TOPSY-TURVY WORLD by Andrew Osmond
O
ne of the century’s great philosophers sang that everything you know is wrong, black is white, up is down and short is long. Patema Inverted, by director Yasuhiro Yoshiura, confines itself to Weird Al’s middle axiom, that up is down. The heroine, Patema, begins in an underground world, falling ‘down’ a chasm to the surface. Once there, she must hang on desperately to anything she can, or plunge into the clouds beneath. A surface dweller appears, and the picture rotates one-eighty degrees to show what he sees; an upside down girl, being yanked up into the sky. “Don’t fall!” she shrieks at him. “Fall where?” he asks, reasonably. It’s a wonderfully fresh starting point for a film, though of course there are precedents. Gravity reminded us there’s no up and down in space. In fantasy cinema, David Bowie strode around an Escher-esque castle in Labyrinth (an idea extended in the third Night at the Museum), while Paris rolled up on itself in Inception. A much closer film to Patema was Upside Down. Made around the same time as the anime, this was a French-Canadian live-action film whose leads, played by Kirsten Dunst and Jim Sturgess, are kept apart by competing gravities. It was close enough to give Yoshiura the heebiejeebies. “When I was making Patema Inverted, the
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