The Girl From The Other Side

Think of Japanese animation and you probably have a very particular style in mind right away. Yutaru Kobo’s The Girl From The Other side, which screened at Fantasia 2022, is a very different beast. Based on the manga by Nagabe, it builds on the distinctive look found therein to create something suggestive o0f Arthur Rackham illustrations brought to life, with just a hint of the work of Edmund Dulac. It is breathtakingly beautiful – hard to look away from, in fact. So beguiling is the effect that it’s easy to drift through most of it before noticing that there is very little story. This is all about mood.

It’s set in a world very different from our own, perhaps in its future. Society has broken down and the surviving humans have retreated to a place known simply as Inside, guarded by soldiers who wear metal plate armour and wield old fashioned weapons. Elsewhere, shadowy Outsiders roam – beings which were once human but have mutated in form and now prey upon the residents of the last few unprotected human villages, spreading their contagious curse. In this world, a lost human child and an Outsider who still hasn’t quite let go of his past meet, a fateful event which will change the course of both their lives.

She is Shiva, young, pale, wide-eyed, clad in white, looking as if she has just stepped out of the pages of a late Victorian children’s book. He, tall and gaunt, jet black, point-faced and gaunt, with a rather dapper coat which barely conceals his tail, has forgotten his name, so she refers to him simply as Sensei, because he knows many things. Perhaps this pains him. He has forgotten the names of the woman and child whose pictures he carries inside a silver locket, though he knows that he once loved them. But his instinct towards this child is, first and foremost, protective. Unwilling to touch her for fear of spreading his curse, a finds a stick, and they each hold one end of it, and in this manner he takes her away with him.

What follows is a tale of surrogate parenthood and friendship in adversity, imbued with sorrow for a lost world which, despite the fantasy setting, presents obvious parallels with what many people are going through today in our own world. One might also think of the loss of innocence which comes with the passage into adulthood and seeing the world for what it really is – though complicating that is the magic which children can restore to adults’ lives through the gift of their perspective. It is this latter quality which intermittently lifts the film out of its melancholy course and prevents its Outsider hero from relaxing into certainty about his fate.

Despite these moments of magic, the film’s focus on depressing themes makes it emotionally draining to watch. it is probably best suited to viewers who are glum to begin with and want to indulge those feelings for a while before countenancing hope. Its beauty casts such a spell, however, that anyone might get lost in it, and it is surely a contender for best animated film of the year.