martin

The Death Lullaby

The first Harada film I've seen is one violent short, no doubt about it. Not only in intent, but in form. The animation is crude and extremely limited, to the point of being more like a moving drawing, than anything else. The characters are ugly and crude, each and every line used for them, drawn with utmost hatred. The limited animation makes them mostly still, but when there is movement, it is always so sharp and jittery, that it feels like it's poking your eyes out. The ugly characters live in a sparsely distorted world. The environment is dead, thanks to the terrible Japanese government, as we learn midway through, the sky - polluted but bright, as if after a manmade catastrophe. Or maybe right before one. Or most probably in-between two. The crudely drawn environmental scenes are interspersed with similar-looking photographs. It's as if to tell us that there's not much of a difference between the disgusting post-apocalyptic-looking world of the animation and the real world. It's a difference of expression but not necessarily one of content. The story, or at least what I could piece together from the kinetic madness that happens onscreen, is even more extreme than the visuals. Drawing parallels between school bullying and violence and institutional one, the movie tells us of the screwed world we live in. The masses are bullied to sickness and almost extinction by the powerful politicians and elites, and even when they try to fight back, their violent outbursts result in nothing. Seeing the nameless protagonist's buck teeth and one of the bullies' USA sleeveless shirt, I also couldn't but wonder if the movie isn't also about the systemic violence over Japan from foreign powers, mostly America. After all, the teeth are one of the most widespread ways during and after WWII to "spot the Jap," as Milton Caniff calls it. The inclusion of pictures and short clips from real protests from the 60s and the 70s, all of which are connected in one way or another to American political or economic intervention, seems to point to this even more.