Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman Review: Murakami Adaptation Is an Unsatisfying Clash of Styles

Despite its hallucinatory imagery and use of pop music as a kind of in-text soundtrack, Murakami Haruki’s work has proven strangely resistant to screen adaptation for much of his career, with Tran Anh Hung’s lethargic 2010 take on international bestseller Norwegian Wood being a case in point. But the last five years have seen a clear blueprint drawn up for successfully bringing the Japanese literary sensation’s output to the big screen.

Lee Chang-dong’s Burning and Hamaguchi Ryūsuke’s Drive My Car are both based very loosely on two Murakami short stories, and deploy languid pacing, a close attention to detail, and vivid symbolism to convey the existentialist melancholy of the author’s writing. Though it’s more faithful to the original text than those latter films, Pierre Foldes’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman also mostly chooses to expand upon the author’s short-form work. It features characters and events taken from both the titular collection and after the quake, while also adapting an early sequence from the epic novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

An opening title indicates that much of the film takes place in the wake of the devastating Tokyo earthquake of 2011, and its handful of interrelated stories are mostly linked by their general sense of loss, with characters and settings apparently haunted by some obscure trauma. As is typical of Murakami’s impressionistic literary oeuvre, the film’s timeline jumps back and forth regularly, and the lines separating memory, dreams and reality aren’t always obvious.

After his wife (Shoshana Wilder) walks out on him unexpectedly, office worker Komura (Ryan Bommarito) takes a trip out to Hokkaido to deliver a mysterious package to his friend’s sister, before having an emotional tryst with her friend in a room at a love hotel. Meanwhile, his extremely introverted and depressed colleague Katagiri (Marcelo Arroyo) is visited one night by a human-sized anthropomorphic frog, who promises to resolve his financial troubles if he agrees to join him on a perilous quest to prevent an even larger earthquake from hitting the city.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is the first animated feature to adapt Murakami’s work, and Foldes makes the most of the medium in order to capture the author’s brand of magic realism, as gently psychedelic dream sequences are interwoven seamlessly with the naturalistic everyday action. Rudimentary sketching and a palette of washed-out pastels give the film a low-key, minimalist veneer, while Foldes also makes use of an advanced 3D modelling technique to capture the smaller nuances of his actors’ live-action movements and gestures.

But the latter makes for an unsatisfying clash of styles, and the overall effect runs counter to the impact of the psychologically rich source material. Here, the bland external world seems to take precedence over the characters’ inner lives. As such, the matter-of-fact presentation of dreamlike digressions is robbed of both its uncanny visual appeal and its metaphorical force.

The aesthetic is occasionally reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s early-2000s forays into rotoscoping but has none of the reality-warping potency that lifted Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly above dull philosophical navel-gazing. Apart from the translucency of many background characters, which serves as a particularly moving illustration of urban alienation, the emotional core of the film’s narrative is rarely depicted in an interesting way.

In trying to render Murakami’s distinctive literary aesthetic on screen, the film also inadvertently emphasizes some of his shortcomings, as the occasionally flat characterizations and monotonous dialogue only become more stifling here. Some pleasingly odd visuals and a sustained off-kilter mood will likely please many animation fans who haven’t had any exposure to the source material, but Foldes’s film ultimately fails to create any clear identity of its own.