Ojiisan no Lamp

Overview: My quest to review the entries of the 2011 Future Animator Contest continues with the one shot anime that won the contest and was widely considered the best. That anime is Grandfather’s Lamp. The story starts in 1930s Japan when a young boy comes across an old oil lamp and is quick to discard it. This displeases the boy’s grandfather, who proceeds to tell the young boy the importance that the lamp played in his life. When he was his grandson’s age, the grandpa worked in a rice field rather than attend school and had to use flint and tinder to start fires. When theWestern technology of the oil lamp was introduced to his rural farming village, he was enthralled with this revolutionary technology and decided to become a lamp salesman. His grandmother saw the oil lamps as demonic and frightening at first, but gradually grew to accept them. For the first 20 years, the Grandpa’s business did very well and he married a beautiful wife and had 2 children. Then to his utter horror, his business was rendered obsolete overnight when electricity was introduced to the town. He tried to scare the other villagers and told them that electricity was evil magic and basically reacted the same way his grandmother had to the oil lamp. Although he was initially furious and emotionally crushed, he realized that he couldn't be left behind and had to change his livelihood. He was then able to move on with a new dream. The theme of this anime is the passage of time and how we can’t stop change. We must learn to accept that things change and adapt along with them. This particular example uses the astonishingly rapid modernization of Japan in the late 1800s and its transformation from a technologically backwards agrarian nation to a modern industrial nation in just a single lifetime. History has seen a number of great jumps like this, but Japan’s post Meiji Revolution jump is often viewed as one of the most dramatic and definitive examples. The anime wisely avoids the pitfalls of nostalgia and saying one time period is better than another. It instead looks passively and objectively at the fast flow of time and just how much the world can change in a single human lifetime. This anime is well animated, artful, and fairly thought provoking. Compared to the other entries in this contest, I can certainly see why this won. The only real flaw I could see as a critic was that it could be accused of getting a tad sentimental at times. I find it amusing that this entry was clearly trying SO hard to win the contest, while the other entries are just playful and goofy. This was competing against a folktale parody about a spider-demon loli! Imagine a film contest in which “Boyhood” was up against “Freddy Got Fingered”. It doesn't even seem fair, but rather like bringing a grenade launcher to a fist fight! Was Grandfather's Lamp guilty of being "award bait"? The answer to that last question is difficult to answer because what constitutes “award bait” actually depends entirely on the specific contest and what its judges are like. For example, “Oscar Bait” is NOT the same as “Cannes bait”. What do I mean by that? A good example of something that would be great for Cannes, but have no prayer at the Oscars is Mushishi. The major American film critics all called the live action version of Mushishi “boring, pretentious, garbage!” In the world of cinema, American film critics are notorious for being what anime snobs on MAL and 4chan call “filthy casuals”. The most respected film critics in the world are people like Sights and Sound Magazine in the UK. If you look at their top 100 films of all time, you will notice that the vast majority weren’t even nominated for the academy awards. Mushishi is an attempt to create an anime version of a very specific style of Euro art film in which plot and characters don’t really matter and it is ALL about surrealist imagery and existential artsyness. An example of the type of film that Mushishi clearly wanted to be like is “Stalker” from 1979. European film critics went NUTS over it and proclaimed it a masterpiece while American critics called it boring and pretentious and snubbed it in every category of the 1979 Oscars. Instead the Americans nominated several mediocre films like “Unmarried Woman”, “Coming Home”, and “Midnight Express”. Of course the French and British laughed their asses off at how profoundly stupid and uncultured the Oscar judges were and said that Stalker should have easily won: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Camera Editing hands down! My point is that I don’t know what the 2011 Future Animator judges were like and if this was indeed guilty of being award bait. It does kind of seem like it though.

Times are constantly changing; old technologies are continuously being replaced by new. Sometimes though, it's not easy to let go of something outdated, especially if it has played a central part in one's life. In essence, this is what happens in "Grandfather's Lamp", when an aged protagonist Minosuke tells his grandson about the role lamps played in his life. Being one of the 2010 Young Animators' Training Project, the artwork has a simplistic beauty about it and seems to have been done with great care. The shading of the eyes is a little weird - they have these dull colourings that are often used in otheranime to indicate a lack of consciousness or control. The background music is also very good, gently supporting the quieter moments and weighing in and enhancing the key ones. Judging technical aspects of an anime really isn't my forte though, so I'm gonna quickly move onto the other stuff. :P The first part of "Grandfather's Lamp" is about how Minosuke, as a boy, came across lamps being sold at a shop in a time when such things are a rarity in Japan. Fascinated by this new technology, Minosuke decided to start selling them in his village, eventually growing up and expanding his enterprises into the city. For a long time, life was great; his business thrived and he started a family with his childhood crush. So far so good. This part of "Grandfather's Lamp" is mostly calm and peaceful, a part that highlights Minosuke's delightful enthusiasm for the lamp, and how it was the foundation to all that was good in his life. The second part of the tale shows Minosuke's lamp business becoming obsolete; electric lighting started to appear as Japan continued to modernise. Even though Minosuke embraced the technology that was the lamp, he was reluctant to show the same attitude towards electric lights, and did not want to abandon the lamp business his life was built upon. On paper, this had superb potential. It could have been a great story about Japan's modernisation and Minosuke clinging on to the past. Instead, "Grandfather's Lamp" fell on its face in this second part, as it went for impact and drama with a subject that should have been treated slowly and with subtlety. After all, it's not like the adoption of new technology happens over night, and the point where it was treated as such, when Minosuke somehow only discovered electric lights when he was surrounded by them, is the point where the story started to fall apart. It gets worse. Minosuke's resentment eventually drives him to ridiculous actions that were made more ridiculous by the "Higurashi"-esq dramatisation, and his eventual enlightenment was delivered with all the finesse of an elephant burglar. It seems almost surreal when compared with the quiet, slice of life nature of the first half. Towards the end, as Minosuke finally came to terms with the inevitable and went about preparing for it, there was one breathtaking moment when the gorgeous visuals combined with the swelling music to form a beautiful, poetic scene, but even that was quickly marred by more silliness. In the end, with its vast potential and solid technical aspects, "Grandfather's Lamp" turned out to be only decent. With better screen writing and direction, it could have been so much more. It just feels like the effort that's obviously been put into the animation is lacking elsewhere.

Young Animator Training Project/Anime Mirai short reviews: Part 1/12 The first, and many people argue the best, of the young animator training projects. It has the highest ranking on MAL anyway. It tells the very human story of a guy who followed his dream and started up a lamp business, only to see it crumble in the face of new technology. The tone is perhaps a touch on the maudlin side, with a lot of “oh gosh aint this sad”, but it does an excellent job of humanising the story. The man’s transition from childlike wonder at the lamps to a successful business family man iswell paced and does a good job at making us empathise with the character, which is why I don’t feel too down on it getting all maudlin towards the end. They earned that through good storytelling. Ojisan himself perhaps isn’t the most memorable character, but the story is built around him having the standard reactions to these events, so we feel the same pain he does as we’d do the exact same things in those positions. Verdict: Watch

From time to time, there are anime which make us think hard and others which convey their message effortlessly. Ojii-san no Lamp falls in the latter category. It is about passion and attachment to the things we love and how at some point of time we are required to look beyond them and move ahead. It is about modernization and the pangs of sorrow which it brings to some people. The story told by the grandfather here to his grandson has a soothing tone. The emotions are conveyed effortlessly. A linear progression of storyline makes it easier to grasp the emotions felt by Minosuke, thelead character. The story is about an old man who one day finds his grandson playing with a decades-old floor lamp. He had completely forgotten that he still had it. That evening, he tells his grandson a story about himself, Minosuke, from when he was a child. He then takes us on a relaxing ride through his life, right from his childhood to when he became an adult. He narrates how he first came to see the wonderous device called a 'Lamp' in a far-off town and fell in love with its glowing beauty at first sight. With his high spirits and optimistic nature, he decides to light up his own town with the lamps. In time, he grows up to be a successful lamp merchant. He starts a family and continues his happy life until a new technology, electricity, arrives in the neighboring town threatening lamps to become useless and thereby endangering his business as a whole. How he copes with the drastic modernization is what constitutes the rest of the film. Letting go of the things we love most is always difficult but sometimes it is neccessary to do so to progress. Embracing new things and ways of life is the way to move forward in life and that is precisely what Minosuke tries to say. It is painful but once accomplised, it brings a sense of peace. The animation is of good quality and complements the village scenes to bring about their true beauty. The voice actors did a fine job and at certain moments like in the ending scene, they manage to make you really feel the words being spoken. These days, I don't usually have enough time to watch an anime series so I decided to watch the anime movies. And this is one decision I do not regret after watching this. Of course, it is not as good as Harmonie or Kotonoha no Niwa or some other movies you may have watched but it does almost perfectly everyhing that it was supposed to which makes it a very good and satisfying watch :)

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