The age of the bamboo helix. Seven views on childhood

The Japanese Cultural Institute dedicates the month of June to children’s cinema, drawing on the titles supplied to its Cineteca and entrusting the selection and curation to critics Enrico Azzano and Raffaele Meale, among the leading experts and enthusiasts of Japanese cinema in Italy. To them the word to present the review.

“With the age of the bamboo helix. Seven glances on childhood the attempt is to tell through seven cinematographic splinters, the relationship between the moving image and the narration of childhood mostly within the Japanese production at the turn of the eighties and nineties, when new challenges lay ahead for the cinema – the eruption of video games, the increasing importance given to television production – and the Seventh Art appeared to be in crisis, both aesthetically and economically. Seven small journeys which, from 1983 to 2013 (Oshin by Shin Togashi, poised between drama and mélo, is the only title to go a few steps from contemporaneity), will allow the public to grasp the will of Japanese production to position the gaze at the height of the child, and from there to scrutinize the world of adults, often viewed with suspicion or not understood: why Akira, for example, has already changed thirty-two schools and is still in elementary school? And why did Tatsuo’s older sister leave home to live with her uncles? Or again, with more and more existential questions, how can one deal with a sudden bereavement, or with the illness of a girl of the same age? Behind apparently simple stories, within medium-sized productions that have often been forgotten over time, you can see the dominant motif of a national production that is always open to any kind of solution, from historical reconstruction to horror, from drama. in the smell of Stand by Me with visual glimpses a few steps away from pure experimentation. The hope is always the same, that is, to awaken the curiosity towards one of the richest, most structured and stratified cinemas, and perhaps to realize the vicinity instead of the apparent distances.”