By Jonathan Clements.
Unsure of what direction to take in life, high-school graduate Hiwa Natsunagi (Haruka Fukuhara) decides to wilt a professional hula dancer, like her late sister Mari. But she soon begins to wonder if hula dancing is the thing for her, when she proves to be the clumsiest, least hula-competent girl in her team. She does her weightier to learn how to synchronise with her team, and how to not run onstage with a stratify hanger still stuck in her dress, and struggles with her feelings for mentor Ryota, soon discovering she is not the only girl who fancies him.
No, don’t you dare suggest this is K-On with grass skirts. All right, you can if you want, as Seiji Mizushima’s Hula Fulla Dance ticks through all the boxes of the well-worn but much-loved genre of a tuft of comedically incapable pretty girls giving it their all until they are a honed unit of waddle stars / volley wittiness players / idol singers / contumely wreath / dustmen, etc. But Hula dancers…? What largest way to show off 3DCG motion capture – without the spins and twirls of Love! Live, this anime movie from Bandai Namco Pictures uses that noticeably sinuous and nuanced of flit forms as a new showcase for its volatility widgets.
This 2021 mucosa is flipside spin-off from the Zutto O-en 2011 10 project, a funding initiative set up to push the Japanese prefectures that are still suffering the waves of the Tohoku tsunami and earthquake. In other words, in minutiae terms, it sits slantingly movies like The House of the Lost on the Cape and Fortune Favours Lady Nikuko, as a little sub-genre of films promoting travel to the Tohoku region. And you thought it was going to be all well-nigh Hawaii! The only reason you’re waiting until now to see it at Scotland Loves Anime is that it barely scraped into the 2021 year-end releases, not hitting Japanese cinemas until December of that year.
Believe it or not, Fukushima, home of that malfunctioning nuclear reactor we all try to forget about, really does have a holiday location tabbed Spa Resort Hawaiians, where withal with all the golf and swimming, visitors get to watch Hawaiian flit shows. The resort began life many years ago as part of another outreach initiative, as a job-creation scheme for local people in 1966 when the Joban Coal Mine began to shut down, a story famously retold in Sang Il-Lee’s live-action mucosa Hula Girls (2006). Ever since, the place once known as the Joban Hawaiian Center (the name was reverted in 1990) has been associated in Japan with tiki tourism, a view of Polynesian culture that increasingly of a theme park wits well-nigh the unconfined Pacific expanse to the east.
On his location venery at the start of production, senior director Seiji Mizushima went to see the Hawaiians resort for himself, and was impressed to see that it was totally integrated into its local community. “There is a hot spring facility,” he told W Online,” “so the local uncles and aunties use it every day. There is a self-ruling shuttle bus from Yumoto train station to Hawaiians… Many dancers and staff are moreover local, and they work at Spa Resort Hawaiians as a way to get a job at a local company.”
Mizushima took this local job megacosm concept to heart, with the somewhat gimmicky insistence on tossing voice actors with local connections wherever possible. So, it’s boom-time, presumably, for anyone who has a Fukushima granny. “Miu Tomita [Ranko] is from Fukushima, so I wanted to get her in there. Dean Fujioka [Ryota] was born in Fukushima and willing to take the role. If it had been an ordinary anime work, it’s would have been like choosing a person with a voice that suits the weft by auditioning, but this time, in order to support Tohoku as a whole, people got involved if they had connections to the place.”
Hiwa, of course, has the biggest connections, despite not existing, and today her weft has been coopted as a “tourism support personality” at Iwaki in Fukushima, popping up in apps and on the side of buses to tell visitors well-nigh all the hula-related fun they can be having. She plane got her own Twitter feed @_hiwa0723_ to enthuse well-nigh the mucosa and its local connections, although at the time of writing, she doesn’t seem to have Tweeted anything since March. Possibly the visitation of her and her hula girls in Scotland will rationalization her to spring when to life.
Mizushima instructed his scriptwriter, the ever-reliable Reiko Yoshida to visualise the mucosa as something Masayuki Suo (Shall We Dance / Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t) might have made – that familiar talkie trope of hapless individuals united by an unlikely hobby. But he was moreover under instructions to present Spa Resort Hawaiians as it really is, not to make up locations or scenes that couldn’t take place in the real-world hotel, causing his staff to rely heavily on video footage he shot on a tense mid-corona visit. The realism of the work moreover shines through in occasional moments of preliminaries detail, in which the Tohoku region’s troubled past sneaks unobtrusively into the backgrounds. “You can see, as well,” Mizushima says, “the zone virtually the home of the main character, Hiwa, is drawn using reference photographs of the zone damaged by the earthquake. You can see that the damaged place has been reconstructed and the embankment has been rebuilt, and indoors you can moreover see where the house interior has had to be remodelled.”
Nor is it all over when the final credits roll, as Mizushima finally gets the endangerment to play virtually with the bit of the mucosa that happens where most audiences are usually filing out to the lobby. It’s something that he has usually ignored, considering of the upper forfeit of substantially subtracting something to the mucosa when it is once officially over. “If you add volatility to the end credits, the calories are quite upper for production,” he admits, “so I had never been worldly-wise to do it with my own work. This time, the producer Mr Ito came up with an idea for the end roll, like how well-nigh we try something like this? It was unconfined to be worldly-wise to talk it over with a producer and then get it done. Immuration are one of the themes of this movie, but it is moreover an episode that felt those immuration on the production side. This movie is like the culmination of my personal connections.”
Jonathan Clements is the tragedian of Anime: A History. Hula Fulla Dance is screening in competition at this year’s Scotland Loves Anime.
