Based on a Japanese folktale, Urashima Taro entrances viewers thanks to its eastern feel, great poetic quality and its visual inventiveness.
This short film invites young viewers to travel into the unique world of the oriental tale. The bonds between people and animals, the animism and the spiritual dimension all hark back to time-honoured eastern codes, while the transformation and magic are ingredients that are more familiar from western tales.
While Urashima Taro is one of Japan’s oldest folktales, here the director offers a free adaptation of it. Taro’s concluding transformation makes this a coming-of-age story with a real lesson and in which life and death, past and present, oldness and rebirth go hand in hand. The box given to Taro by the princess of the sea is not a Pandora’s box like in the western tale – and Taro’s ageing, although it seems terrible, is not a punishment, rather it is a promise of peace in the next world.
This film with no words harnesses the power of images to move us, making us feel, through Taro's fate, the potency of nature and the passing time. While the watercolour paintings confer softness and poetry to the set, the stop motion animation brings the characters’ movements and expressions – as well as the various natural elements – to life. The soundscape lends an even stronger pulse, as we hear the rain, the wind, a seagull, and a box being opened. Thus the film pays tribute to the traditional tale on which it is based while also elaborating a very personal universe blending more contemporary artwork and techniques as well as stop motion. Also, an honorary mention must go to the dragon and the magic powder!
This film, then, is both an invitation to dream and a stimulation to explore the imagination. The underwater motifs, from the enchanted palace and the transformation to the eastern themes and assorted symbols from western fairytales, young viewers are encouraged to wonder and, cajoled further by the film’s poetic quality, they will doubtless want to find out more …
If you like fairytales and especially magic, set sail with Taro the young fisherman for a mysterious eastern world!
