Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (M18)

100 minutes, opens on Thursday exclusively at The Projector

4 stars

The story: A talkative frog and an elusive cat help a listless clerk, his traumatised wife and a schizophrenic accountant find meaning in their lives in the days following the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami.

Japanese literary superstar Haruki Murakami is having a moment for an author deemed un-filmable.

A European co-production with English dialogue, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is an adaptation of six short stories from the author’s three anthologies that arrives on the heels of the 2018 thriller Burning and 2022’s Oscar-winning Drive My Car.

It is an animation: casting the frog might have been a challenge otherwise, even if he is voiced with beguiling personality by French-American composer Pierre Foldes, who makes a striking writing-directing film-making debut.

In the wake of the Great Sendai Earthquake, two Tokyo salarymen are further destabilised when told their bank jobs will be outsourced, and timid middle-aged debt collector Katagiri (Arnaud Maillard) is visited that night by the humanoid amphibian seeking his help to save what is left of the city from a giant subterranean worm.

His colleague, Komura (Ryan Bommarito), heads to Hokkaido with a mysterious package on a week’s leave. His depressed wife (Shoshana Wilder) has left him after five days watching cable news coverage of the tragedy.

The personal journeys of the three individuals drift from one to the other while surreal disturbances bleed into the mundane. Ghosts are everywhere.

The visuals are a hybrid of 3D rotoscoping and 2D layouts. They lend themselves well to the magic realism in a bewitching meditation on the external and psychic fallout of the disaster.

Hot take: Turns out animation is the ideal medium for the whimsy and melancholy of Murakami’s fables, which find beautiful expression in this Annecy International Animation Film Festival prize-winner.

The Woman King (PG13)

135 minutes, available on Netflix

3 stars

The story: The Agojie were the legendary female militia of 19th-century West Africa, the original Dora Milaje of Marvel’s Black Panther. Viola Davis stars in this fictionalised dramatisation as the commander readying the next generation of fighters to defend their homeland against the Atlantic slave trade.

There was much disgruntlement in the lead-up to the 2023 Academy Awards over the perceived snubbing of Davis, who received no love for her sinewy yet sorrowful presence as General Nanisca of The Woman King.

This imposing leader is the adviser-cum-conscience of young King Ghezo (John Boyega), pressing him to repudiate the slave economy – their wealthy Dahomey kingdom profits by selling captives from neighbouring tribes – as African and European nations draw up strategic alliances in a historic era of colonisation.

Around their palace courtyards, meanwhile, the Agojie train and live in sisterly solidarity.

Director Gina Prince-Bythewood has been telling black stories since her 2000 debut Love & Basketball, and this Afro-centric feminist opus is a rare Hollywood display of ethnic and gender representation.

It has the context right, but, regrettably, not the content. Beyond the political tensions and cultural specificities, and for all of the film-maker’s passion, the narrative is a hackneyed coming-of-age journey of a brash teen recruit (Thuso Mbedu) learning discipline and sacrifice from her Agojie femtors – while having a furtive romance with a shirtless African-Brazilian himbo (Jordan Bolger).

The movie fails to fulfil its potential except as a military action epic. In hand-to-hand combats lithe and fierce, the women warriors show no mercy, slaying their enemies using scimitars, machetes and manicured nails.

Hot take: Black, strong and proudly female – but just because this historical saga is a progressive movie does not make it a good one. It is contrived melodrama all the same.