Author: Bryan Loomis
Chizuko’s Younger Sister is a coming of age movie where grief casts a long shadow. Mika is approaching the age that her older sister Chizuko was when she died. Mika had been the more reserved of the two and leaned heavily on Chizuko for learning how to interact with the world. But now Mika has to figure out who she is on her own as the adult that Chizuko will never be. This brings a unique gravitas and emotiveness to the coming of age story, and is a core strength of the movie.
To complicate things further, Chizuko’s ghost starts showing up, and has frequent conversations with Mika about the various occurrences of her life. This is an effective device to give us more insight into how Mika feels about both her sister’s death and the drama of her daily life. Mika’s character is phenomenally written - she already has a pretty strong sense of her values but just needs more confidence overall, as well as more certainty about exactly what she wants out of life. She builds her confidence and self-direction over the course of the movie but then some of the later events really test her, where she nearly makes some very bad decisions out of line with her values. But I always had a sense of why she was doing what she was doing, and felt that perhaps under the circumstances I would have done the same.
Obayashi liked to make movies about young people, and in his filmography, this is most similar to Lonely Heart, which also has a high schooler trying to figure out life while encountering a mysterious girl that seems to be a figment of his imagination. But where Lonely Heart tells a tight story with intersecting plot threads, this is more sequential and episodic, taking us through a series of events and interactions that Mika encounters at school and at home. Some of these sequences work better than others, but there are certainly too many of them. I was really locked in for the first hour, but there wasn’t a lot of development, so I felt my attention waning. A tighter cut would’ve served it well, I think.
In terms of style, Obayashi deploys a pretty light touch here. He still absolutely refuses to abide by the 180 degree rule, which is always funny to me. There are also some big moments where a bit of a flicker is used with a slightly zoomed image and then back immediately to the primary image, which gives those scenes a dreamlike quality. I had trouble finding this film with English subtitles so the version I watched was about VHS quality - not ideal. But I went back to a better transfer without subtitles and watched the film’s most visually impressive sequence, which involves fireworks on a dock, and it was pretty stunning.
So despite the runtime being a bit of an issue, this is a strong film where Obayashi deploys his ability to get to the root of real human emotion without contrivance.
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