Garden of Remembrance

An untidy room. Empty beer tins, empty wine bottles, a half-empty glass of whisky...

A girl is getting up absent-mindedly and starts preparing herself. YOUR morning starts. Lazy and hard-to-wake-up YOU. The emoticon is ME watching over YOU. I play tricks on YOU, while YOU are playing the guitar and drinking. One day, in town, YOU walk past THE CHILDHOOD FRIEND who is buying an Anemone I liked, and remembering that I liked them, YOU rush out to buy them. THE CHILDHOOD FRIEND displays the Anemone with care.

One day, years after I died, YOU hear noise from the closet. Opened, YOU see MY garden right in front of YOU. Overflowing emotions of ME and YOU. When exiting from the room with memories, a picture of the Anemone that YOU painted is displayed in YOUR new room.

(Souce: Annecy Film Festival)

Yamada, Naoko Director, Screenplay

Moaang Animation Director, Character Design

Lovely Summer Chan Music

Motohashi, Mari Key Animation

Reviews

Sep 8, 2024

Ken-ji

Recommended

Naoko Yamada's ability to purely express emotions through her marriage of audio and visuals is undeniably strong at this point. She seems to understand exactly what type of scene, what movements, and which colors totally encapsulate what she's trying to convey. Garden of Remembrance is a short that completely leans into this style of storytelling. It depicts a girl through her day to day life as we learn that she is grieving the loss of her lover, but there is essentially no dialogue and the whole short is set to music (by Lovely Summer Chan). Despite having some reservations, I definitely enjoyed this and found ... that especially by the end, I appreciated what it was going for quite a bit.

Right from the gate, this short sets itself up to be largely presented through it's imagery, much of which the viewer has to read into themselves. We're immediately met with the image of anemone flowers, which are often symbolic of the loss of a loved one. Yamada often includes the language of flowers in her works but here it's basically a core part of the story. Shots of water are intercut with what seems like a cup of coffee and then a gust of wind (and what I assumed to be the lover's ghost) sweeps from above and into the girl's room through her window. We get a shot from a bird's eye view watching over her.

We watch as the girl goes through the motions of her day to day routine. All of Yamada's characteristic attention to small details are present here. The animation feels alive and believable. We watch her struggle to wake up, brush her teeth and eat breakfast each day. She drinks and plays the guitar and occasionally a few emojis appear on screen. I admittedly found this part to overstay it's welcome a bit. The music is building up and it had me expecting something to happen that would warrant this implied tone, but that doesn't come until much later in the film. With the full context, I can better appreciate what it was going for, but I do feel this first bit could have had a bit more going on.

After noticing a girl with glasses buy anemone flowers the girl goes and buys some as well. As she's painting, she hears a noise in her closet. When she opens it, a flood of memories erupts from inside and sweeps her off her feet. I really liked the visual of these emotions being trapped in her closet as though she had been trying to bottle them up and is now overwhelmed by her memories and feelings. We see shots of her and her lover recontextualizing all of her seemingly mundane acts as things she used to share together with him. They wake up, brush their teeth and eat together. She had been playing his guitar, and so on. She walks across anemone pedals to embrace him. The visuals and music are really evocative and all of the messaging is finally on full display in this sequence. After reconciling with her emotions, the girl mouths along to lyrics of acceptance and saying goodbye to her lover. Finally, we're shown a shot of her entering her apartment accompanied by someone else, likely implying that she has been able to start properly moving on. This whole climactic bit did a great job selling what the short had been going for and left me with a positive impression overall.

There are aspects that weren't so easy for me to get behind. Rather than focusing entirely on her routine, I would've liked to see some indication of the lover character in the first bit, even if not in a way that gives away that he's passed on. I honestly was a bit confused when shots of him started appearing only after halfway through the short and only gathered it was her lover during the flashback sequence. The use of emojis was apparently meant to be the boyfriend's attempts to communicate with the girl but I never felt it was clearly conveyed and was mistaking it for being just an on-the-nose visual of what the girl was thinking and feeling. It wasn't till I read the MAL synopsis, that literally spells out "The emoticon is ME watching over YOU". Similarly, the girl with the glasses is meant to be a childhood friend, which again I only understood after reading the MAL synopsis. There were shots that were, I guess, meant to convey the characters' relationship to each other, but I didn't find that they clearly communicated it, personally. I think that if the film had a few more elements that were tangible and less purely depicted with interpretable imagery, it would've helped to smooth over these bumps that had me a bit confused.

Overall this was a really strong showing of what I believe Naoko Yamada is one of the industry's bests at: pure emotional expression through evocative audio visual presentation. It may not quite hold up to the level of polish that her longer works have, but shares many of the same strengths you would find in those. Definitely worth checking out.

6/10

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Oct 28, 2022

IronlordtheMad

Recommended

Preliminary (1/1 eps)

Spoiler

I was lucky enough to see this at Scotland Loves Anime along with a Q&A with director Naoko Yamada who was happy to talk about the themes, ideas and production that made this short film happen. I am using the spoiler tag for a reason because I recommend people experience it for themselves without seeing spoilers.

The film is ~17 minutes long with no dialogue and is set to Lovely Summer Chan's rock based score as we go through several repeating loops of the main character's morning routine and show the impact of her coping with her feelings of loss.

The remaining parts of the ... film deal with her exploring the flat they lived in and reconnecting with her lost love and expressing herself through art, first by immitating her lost partner's guitar playing and then by her own painting while she draws comfort from the memories she has with her former partner.

The movie is more about showing you it's metaphors and letting you take the story from the imagery which I thought was a great way to handle the vague feelings of pain and loss. I think the choice to avoid having hard lines drawn on every edge is part of expressing this vagueness of her feelings (the tea pot or the painting of flowers for example).

The film also uses a lot of colour to symbolise characters and I think a second watch through might be needed to track every use of colour in the film, as it is hidden everywhere throughout.

Some things I didn't know or get during the screening that were explained during the Q&A:
The lyric about "Cucumber Horses and Aubergine Cows" this is a reference to the Obon fesitval tradition of making vessels for spirit animals who will bring back ancestors during the festival.
The emoji's (yes emoji's) are an attempt by the dead boyfriend to communicate with his still living girlfriend, but she cannot percieve them. It was a little jarring at first but you can see this as part of the vague communications/feelings theme that runs through the movie.
There's probably a significance about the use of Anemone flowers but as I don't know the "language of flowers" it's lost on me.

Generally speaking I would like to re-watch this film a few times, Naoko Yamada was asked about what would happen to the film after it's shown in cinemas and she doesn't know, it's up to the production staff to determine how the distribution will be carried out. I hope this film becomes widely available outside of Japan so that people can enjoy it as much as I did.

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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	Poll: Garden of Remembrance Episode 1 Discussion Leysoh - Aug 31	6 replies	by EGOIST »» Sep 29, 7:34 AM
	Film is without dialogue (so no waiting for subtitles), currently streaming, here's the official links merukomu11 - Aug 29	0 replies	by merukomu11 »» Aug 29, 7:04 PM
	Release date and Main PV nirererin - Aug 19	0 replies	by nirererin »» Aug 19, 1:22 AM
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	Why is this labelled as "Previewed" in October 2022? illintelligence - Nov 17, 2023	1 replies	by MagicPolly »» Nov 17, 2023 8:34 PM