Japanese animator Yoshitoshi Shinomiya‘s background as a painter is clearly evident in his feature directorial debut “A New Dawn,” representing Japan in the Berlin Film Festival’s main competition. The film is gorgeous to look at, paying attention to every little detail painted on screen, while backgrounds to the action look like still tableaux that could be in a museum. The story that shows off this beautiful art, however, is less successful than the visuals, relying too much on dialogue and exposition. Still, “A New Dawn” marks a strong entry into the animation world, and promises much more from Shinomiya. Perhaps next time he can collaborate with an experienced screenwriter.
The protagonists of “A New Dawn” are two brothers, vastly different in temperament. The elder is Senataro, whom everyone calls Chichi (voiced by Miyu Irino), and the younger Keitaro (Riku Hagiwara). Stubborn and hot-headed, Keitaro clings to their late father’s rural fireworks factory, trying to keep it working as it faces eviction to make way for gentrification. Chichi, meanwhile, has moved to Tokyo and become a civil servant. To convince his brother to leave, he invites their childhood friend and former neighbor Kaoru (Kotone Furukawa) along with him on a visit back to their former home. The story takes place over two days, four years apart: the eviction day in the present, with flashbacks to another as the three principals recall their formative friendship, and fireworks-related secrets told to them by the brothers’ now-deceased dad.
In the eviction-day scenes, Keitaro tries with Kaoru’s help to assemble and release the ultimate fireworks display, bigger and more beautiful than any other — which they both keep referring to as “Shuhari,” a Japanese word made up of three characters which respectively mean “protect,” “break,” and “separate.” It also could be a metaphor for whatever one’s ultimate goal is, something the brothers’ father was never able to actually achieve. So the film becomes a race against time, as they try to mount this display while city officials close in with their bulldozers to wreck the factory. At the same time, Chichi is having a crisis of conscience, thinking that he sold out his father and brother.
Every single gorgeous frame of “A New Dawn” is painstakingly painted, with colors somehow both vivid and muted. The latter impression is enhanced by an abundance of background light, but the images remain stunning. Shinomiya pays detailed attention to everything on screen, crafting not just the faces and emotions of the characters, but also all the other creatures, natural landforms and skies of this story world. From tiny insects like flies and butterflies at the edge of the frame, to large mountains, clouds full of rain, even great wrecking machines — everything is animated with precision and beauty. There are montages that look like breathtaking paintings, but there’s also ingenuity in every less spectacular aspect of the animation: A scene where Chichi gets drunk is rendered in less painterly, more realistic toy-like structures that reveal his confused state of mind.
Yet all this beauty ultimately does not save a jumbled narrative. Shinomiya wants to tell a story about wisdom passing between generations, yet his characters get lost in repeated conversations that never illuminate their personalities beyond broad strokes, and fail to push the narrative forward. The climactic fireworks, to which the script has been building for almost all of the 76-minute running time, arrive too late, with too little differentiation from the rest of the visuals. It can’t help but feel like a disappointment, even if every frame up to this point has been beautiful beyond words.
English (US) ·