THE RELUCTANT ADVENTURESS By Andrew Osmond
K
eiichi Hara’s feature film Birthday Wonderland plays like a very traditional family fantasy, which seems to be part of its point. Given that the film tells the story of a Japanese girl travelling into a magic world, it inevitably raises thoughts of Spirited Away – which was, among other things, a plea for viewers to remember earlier ways of life, to not let the present swallow the past. That’s a theme in Birthday Wonderland too, and it’s stated very explicitly in the script. But Hara’s film also seems like a plea to remember earlier kinds of story. In the two decades since Spirited Away, the “youngster goes to another world” story premise has become familiar in anime – all too familiar. If you follow new anime made for TV, you’ll know it’s one of the most overused formulae in Japanese media now. As long ago as 2016, a Japanese short story contest in Japan actually banned tales of characters travelling to alternate worlds. As I wrote in a previous article, one reason was these stories “could all too easily turn into fan fiction for lazy writers, descending into self-insertion wish-fulfilment. At worst, they’re full of teen ciphers on mechanical quests, so self-absorbed that they negate the point of going to another world.” They also could be massively gamified, adhering to the worldbuilding and conventions of Dragon Quest and its RPG brethren, as if that’s all fantasy ever was. Birthday Wonderland, though, seems meant to remind viewers that otherworld stories existed before games consoles. It’s based on a 1981 book by Sachiko Kashiwaba, a Japanese writer who’s written a slew of stories about people visiting
46
“other worlds,” going back into the 1970s. But Kashiwaba acknowledged she was following still older traditions; she cited British authors such as C.S. Lewis, who created Narnia in the 1950s, and P.L. Travers, creator of Mary Poppins in the 1930s In Birthday Wonderland, it hardly seems an accident that the path to the wonderland lies through a lovely shop with shelves full of colourful children’s books, and not a video game cartridge in sight. True, the Birthday Wonderland film updates Kashiwaba’s story to the present day. The main character, a teenage girl called Akane, has a smartphone… except that sets up a flashback in where we see Akane’s peers cruelly “blank” another girl, who committed the heinous crime of not keeping up with her texts. The reason the girl missed the texts was that she spent a day with her grandmother. Thus, the film niftily sets today’s electronic life in opposition to the values of the past, of connecting to the previous generation. Akane doesn’t want to go to school, guilty she didn’t stand up for the other girl. She makes fake excuses that her mum sees through; but rather than scold her, mum bundles Akane off to the little shop mentioned above. Supposedly the shop’s owner, a family friend called Chii, has a present for Akane (it’s her birthday tomorrow). Curiously, though, Chii herself doesn’t know anything about it. Both Akane and Chii are distracted by a knocking from the cellar under the shop, from which emerges a dapper rake-thin gentleman, in a black suit and top hat. He’s called Hippocrates, and says he’s from another world
