Blue Spring
By Chris Hyde
December 20, 2004
It’s manga-to-film time, as Artsmagic sends Toshiaki Toyoda’s cinematic adaptation of Taiyo Matsumoto’s Blue Spring to DVD.
As North American audiences well know, the process of taking comic books and turning them into movies is a popular pastime for film producers of late. In Hollywood, this is often because in these days of CGI uber alles the producer’s new digital tools of manipulation allow flights of spandex fancy that couldn’t be easily done in the past. But though this is a general truth that helps explain projects like X-Men and Spider-Man (as well as horrendous outings like The Hulk and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), even domestically some attention has been paid to sequential art works whose original form is in a decidedly lower key — such as American Splendor and Ghost World. This has also held true in Japan, a country where comic book reading is held in much higher cultural esteem than it is here in the West, and where for every funloving Cutie Honey there seems to be a brooding and darker Blue Spring.
Set in a graffiti-strewn boys high school, the opening sequence of Blue Spring introduces us to a group of wayward youth competing to be the head of the school’s senior gang. This contest involves leaning backwards from a railing many stories high and clapping as many times as possible before grabbing hold again; and surprisingly enough the eventual victor is the unprepossessing Kujo (Ryuhei Matsuda, in a truly stellar performance) whose almost waifish appearance belies a cold, interior strength. Playing out atop strains of raucous rock and roll (provided by Japanese band Thee Michelle Gun Elephant), this introductory ten minutes of the film is visually gripping and extremely stylish — and yet it’s also a skillfully directed introduction to the gang who the film will center on and the relationships between them.
For the duration of the movie, the action concerns the at-times violent antics of this group of boys as they try to come to grips with their lives in a crumbling social system. The bulk of the drama comes out of the interpersonal friendship that Kujo has with a boy name Aoki (Hirofumi Arai), a kid who begins as a seeming comic foil for underclassmen but who eventually rises to challenge his former pal for leadership of the school. While some of this middle section of the film is a bit muddled story-wise, the general sense of youths adrift in a broken culture comes through just beautifully. It’s obvious that the tale grows out of Japan’s post-1980s economic collapse and the subsequent dismantling of the job-for-life system that its corporations had previously offered, for here the young are quite clearly rejecting the lessons of their elders. Save for one teacher whose unthreatening countenance allows him to communicate with Kujo, the adults are all pretty much frightened and useless remnants of a system that has apparently lost its relevance.
While it would certainly not do to describe the final denouement in any terms that might spoil the proceedings, suffice it to say that the ending segment of Blue Spring is one of the most devastating and exciting pieces of direction that this viewer has seen in recent years. The director’s artful handling of the conclusion is both powerful and stylish, and whatever small sins of plot may have slightly marred the middle of the film are quickly wiped away in an intense swirl of image and sound. It’s not engaging in hyperbole to say that I think that this is the likely the single most impressive sequence that I’ve seen in a post 2000 film that I have watched in 2004; no other work of cinema has led me to watch its finale five times over once my initial viewing was complete. What’s ultimately clear from this finale (as well as what precedes it) that what we are watching here is one of the most important talents in Japanese cinema today.
Luckily for Region 1 viewers, Artsmagic apparently feels the same way about Toshiaki Toyoda, for not only have they released this excellent 2001 work of his but are also planning a January ’05 DVD of the 2003 jailbreak pic 9 Souls. Their disk of Blue Spring doesn’t just stop at the nice 16:9 anamorphic transfer of the film either, as it also has a couple of additional features that really add some depth. There are the standard bios and filmographies, of course, but a nice subtitled interview here allows a chance to listen to the filmmaker’s own perspective on the movie. Also of import is a commentary by the knowledgeable Tom Mes (co-author of the recently published The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film ), a rich and detailed exposition on the film that delineates much of import about Blue Spring and the context in which it was made. While at times feature length commentaries often grind down into meandering blather, Mes’ dialogue remains vital and informative throughout the film’s 83 minute running time and adds a wealth of data to enrich the audience’s experience of this one.
Having not yet read the original manga on which this film was based (interested readers should note that the English translation of Taiyo Matsumoto’s graphic novel has been supposedly scheduled for a December 29 release by the prominent manga publisher Viz), it’s impossible for me to say how devoted to its source material this version of Blue Spring is. But in its cinema form, at least, this is a spectacular and stunning document of a society in decline and with the guiding hand of Toshiaki Toyoda in charge, this is simply one of the most impressive movies that I’ve seen from Japan this year. This is not to say that the movie is a completely unqualified success, as the interior portion has a bit of trouble in equitably doling out time between its multiple storylines. But whatever stumbles there are with the finer machinations of the story are slight and pale in comparison to the unbridled thrill of cinematic expression contained within Blue Spring; and the opening and closing sequences especially are jawdropping in their execution. Overall, then, this Artsmagic release stands as one of the most impressive Asian digital offerings to have debuted in North America during 2004 — and the advice from this corner is that you don’t miss it.
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