``Fireworks, Should We See It from the Side or the Bottom?” What is Shunji Iwai's thorough strategy for handling child actors?

``Fireworks, Should We See It from the Side or the Bottom?”Synopsis

Five boys, including elementary school students Norimichi (Yuta Yamazaki) and Yusuke (Takayuki Tanda), have a simple question: When you look at fireworks from the side, are they round or flat? I plan to go to the lighthouse on the outskirts of town to find out. On the same day, Nazuna (Megumi Okina), who had decided to transfer to another school due to her parents' divorce, plans to elope with the winner of one of the two competing in the pool, Norimichi and Yusuke. The fate of the battle between a boy and a girl for their delicate yet fresh love is sublimated to two different endings.

Index

• A story of a wonderful childhood
• How Shunji Iwai brings out natural acting from children
• Should children's films use amateurs? Will you use child actors?

A story of a wonderful childhood

Summer vacation, pools, festivals, boys and girls, unmanned stations, and fireworks. Director Shunji Iwai's ``Fireworks, Should We See It from the Side or the Bottom?” (hereinafter referred to as ``Fireworks'') is a refreshing masterpiece that stimulates the audience's sweet and sour childhood memories and fills the screen with the smell of summer. Even the ants crawling on the heroine's body and the weeds growing on the roadside look irresistibly attractive in this work.

However, rather than being immersed in nostalgia, the children's relationships and details are depicted realistically and carefully from the child's perspective, thereby bringing the unrealistic and excessive settings prepared there to life. In fact, there are probably very few people who have experienced the ``elementary school elopement'' and ``examining whether fireworks are round or flat when viewed from the side'' when they were children. By using such a setting unique to fiction, even when the film goes to the extreme, as exemplified by the climactic pool scene, the audience is carried by its momentum and does not feel the slightest bit of discomfort. At the time of its production, an increasing number of works were trying to be realistic and their stories lacked dynamism, but by condensing the potential of fiction into a juvenile work, Shunji Iwai created an excellent work that would be passed down from generation to generation until it was remade into animation. It was created.

How Shunji Iwai brings out natural acting from children