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The recent films Drive My Car and Burning, two exquisite screen adaptations of Haruki Murakami’s fiction, delve into unsettling enigmas and longings, spun around performances of gripping subtlety. As a work of animation, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman can’t plumb behavioral depths and tics in quite the same way. But animation is an apt medium for exploring another aspect of Murakami’s work, his magic-realist spin on existential angst. Pierre Földes, a composer and visual artist at the helm of his first feature, has made something that mixes the painterly and the stylized, a film that’s lovely, mysterious and also, at times, fittingly odd.

The writer-director finds connective tissue among the various storylines in the idea of an earthquake as a psychic rupture, shaking loose the dissatisfactions and yearnings that are usually under wraps, keeping people shut off and stuck. Földes’ multiple roles here include writing the score,...

Haruki Murakami doesn’t write in any particular genre — the Japanese literary giant is a genre. While his expansive bibliography has seen him dip his toe into everything from magical realism and hardboiled mysteries to straightforward literary fiction and fitness commentary, his singular worldview ensures that every genre he chooses to play with is bent to his will — never the other way around.

At this point, the novelist’s trademarks are known to anyone with even a passing interest in contemporary literature. His stories unfold like steam rising off a lake, flowing in seemingly directionless patterns before forming something indescribably beautiful. His protagonists are often ambitionless men who appear content to let life happen to them. But as they get sucked into increasingly surreal adventures, their passive dispositions and willingness to go along with things quickly make Murakami’s bizarre plots seem relatively normal.

By seamlessly shifting his focus between...

Unfolding in the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Pierre Földes’ animation - based on the work of Haruki Murakami - is filled with unexpected movement, from rumbling discontent to relationship aftershocks and from the real to the imagined. The sense of flow extends to the narrative, which weaves together a series of stories, connected not so much by plot intersection as by existential questions of purpose and loss.

Chief among the characters are two bank employees, Mr Komura (voiced by Ryan Bommarito in the English language dub that is currently on release in the UK) and Mr Katagiri (Marcelo Arroyo). Komura is facing a seismic shift in his life, after his girlfriend Kyoko (Shoshana Wilder) suddenly leaves him. Meanwhile, Katagiri, who is under immense stress in the loan department at work, begins to have strange visitations from a giant frog who wants him to help save...

The seductively quirky sad-serious tone of the author is evident as a constellation of characters try and save the city – including a lost cat and a giant talkative frog

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has inspired some prestigious movies, most recently Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car. Regardless of whether this new Murakami adaptation (based on his short story collection of the same name) comes to be considered the best, I think it might actually capture the elusive essence of Murakami more than any other – something in it being a Rotoscope animation of elegant simplicity. It has the ruminative lightness, almost weightlessness, the watercolour delicacy and reticence of the emotions, the sense of the uncanny, the insistent play of erotic possibility and that Murakami keynote: a cat.

Pierre Földes makes his feature directing debut here, having been long been a composer; his musical credits include Michael Cuesta’s L.I.E.

"No matter what you wish for, you can never be anything but yourself." The Match Factory has revealed an official promo trailer for an indie animated film titled Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, marking the feature directorial debut of composer Pierre Földes. This premiered at the Annecy Film Festival and at TIFF this year, and has been released in France and Canada already, but nowhere else just yet. A lost cat, a giant talkative frog, and a tsunami help an unambitious bank employee, his frustrated wife, and a schizophrenic accountant to save Tokyo from an earthquake and find a meaning to their lives. It's based on the Haruki Murakami book of the same name. This sounds like a fascinating animated existential tale of identity and philosophy. The film's initial voice cast includes Marcello Arroyo, Michael Czyz, Zag Dorison, Pierre Földes, Jesse Noah Gruman, Katharine King So, John Vamvas, Nadia Verrucci, and Shoshana Wilder.

An early 2023 UK-Ireland release is planned.

UK distributor Modern Films has picked up Annecy premiere Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman for the UK and Ireland from German sales agent The Match Factory.

It is the directorial debut of US-born French composer Pierre Földes, who also wrote the screenplay and score, and is based on a collection of short stories by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. Modern Films released Cannes premiere Drive My Car in the UK and Ireland in November 2021, also a Murakami adaptation.

The animation follows the lives of multiple characters as they navigate existence after the 2011 tsunami in Japan, including a bank employee without ambition,...