Ocean Waves
jpn Umi ga Kikoeru, aka I Can Hear the Ocean. 1993. TV movie. 72 min. Drama/comedy. org Saeko Himura (novel). dir Tomomi Mochizuki. des Katsuya Kondo, Yoshifumi Kondo. -bc
An unsung made-for-TV Studio Ghibli drama, Ocean Waves tells the startlingly honest (and often quite funny) tale of a self-aware high school boy captivated by a beautiful but willful new transfer student from Tokyo who causes him and his class nothing but trouble.
In the southwestern Japanese town of Kochi, Taku Morisaki and his best friend, Matsuno, meet a new transfer student, Rikako Mutou, whose mother has separated from her father and moved with her children away from Tokyo. A born-and-bred city girl, Rikako gets good grades but is aloof and distant for the most part and considered snobbish by the other girls. Matsuno is quickly smitten with Rikako, while Taku tries to keep his distance. Unfortunately, he finds himself caught up in the girl’s schemes and winds up first lending a large sum of money to her and next accompanying her on a trip to Tokyo, where she hopes to reconnect with her father and get him to agree to let her live with him. This doesn’t pan out the way she wanted and Taku finds himself in a single bed hotel room for the night, with a tearful Rikako on hand complaining about her father’s new girlfriend and drinking to forget her troubles. He winds up sleeping in the bathtub.
Back in Kochi, rumors of the Tokyo stay spread slowly through the school and Taku has a confrontation with Rikako over it, culminating in the two slapping each other. Things come to a head between Rikako and the other girls on the occasion of the school festival, where Rikako is berated for her lack of class spirit in refusing to participate. She stands up to them and sends them storming off. Taku is a witness and praises Rikako for her refusal to be intimidated. She cries and this earns him another slap. Seeing this, Matsuno comes over and punches the stunned Taku.
Everyone graduates and goes off in different directions, with Rikako staying in Kochi and Taku going off to Tokyo University. At a class reunion in Kochi a few months later, Rikako is notable by her absence, but then Taku is informed that Rikako had gone to Tokyo to look for a person who likes to sleep in bathtubs. . . .
Tomomi Mochizuki directed another acclaimed high school drama, Kimagure Orange Road The Movie: I Want to Return to That Day, as well as episodes of the Kimagure Orange Road TV series. Other directorial credits include Here Is Greenwood, as well as episodes of Maison Ikkoku and the first TV season of Ranma 1⁄2.
This is a simple, slice-of-life drama done in a straightforward, realistic style, with lots of sunlight and a palette of light colors, as befitting a southern Japanese seacoast town. There are real-life settings all through it, from the airport at Kochi to apartment lobbies and hotels in Tokyo to the restaurant-bar where the kids have their reunion, to the townscape with Kochi Castle illuminated at night in the distance and the Tokyo subway platform that appears in the opening and closing scenes.
The characters are all realistically executed and almost look Japanese. The eyes are too round and the hair on some of the characters is too light, but with some, such as Rikako and Matsuno, you can see their Japanese real-life counterparts clearly in them. They’re an interesting group of characters, not one of them an anime “type,” and their designs reflect that. The reunion scene at the end is particularly effective because these kids actually look like they’ve grown up somewhat and matured over the year. They still look recognizably the same, but with the subtle differences you would expect of a high school senior–turned college freshman. “You got pretty!” one boy exclaims to Shimizu, the girls’ class leader and the one who had been most inclined to lecture Rikako. And indeed she has.
There is some interesting cutting between scenes, and unusual choice of angles throughout, with a particularly clever flash-forward at the very beginning to a scene that takes place near the end, all to set up the surprise ending.
Ocean Waves is the great “lost” Studio Ghibli film, unseen by anyone in the U.S. who doesn’t buy (or download) fan-subs or purchase Hong Kong import discs in Chinatown stores, or buy Japanese imports online. It’s the only Studio Ghibli feature that was omitted from the package of films licensed by Disney for distribution in the U.S. and is, arguably, one of the studio’s great treasures, on par, in its own down-to-earth way, with the bigger-budgeted dramas, Only Yesterday and Whisper of the Heart. It’s a simple tale of high school life with the emphasis essentially on two characters and the distance between them at the start of the school year, and the closing of that distance over the next two years, until a very pleasant surprise in Tokyo. Rikako’s actions and schemes force Taku into reacting to them. He knows he’s being manipulated, he knows she’s calculating, yet he’s a man of chivalry and does the right thing each time. Well, almost each time—there are those slaps to consider. Her actions cause him great difficulty, but prove hilarious to the rest of us. In the end, it seems, he’ll be rewarded after all.
It’s all accomplished in a short running time (72 min.) in a simple but straightforward style, with none of the stylistic quirks of the far more ambitious His and Her Circumstances (whose two lead characters are much more idealized versions of these two), nor any of the silly comic antics one finds in most high-school-themed anime. The movie could easily have been made as a live-action film, and a very charming one, too, but the choice to animate it offers yet another example of how animation can effectively tell a range of human stories, complete with all manner of behavioral nuances.
The musical score is not terribly intricate, basically the same charming, lilting melody played over and over in different arrangements, but a sweet composition that is heard at the end as a song sung by Youko Sakamoto, the actress who voices Rikako.
Poor Taku. First he agrees to lend ¥60,000 to Rikako on the spur of the moment in a Hawaiian hotel lobby. Then he winds up on a plane to Tokyo with her with only the clothes on his back and the money in his pocket. When he calls his mother from a hotel and she tells him to get home soon because dinner’s almost ready he has to tell her he can’t because he’s in Tokyo and he’ll explain later. Then he has to sleep in the bathtub after Rikako gets drunk and falls asleep on the bed. Much later in the film, he praises Rikako after watching her stand up defiantly to the other girls’ attempts to pressure her and she gives him a solid slap for his trouble. Then Matsuno, his best pal, comes over and gives him a punch for good measure. Why? For not recognizing the pain Rikako was hiding by standing up to them. Poor Taku.
The sublime ending on the subway platform is one of the great endings in romantic movie history and hardly anyone outside of Japan knows about it.
Kochi, the setting for this film, is the capital of Kochi Prefecture on the southern coast of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four major islands, almost four hundred miles southwest of Tokyo. Kochi Castle, dating back to 1748, is the city’s chief historical attraction and is visible in a few scenes in the movie.
There is much talk about accents, as Rikako complains about the regional accents of the boys in school, while the boys are turned on by Rikako’s Tokyo accent. The credits list a coach for dialect instruction.
Of all the Ghibli films, this is the only feature that has yet to be seen officially in the United States in any form. There have been Ghibli retrospectives in the U.S., but this film has been absent from the programs, presumably because of its TV origin.
advisory As college freshmen, the kids drink and smoke at their reunion party. One boy passes out.