Life is short, extremely short. The time between birth and death seems to fly by. Snip your finger – and it’s all over. The last seconds are just long enough to pronounce the syllable “da”. It is precisely this syllable, spoken with someone’s last dying breath, that is picked up by a man who looks for the shortest of all things in the streets of Tokyo. The syllable whirls through his thoughts, triggering a torrent of reflections on the Japanese language that he gets more and more worked up about. In a dadaist manner, the “da” words hurtle at us like notes in jazz. Bold ink drawings move across the white background, sometimes fluidly, sometimes explosively. A last “da” completes the extemporisation and brings to a standstill all the energetic circling and vibrating that dominated the image before. The dying man closes his eyes. But the end is followed by a new beginning.
“Extremely Short” marks the start of the series “Bungaku Bideo” – literature videos – which, commissioned by the Yanai Initiative, makes innovative accomplices of contemporary Japanese literature and international animation. In this case, Koji Yamamura encounters a piece of prose by Hideo Furukawa, listens to the monologue recited by the author himself and translates his linguistic furor into an exciting visual form.

Eleven-year-old Karin is spending the summer in the country, where she makes friends with a giant talking cat. So far, so cute. But there is more to come. Her father has run up debts with gangsters who will beat him half to death. The god of poverty stalks Karin. He will take her to hell, where her deceased mother is spending eternity as a cleaning lady. Does this still sound cute? If “Ghost Cat Anzu” is meant to be a children’s film, it is the most merciless one you can imagine.
The cat demon, or Bakeneko, is a well-known character in Japanese mythology. And there are other familiar patterns in Takashi Imashiro’s manga on which this film is based: the portal to a parallel world, the mythical creatures in the forest … But the devil is in the details, for comic and adaptation handle the traditions with an astonishing degree of irreverence; humans and ghosts often behave like unmitigated louts, and the entrance to hell is through a toilet bowl. First-time director Yôko Kuno and the renowned Nobuhiro Yamashita, who has co-directed an animated film for the first time here, work with rotoscoping. The quirky, cartoon-like figures and painterly backgrounds contrast so harmoniously, the highlights are so lovingly placed that one can feel, taste, smell and grasp the sultry summer atmosphere.