Going through the extras, they are all extremely worthwhile. I know we tease Nick Redman and the whole methodology behind Twilight Time's limited release model a bit on the board but I always enjoy his moderation on commentaries (particularly guiding the discussion between the scholars on the Peckinpah films, and for his fascinating comments on The Inn of The Sixth Happiness which had a personal relevance to him), and this was another really great example. I have to admit that I was really just expecting to hear the sound of people quietly sobbing for the last half hour of the commentary, but they held it together!
The Wind and the Bomb is a nice contemporary making-of piece which does a valuable tour of the cramped premises of the animation studio (with a scene of the panicked camera swirling around the location, replicating the panic of someone told they have three minutes left until a missile strike!) and provides some fantastic footage of early animation tests. There is nothing really about the voice recording and scoring of the film (things that are usually emphasised in extra features on Disney or Simpsons discs, probably because they provide the moments of most visual 'action') but more emphasis is placed on the creation of the animation itself, and this has some wonderful moments of the footage wavering from pencil tests up through to finished animation and back again, or illustrating people working with various levels of the cells of animation on work boards to help the animators move the action forward (the moment of Jim cutting the loaf of bread gets focused on, with the loaf going from full to half cut in a flick of a wrist!), and eventually all of the cells being put together and photographed.
And the highlight of the set is the Jimmy Murakami: Non-Alien documentary, which follows Murakami travelling from his home in Dublin back to California to visit his brother and sister and then go on a coach excursion with other children of the camp back to the
Tulelake camp where he and his family were interned for four years during the war. While it might be a bit provocative to describe a prison camp in the United States as a 'concentration camp', that is how Jimmy Murakami sees it and still feels marked by decades on. I would perhaps more agree with the brother's comments that it was as much for the safety of Japanese-Americans (from reprisal attacks after Pearl Harbor), even if it was still the wrong thing to do to round innocent people up for having committed no crime but that of being of a particular ethnic background.
Even worse than the internment though is that forced question being asked of all those living there - to pledge complete loyalty to the United States, which in some cases would have involved giving up Japanese citizenship - which is combined with the language of the document describing Japanese-Americans as 'non-aliens' rather than as American citizens (so you have to give up any claim to belong to Japan and having a loyalty to your heritage, but are still given no compensation for that loss and are not being treated as a full American citizen, both on paper and in terms of being interned in a camp). There is something fantastically disturbing about the mundane way that language can sometimes unintendedly reveal certain truths in the process of being normalised that would be vehemently denied if someone called them on it. Of course you are 'non-alien': you aren't the real 'alien' inhabitants that we are looking for and could potentially remove from the country as undesirable. We have to still accommodate you. But you are still not 'fully human', or at least treated as a full American citizen, either. At least during the war period.
(Of course there could be a J.G. Ballard link to be made here too, with that author's Shanghai childhood experiences marking him for the rest of his life, and making him see peacetime life through different eyes, applying the traumatic event to the alienating structure of post-war society)
It is a fascinating period of the Second World War, and it is great to see this subject getting tackled again outside of the film
Come See The Paradise.
The documentary itself follows Murakami visiting a museum about the events, speaking with his brother and sister about their personal experiences and then visiting the site of the camp in a guided tour and speaking with some of the other people also making their pilgrimages there. It is much more focused on this central experience of Murakami's youth, and if you are looking for something dealing with his animation work it is not dwelt on in too much detail. There is a moment in Dublin at the beginning of Murakami saying he worked on Battle Beyond The Stars and describing the plot of When The Wind Blows to a young barman in a pub, but rather than the more celebrated features this film dwells in more detail on his more personal works and how they tie into his life. For instance a great lengthy clip from Murakami's short film
Breath gets made very personally powerful when put in conjunction with Murakami's voiceover describing his failed marriage, drinking problem and the birth of his children, as the character on screen rhythmically inhales women and alcohol and exhales a child.
And throughout the film we are shown Murakami painting, beginning with Irish landscapes and then revealing his paintings of his memories of when he was interned with his family, which themselves get animated by the film. That is perhaps the power of a painting, that it can capture not the actual objective truth of a situation but the subjective
feel of what it was like to be in a certain place at a certain age, tucked up in bed whilst your parents are awake next door worrying about their future.
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Watching the film a few more times with the commentary and isolated score I also noted another upsetting detail that made me cry a couple of times - that in that final scene they've pulled the mattress out of the 'inner core or refuge' and it is in the centre of the (ironically named in this context) living room with Hilda laying dying on it, as Jim lies delirious on the couch. Then they both decide to get into their potato sacks and back into the 'inner core or refuge', which of course without the mattress means the characters just lying on the bare floorboards. I guess being comfortable does not matter at that point but it just emphasised that bleak, sparse, ascetic end for a couple who did not deserve such hardship.
And I forgot to add David Lynch to the comments about 'physicality and animation' above. I am thinking of his early short animations like The Grandmother and of course Eraserhead, but that final image of the film of showing the wooden doors of the refuge getting halo'ed into an iris and then floating off into the clouds as Jim and Hilda speak their last lines could be seen as being as bizarre, upsetting and beautiful as Laura Palmer's creation myth in the recent Twin Peaks series!