Howl from Beyond the Fog (2019)

directed by Daisuke Sato

Japan

35 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Another slightly unconventional pick for our second week of KaiJune, but one that, again, most definitely does have a giant monster in it.

Howl from Beyond the Fog bowled me over for about the first ten minutes. The film begins with a young man returning to his childhood home after the death of his twin brother (this is thematically significant but never addressed). There he meets a blind girl - who everyone thought was supposed to be dead - living in seclusion inside his house, and she introduces him to the god inhabiting the lake in the middle of their village, a creature that just wants to live and breathe along with everything else in the world.

I screened Great Buddha Arrival to a small audience this past month, and afterward, my friend and I were talking about the sense of never being able to go home again, of having memories of some specific place or thing that you can never, ever replicate, because even if you try, whatever you're nostalgic for is never going to be the same as the first time you experienced it. To me, that was the overwhelming feeling of the first ten minutes of this short: coming back home to find that everything is the same but also different - it's your home, the place you grew up, but there are aspects of it that you never recognized, here represented as the tremendous, unmovable force of nature that is the creature, but also the undercurrent of hatred in the village that the protagonist may have been too young to notice the first time around.

This is a stop-motion film where all of the characters are portrayed using puppets. Their static faces did not bother me at all, because I wasn't looking to the individual characters for information, I was listening to what was being told through their actions and the imagery onscreen. The creature (canonically named Nebula, which I think is quite beautiful, although it's never named in the film) was designed by legendary creature designer and modeler Keizō Murase. Most relevant to our discussion of this film is the fact that Murase also designed Varan, a creature who was also depicted as being a god to the people who lived nearby. Varan feels very influential on Nebula, and in a way, the story of Howl from Beyond the Fog is a bit like what an alternate-universe version of the movie Varan might look like. Varan is one of my favorite kaiju because of its unconventional origins, and I've always wanted a story where we get to see the creature in its context as a god.

I also want to mention that the film has this way of making Nebula's roar almost diegetic that I thought was really amazing. There's a soundtrack that starts up almost every time Nebula is onscreen, and when the creature roars, it fits in with the music so well that it feels like it's part of it. I don't know, that just gave me chills whenever it happened. Some of the music in this is actually rather unfitting, but the part of the soundtrack that blends Nebula's roar into itself is gorgeous.

I don't think this movie is all that it could have been, but it's pretty close. Going into this with expectations is not the best way to encounter it. Try to just live in it for a little while, get past the lack of human actors and revel in the craft of making this film.