Mar 27, 2024
This was a really, really beautiful film, heartbreaking and devastating at times but so full of kindness and hope and love. As someone who also was a very unconventional child that needed an idiosyncratic, accepting environment (and was so generously afforded this), this story really affected me emotionally, spoke to me on a deep level, and was significantly moving. This is a real story, about a real school in Tokyo during World War II that encouraged children's freedom of expression and independence, run by a wonderful, forward-thinking man named Sōsaku Kobayashi who so genuinely loved, understood, and valued children.
Japan is a *very* rule-based culture –
...
"the nail that sticks out gets hammered down" – and that fact has personally been quite hard for me to deal with since moving here a month and a half ago. It's depressing to see kids who aren't even ten years old being dressed like miniature adults in formal school uniforms every day. I'm not one for conformity, or blindly following rules without question or understanding, and almost nothing makes me angrier or sadder than children's (especially girls') independence and weirdness and curiosity and creative spirits being quashed, suppressed, or diminished. So even now, 60 years after his death, I feel grateful to the real-life headmaster Kobayashi for providing such a unique, rare sense of freedom, warmth, and trust, even during difficult times, to these children – including the author Tetsuko Kuroyanagi whose autobiographical novel this film is based on, and who in turn wrote of her gratitude and her memories at Tomoe Gakuen.
There were some really beautifully hand-animated sequences in this too, fantastical departures from the film's regular style at subtly emotionally-charged moments that break free of the concrete and literal, evoking that childhood sense of wonder and imagination that is (or was) common to us all. The first one happens about 20 minutes in and really caught me off guard, since I was initially a bit put off by the artstyle of overly-rosy cheeks and lips that everyone has, and unsure of what to expect of the film or its story – but upon seeing Totto-chan's imagined journey (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpaTrEoVE5A&t=70s) in the old railroad cars which served as her school's classrooms, I was sold. The following one is drawn in little more than lines of pencil with faint color, depicting a freeing and transcendental experience in the school's swimming pool, in the nude, where Totto-chan helps her physically disabled friend Yasuaki-chan, who had polio, swim for the first time. I'd love to go back and watch these parts again, paying particular attention to how they focused on motion and movement and made use of color. Really, really stand-out work.
I could be mistaken, but I don't think the original book is too well-known outside of Japan, despite the fact it's *the best-selling book in Japanese history* (?!) and has been translated into over two dozen different languages. By now, it's sold 25 million copies – that's on par with The Wind in the Willows, more than Things Fall Apart and almost as many as James and the Giant Peach! There hasn't been much mainstream English-language coverage of it, either – one piece being the NYT article at https://www.nytimes.com/1982/11/21/books/growing-up-japanese.html from 1982, and another short but sweet column in the Asahi Shimbun about the sequel that just came out this year at https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15020303. Both are worth reading.
I really hope this gets licensed in the US and elsewhere, subtitled, and shown in theaters abroad, as it truly deserves to be seen. I'm so glad I went to see this. Happy tears.
Watched: December 17, 2023
Via my Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/frozenpandaman/film/totto-chan-the-little-girl-at-the-window/
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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