In the era of moe moe kyuniliciousness, screening through the hundreds of new titles annually is a chore. Still from time to time I would come across something that makes the assault on my sanity worth the while.
Mai Mai Miracle is precisely that sort of thing.
This Madhouse film captures something innocent and precious, and I'm not sure how to react to it. It's also by some definition a film opposite of Summer Wars, yet also very similar. Click on to find out what's exactly magical about Shinko and her thousand-year magic.
Mai Mai Miracle
Directed by: Sunao Katabuchi
Produced by: Studio Madhouse
Released in Japan: November 21, 2009
The full name in Japanese, Mai Mai Shinko to Sen-nen Maho, describes our protagonist, Shinko, an imaginative child growing up with her family in the countryside. The year is some time during the 1960s, the location is in a farming town, covered by untamed fields and seas of wheat stalks.
In truth, there's nothing particularly supernatural, at a glance, about Mai Mai Miracle. The film is an adaptation of Nobuko Takagi's novel of the same, loosely based on her childhood experiences during the same era. The magic comes in when Shinko's imagination gets the better of her, and how imaginative coincidences build up an interesting and charming web of friendship--including a girl who lived in the same land a thousand years ago.
The heart of the experience is the dramatic aspects of Mai Mai Miracle. The story is told not only from Shinko's perspective, but also from the child a millennium ago, Nagiko, and Shinko's new classmate from the city, Kiiko. Kiiko moved away from the luxuries and comforts of blooming Tokyo to join her dad, who works as a doctor at a factory nearby. Shinko and Kiiko's friendship is both touching to see unfold and a bunch of fun, a collision of two worlds. Their relationship with Nagiko is perhaps more uncanny, but yet very natural of a bunch of 9-year-olds just the same.
At some basic level, the idea behind Mai Mai Miracle is that there just isn't a whole lot of things one could do in the countryside during the 1960s. Our protagonists, in essence, are entertaining themselves with their imagination. Playing house with dolls, building mud castles and racing with your imaginary friend are difficult activities to play up to a theater full of adults and children entertaining themselves with a film. Our protagonists can't even afford that (they had to sneak into a movie theater during one point). Part of the charm is this kind of backwater reminiscence, but at the same time it slows down the film drastically, and what we get isn't a particularly compelling show, especially if you are of short attention span.
Still Mai Mai Miracle was able to overcome that and delivery an impacting climax, despite the cinematic expectations of its audience. Perhaps even more notable is how Kiiko and Nagiko come in aid of the situation, despite their contributions are mostly on the realm of the imagination and emotional support. The visual magic is both subtle at time, and at times transformative, transporting us into the lives of a bunch of kids living a long time ago. It is what you would expect of a Madhouse feature film.
After seeing the movie (thanks to the NY International Children's Festival), my immediate reaction was one of surprise; some of the directorial tricks to merge Nagiko's world with Shinko's reminded me of another Madhouse film, Millennium Actress, and the whole rural Japan/urban Japan angle reminded me of the Ghibli film, Omohide Poroporo. These two things just never would occur to me to appear in the same work. Maybe that is the magic of Shinko after all.
live comments!
