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, Episode Director, Storyboard, 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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Nov 5, 2024

utopia-

Recommended

When we grow up and reach adulthood, it is normal, sometimes, whether by chance or for plausible reasons, to abandon who we were during childhood or during who we were during adolescence, maybe because we must seek maturity or maybe we have made wrong choices along the way, Depending on how your journey to adulthood went, your life can be seen from different perspectives. Tomorrow you may be alone, tomorrow you may find love, tomorrow you may find death, tomorrow you may find the happiness of living... In this we only have one certainty... with absolute certainty we will abandon something, because growth demands it ... this of us. It is cruel to give up the sweet moments in someone's company during childhood, it is sad to drop out of school when we reach adolescence, It's heartbreaking, painful, to leave a friend, or a/one girlfriend/boyfriend after so much time together. But sometimes, it's necessary for us to grow, and it's inevitable for us to try to stop it. Time runs out, and all that's left is a garden of memories, from different times, with different feelings...Growth sometimes exhausts our potential to think or it can also have the opposite effect, taking away or adding our potential, Emotions are easier to control in adulthood but there are still times when they slip from our mind and overflow to say that we need to remember good times of what we were and that from now on we will be someone who will experience new things.

"Ah... How relaxing it was when I just played with my friends and went to school."
"It was so good when I loved and didn't have to think too much"
"Maybe I miss something or someone, but who cares."
"Today I saw a childhood friend that I hadn't seen for a long time, I wanted to greet that person, but I couldn't"
"My routine is the same, and that's just something that even if I try to change now, I feel like it's too late."
"What is happiness? What am I? Is my purpose...?"

With only 17 minutes in length, with no dialogue, and a silent beginning that gradually creates sound, "garden of remembrance" places the viewer in the presence of a girl that at first glance seems to just be repeating a common routine, where the simple sound of an alarm is what makes her find the strength to get up. The girl remembers good times that are gone while she is faced with longing, her feelings overflow and the world begins to become nostalgic, colorful, happy, sad, exciting...there are so many emotions that all she wants when remembering the memories is just to hold on to them so they don't run away, maybe because she's lonely, or maybe because she needs those memories for herself that she was happy. The sound of the guitar along with the serene voice of the song played in the episode exalts the nostalgia of someone who has already passed away, feelings hide in every corner of the room, in the living room, in the bedroom, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, maybe the girl just wants to go back in time or maybe she needs to give up who she is and who she once was, feeling exhausted but perhaps satisfied because for her the process has reached where she is, in its adult phase, it was beautiful but unfortunately it is fleeting and distressing...

Garden of Memories presents the viewer with visuals that always try to represent the movement of everything, as that girl's life is very stagnant at the moment, and only the memories move her. The lack of speech and the excess of emojis represent feelings that we cannot express, but that are still in our minds. The soundtrack is serene and sometimes a little chaotic, depending on the moment, but only one thing is certain, the garden of memories will disappear from the moment we take a step forward and discover that we can make new gardens of memories.

I wonder now: did that girl find what she wanted? Or was the change of leaving that house just a feeling that: "I must abandon this to move forward and evolve"...I don't know... I just know that she was happy and maybe we just need to overcome the feeling of longing, maybe this is the real step towards our evolution...

Thank you for reading this far.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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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	7 replies	by Chika_tetsu »» Dec 5, 4:22 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
	This was shown as Scotland Loves Anime way back in Oct 2022 Jax - Apr 10	4 replies	by RainyEvenings »» Aug 11, 4:13 AM
	Why is this labelled as "Previewed" in October 2022? illintelligence - Nov 17, 2023	1 replies	by MagicPolly »» Nov 17, 2023 8:34 PM