat history as well as what has happened since “Doomadosh”, because the author is now only a figment of ratty imagination.

Or is he?

It’s rather easy to feel that, with the end of the Cold War, the nuclear threat has died away – although most of the missiles are still around and there are still plenty of  ‘rogue states’ that might not be trusted not to use such a weapon. And that’s without mentioning the threat of chemical weaponary.

But even if readers falls into that camp, the environmental concerns are every single bit as relevant.

In the 1980s, Germans had just started to comprehend the scale of death that was visiting the country’s forests.

It was a vital wake-up call. And just a fortnight or so ago, on a cloudy Sunday, the country produced 74% of its energy needs from renewables in an illustration of how domestic policy has moved since then.

That rather makes a nonsense of the objections of those who oppose, say, the generation of wind power. But then one is reminded of Grass’s industrialists and their political and religious apologists in the novel.

The threat to the forests has not ceased, due to climate change, but action has helped to stabilise the situation.

And while the book only really touches on the pollution of seas and rivers, its references to the rubbish generated by human existence bring to mind recent reports about our trash being found in the deepest parts of the oceans, thousands of kilometers from land.

Similarly, a recently-unveiled study from Havard Universityhas shown that the frequently-reported threat to bees is a direct consequenceof certain classes of insecticides.

Yet the corporations that produce these poisons are reluctant to stop – evidence, were it needed, that just as Grass’s fictional industrialists are motivated only by short-sighted greed, so too are the non-fictional ones.

All is finally clear

In neither of these cases do you have to be a dyed-in-the-organic-wool eco warrior to see trouble ahead if such things are simply allowed to continue unabated.

So Grass’s novel continues to be every bit as topical as it was when written.

Quite apart from it being shameful, on the grounds of its continuing topicality, that it’s out of print (in at least some countries) it’s well near criminal on a literary basis too.

However gloomy it sounds, it somehow avoids that and is often funny and frequently endowed with a great warmth.

Yet however much control there is to the entire piece, it’s also a massive howl of rage against the prevailing insanity.

The frequent use of poetry within the text reminds one that Grass is not ‘just’ a novelist (and a sculptor and artist etc), while the tone, the language and the characterisation are simply first rate.

Even those blue and white smurfs play more than a passing role, as the book also explores the creation of religion, the death of fairy tales, rampant commercialism and the question of what is real and what is not.

For all the seriousness of its message, this is never dull or difficult, but rattles along at a cracking pace, and leaving you unsure of the eventual outcome until the very last.

In terms of scale, imagination, organisation and the sheer complexity of vision, The Rat is a staggering achievement, and one that illustrates, yet again, Grass’s genius in general, and more specifically, his command of magic realism and his gift as a storyteller.

Indeed, it’s a reminder of the power of stories too.

That I had not expected it to be directly related to the area we were visiting simply served to increase its impact.

That reading it also fell at a time of local and Europe-wide elections, where we saw widespread revealed large levels of dissatisfaction and a general misunderstanding of the key problems, while the same industrialists and their friends in big finance continue to fiddle, gave a further layer of significance to the experience.

Twenty-eight years on from its original publication, The Rat’s message is as clear and as important as ever. And in literary terms, it’s a reminder – were that needed – of the genius of Grass.