End Of The World

End Of The World

InKazuaki Kiriya, the Japanese director crazed for action and comics and fantasies, impacts the world of cinema with his bold and controversial works like Casshern (2004), Goemon (2009), The Last Knights (2013) And Finally, from The End of The World (2023) There has been a lot made from just 4 films and even though it may not be widely considered as a large body of work, Kiriya’s work demonstrates his singular and visionary artistry.

He is well known for his cinematic approach with a distinctive trademark even with owing music videos for the likes of Hikaru Utada who was his ex-wife. And indeed, in the film, From the End of the World, Kiriya maintains a unique authorial position in showing a world destroyed by human desire and vanity that has no escape from it.

In a rather disheartening way, the story of From The End of the World is both simple and intricate. Fast forward somewhat in time to the year 2030 for Hana (Aoi Ito) a young girls who seems to hold, rather single handedly, the world in her hands. It is her duty to find and uphold the threshold going between dream life and reality so that she can prevent the end of humanity along with its production desires.

She has to do this within a span of two weeks. In the part of the timeline which Hana is trying to affect, she looks up with a younger version of Yuki (Mio Masuda) a girl and a weird kid-shaped man known as Shiro, who is draped in leaves with domestics around his head as a mask. In this motley crew of homeless abused or deceased children, they set out to execute a mission save the earth that no one else does.

For that, an ancient witch (Mari Natsuki) who holds the records and dreams of physical people together with the records of the book of history of the universe, helps them. And all along, it is only Hana who can change this history, by destroying the evil residing in both the imagined past as well as the real present.

Much like the elderly woman, Hana too is a reincarnater, living not just one, but several lives in succession. To keep the world safe, she must travel to the distant past in her dreams and deliver a letter there. The where the main problem lies is whether the world in its present form is even worth saving?

While evidently long, From The End of the World manages to remain entertaining and gripping the entire length. This is mostly due to the brilliant performance of the two young actresses Aoi Ito in the role of Hana and Mio Masuda in the role of Yuki as their characters have extreme traumas and are both alone in a tricky world full of vicious men whose agenda is to bring down the superiority of female nature.

Kirayi’s work and his cinematographer Chigi Kanbe had great success in creating remarkable aesthetics of destruction: in depth and in volume, such as in high angled, wide-angled background shifting scenes. The cinematic time shifts back and forth between the feudal past and the present now, in order to integrate the story temporally, use color and black and white images.

The color palette of our time or the near future is composed mostly of greens and yellows, while blues and reds provide needed contrast and breathing space that indicates that all hope is not lost. However, this is not a straightforward opposition as colors spill over into the realm of the dream: fire glows in yellow while blood drips in red which hints at the intertextuality of the realms.

As Kiriya himself has said, the film’s title suggests that it is a closing chapter. If true, it will not only be a setback for Japanese cinema, it will be for the rest of the world’s cough, too. To put it mildly, modern movie industry is swarmed with tired franchises and the likes of Scorsese get hired for their names and are forced to water down their talent to relieve action scenes and some shallow story that makes no sense.

Judging by the cinematic and the ecological worlds, both seem afflicted with a malignant tumor of capitalist overconsumption and narcissism of the man. Finally, From The End of the World reminds us of important issues, such as the nature of philosophical and ecological dangers resulting from the lifestyle oriented around the ‘now’, without the intention to bequeath anything to future generations. However, Kiriya’s films are a relief from feeling bombarded by all the clones of such, it would be most unfortunate if Kiriya’s story would end as it does within the movie.

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