 and quarrelsome Kōsuke (Mutsumi Tamura) – and whose skin is partly furred over with moss. This is the sort of film that would partly delight and inspire a younger audience and partly psychologically scar them, and I mean that as a compliment. Director Hiroyasu Ishida, whose delightful Penguin Highway screened at Tokyo in 2018, isn't working in apocalyptic eco-fable mode here: this isn't a pre-teen-centred spin on Makoto Shinkai's Weathering With You. The flooding in Drifting Home doesn't create chaos, but a space in which Natsume and Kōsuke can confront and move past the unspoken tensions in their surrogate-sibling relationship. When the two were younger, both of their families lived in the block in which they're now reluctant passengers: so too did Kōsuke's kindly grandfather, who took Natsume under his wing to help her escape her parents' unhappy marriage. The friction between these two is written by Ishi){kind=link}
In Studio Colorido’s new feature, an apartment block is washed into the ocean with a gang of children abroad like a madcap Famous Five caper
‘Dreamlike’ is an easy word to swat around with animation – but this strange and beautiful new film from Studio Colorido really does feel like the product of a child’s imagination on rest mode. Drifting Home, which is screening at this year’s Tokyo Film Festival, follows half a dozen school friends who go exploring an abandoned apartment building one day in the summer holidays, only for the whole thing to be swept out to sea during a freak rainstorm with them inside.
This crumbling, cobwebbed hulk spends the next few weeks floating around an empty ocean, while other neglected and now unmoored structures – a derelict leisure centre, a shuttered department store – occasionally bob past. The children cross over to these buildings and back again in search of supplies, fashioning scrap into zip wires and rafts, while a few metres under the water’s surface, a dark, formless entity grasps and roils.
Back in their own block, meanwhile, they meet a ghostly new playmate who’s suspiciously knowledgeable about the lives of two of the group – retiring Natsume (Asami Seto) and quarrelsome Kōsuke (Mutsumi Tamura) – and whose skin is partly furred over with moss. This is the sort of film that would partly delight and inspire a younger audience and partly psychologically scar them, and I mean that as a compliment.
Director Hiroyasu Ishida, whose delightful Penguin Highway screened at Tokyo in 2018, isn’t working in apocalyptic eco-fable mode here: this isn’t a pre-teen-centred spin on Makoto Shinkai’s Weathering With You. The flooding in Drifting Home doesn’t create chaos, but a space in which Natsume and Kōsuke can confront and move past the unspoken tensions in their surrogate-sibling relationship. When the two were younger, both of their families lived in the block in which they’re now reluctant passengers: so too did Kōsuke’s kindly grandfather, who took Natsume under his wing to help her escape her parents’ unhappy marriage.