Anime On the Big Screen: “Penguin Highway”

Venue: Dendy Cinemas, Level 2, North Quarter, Canberra Centre, 148 Bunda Street, Canberra City, ACT
Date: Saturday 10 November 2018
Distributor: Madman Entertainment
Format: Digital Projection, Japanese dialogue with English subtitles
Length: 119 minutes
Production Date: 2018
Currently on Home Video in English (as of writing): No

Three weeks after the last anime film in cinemas, another one pops up. It was a fairly nice spring day out with a fair bit of cloud cover but lots of sun poking through. But I had to battle through quite a lot of road works from home into civic which surprised me. Madman did a little more promotional than usual (which normally consists of a few social media posts and a website) and had a poster up in the cinema foyer, the first time they had done so since “Mirai” in August. Dendy was playing this film in the new section of the cinema which can be found via a walk way behind the box office. Despite usual poor promotion Madman does for these films, 14 people showed up including two families who had brought young kids. Yes, they brought kids to a subtitled film. And the families weren’t Japanese as you’d expect. Both were Anglo. Also of note was that a whole chunk of the adverts before the main feature were in Mandarin, some without English subtitles. I think it’s obvious, especially for the Sydney and Melbourne markets, Madman to a large degree is promoting these films to the Chinese demographic in this country. With that out of the way, it’s time to talk about the film;

Fourth grader Aoyama lives in suburbia with his family. Highly intellectual for this age, he is constantly jotting down notes and is continually interested in the world around him and learning everything about it. He often wonders what he will be like when he is an adult and has even calculated how many days it will be until he is one. With his best friend at school, the somewhat dim-witted Uchida, the pair conducts experiments and explore the area around their suburb. Most recently they have embarked on a project to discover the source of a local stream which they have dubbed the Amazon project. Aoyama has taken a liking to a female dental assistant at a local dental clinic he goes to. She has been teaching him how to play chess at a local coffee shop, however a girl at school, Hamamoto, always seems to beat him despite his continual progress in learning the tactics of the game. Regardless Aoyama has decided that the young dental assistant is the one whom he will marry when he becomes an adult.

One morning at the bus stop, Aoyama spots several penguins in the field across the road. He runs over to confirm this bizarre sight and can’t believe what he is seeing. At school everyone is talking about the strange appearance of the penguins. Aoyama hatches a plan with Uchida to investigate where the birds came from. Aoyama already has several theories as to why they have appeared and if indeed if they are penguins at all. Class bully Suzuki arrives putting down Aoyama and anyone else who is interested in the penguin invasion of the town. He knocks over Uchida which annoys Aoyama. Later in the waiting room at the dental clinic, Aoyama spots Suzuki and tells him that his appointment for removing his wisdom teeth is really code for a terrible disease he has in which he’ll have to have all his teeth pulled. Suzuki goes into the dental chair absolutely terrified and in hysterics and Aoyama is reprimanded by the young dental assistant.

Later doing research on penguins, he comes across the term “penguin highway” in a text book. This is the path the penguins take from feeding in the ocean going back to their rookery (i.e. colony). Liking the name so much, he decides to title his new research project on the penguin phenomena by that name. Aoyama and Uchida begin their research by quizzing several locals who had seen the penguins. This includes a lady who hit one with her car which left a penguin shaped dent in her grill and the truck driver who was taking the rounded up penguins to a zoo. On the journey he heard a bump in back of the truck and was amazed to discover household implements in the truck in place of all the penguins who had vanished. The pair continues their investigations in the forest behind the water tower. After a fruitless search, the pair hear something in the bushes and find a line of penguins following the stream. However they soon lose track of them. It’s as if they have disappeared into thin air.

Suzuki later spots the pair and with his two henchmen friends ties Aoyama up to a soft drink vending machine as Uchida flees in terror. As revenge for being humiliated at the dentist, Suzuki destroys some of Aoyama’s research notes and leaves him roped to the vending machine. A while later the young woman from the dental clinic walks past and eventually frees him and helps remove a loose baby tooth that has been annoying him for several days. To get his mind off the pain of the tooth removal, she retrieves a can from the vending machine and says shes going to show him something really special. She throws the can high in the air and it falls to the ground, turning into a penguin. Baffled at what he has seen, a day or so later he asks her to repeat the same phenomena this time with a number of household items. Nothing seems to work and she can’t understand why. She tells him that just sometimes she has the desire to create a penguin. Uchida later reveals he has captured one the penguins that was hiding in his parent’s garage. Oddly it refuses to eat or drink. They decide to take it to a local aquarium, however after the train passes only a few stops, the penguin becomes sick. They get off at the next station where the penguin metamorphoses back into a soft drink can. Days later, Hamamoto pulls Aoyama aside in class and asks him to come to the forest after school. Both he and Uchida decide to go with her. Deep in the forest in a clearing she shows the pair something she has kept secret from everyone; a large floating globe that seems to made from water. Are all the phenomena plaguing the town related?

This is the first full length feature film from Studio Colorido. It’s reasonable to say that most anime fans would have not heard of this fairly new studio which was founded in 2011. The only other major anime of theirs to get an English language release is the short film “Typhoon Noruda” which was released by Sentai Filmworks earlier this year. The director of that short film as well as this one is Hiroyasu Ishida who again is relatively unknown to most anime fans. He first gained recognition with his hilarious action filled student anime film “Fumiko’s Confession” back in 2009. After joining Studio Colorido he directed the short films “Fastening Days”, “Sonny Boy & Dewdrop Girl” and the much loved “Paulette's Chair” which was created as a 10th anniversary project for Fuji Television’s noitaminA programming block. This film is based upon a novel by Tomihiko Morimi who also wrote the novel “The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl” which was recently adapted into an anime film by Masaaki Yuasa. He also wrote the original novel which the TV anime series “The Eccentric Family” was based on. Makoto Ueda of Kyoto based theatrical troupe Europe Kikaku was the screenwriter. He previously wrote the script for “The Night is Short, Walk On Girl” and several scripts for “The Tatami Galaxy”. Rounding out the talented staff is former Studio Ghibli key animator Yojiro Arai who provided the character designs.

So far this year, I really think this is the best anime film that has come to cinemas. Though a Japanese film through and through, the film does at times feel like a 1980’s kid's adventure film, dare I say it, a bit like “The Goonies”, except with more of a sci-fi bent and perhaps a fantasy twist, somewhat like the recent retro Netflix show “Stranger Things”, but made for a family audience. With the core trio of Aoyama, Uchida and Hamamoto, their adventures really made me feel quite nostalgic for my childhood. Though unlike Hollywood films and indeed a lot of anime and Japanese films, this family film celebrates intellectualism rather than pushing those types of characters to the sideline. It is quite unusual to have to lead characters, Aoyama and Hamamoto, who are intelligent beyond their years in a film like this. But other characters like Suzuki are much more typical, verging on cliché, which I thought was a bit out of place considering how well written Aoyama was.

Having said that, I think Aoyama could be seen as a bit polarising for audiences. His opening monologue about the town and himself could be seen as him being terribly conceited. However his other personality traits such as his fondness for Uchida and the fact he has no harsh feelings towards Hamamoto every time she beats him at chess, show that he isn’t really some stuck up little kid. I also really liked the way Aoyama’s budding puberty was depicted. Like everything else he encounters, puberty and his feelings for women are something that Aoyama must study and solve as if was some kind of mystery. Luckily the way this is explored is quite well written. The unnamed dental assistant in her 20’s is not some object for Aoyama to ogle at. Much like him she has an intellectual side but is also quite playful. Possibly to some degree she is presented as an ideal woman as such, however in terms of story and plot she is much more than that to the film. I think the screenwriter, Ueda, has managed to fairly successfully portray her as fully fleshed character as well as an object of desire and fascination for Aoyama. That’s a pretty tough balancing act for a screenwriter I think.

The mystery behind the penguins, the large floating globe in the forest and the unnamed lady is fairly well done. Having read some reviews, some seem perplexed that the original novel won the Nihon SF Taisho Award in 2010. While there are some fantastical elements to the story, the core of the plot is purely science fiction based. It sort of baffles me that people can’t understand that. I think for the vast majority of its run time, the science seems to make sense. Of course not all of it is explained, especially how some parts of it fit together and if it is all the work of nature or was crafted by some being or alien force. However to a large degree none of this really matters. With the humour in the film, well written and likable characters and the action sequences there to distract you, it doesn’t matter all that much. Though perhaps at some points, some of the action is a little too silly to be believed.

Summing up, this is a really nice debut feature film from Studio Colorido and director Hiroyasu Ishida. Like with Shinichiro Ushijima who directed “I Want to Eat Your Pancreas”, I think he’ll be yet another young director I’ll be looking out for in the future. I recall seeing a fair few advertisements for the film when I was in Tokyo in summer this year, however Mamoru Hosoda’s “Mirai” got all of the press that summer. That’s a real shame as I think “Penguin Highway” is a far better film than “Mirai”. Maybe some of the scientific concepts are a bit too much for a movie with kids in mind and some of the sequences may scare young children (in regards to a penguin’s metamorphosing back into a soft drink can and some minor animal deaths), but overall it’s a really fun family film that is well animated, doesn’t talk down to kids, isn’t anti-intellectual and has an intriguing mystery at its core. Plus it’s got lots of hilariously cute penguins. You can’t ask for more than that. 8 out of 10.