Back in the late 19th century, Japan started to modernize itself to catch up with the West and to raise its economic and military power. This effort however, had a significant impact to the country's long lasting healthy ecosystem, with the extinction of the Japanese wolf being one of the consequences. Taking inspiration from this fact, Masakazu Kaneko pens and directs “Ring Wandering”, a rather interesting movie that unfolds on a number of levels.
“Ring Wandering” is screening on Fantasia International Film Festival
Sosuke is an aspiring manga artist, though for the moment he's stuck doing heavy labor on construction jobs in central Tokyo. At the same time, he is trying to finish his manga about the battle of a hunter and a Japanese wolf taking place during the Russo-Japanese war. He is struggling however, particularly in drawing the animal, since no one has seen one for over a century. One day, while digging during his work, he accidentally uncovers a partial canine skull, which he thinks might be from the particular wolf. Therefore, he sneaks in the site during the night to search for more bones, but instead stumbles upon a distraught young woman who is searching for her lost dog, and treats him as some kind of curiosity. After much verbal back and forth, he agrees to help her, but Midori sprains her ankle and Sosuke has to carry her home. They pass through the gates of a shrine, and a different Tokyo awaits Sosuke on the other side, which he soon realizes is from another timeline altogether.
Masakazu Kaneko directs a film that makes two distinct comments, one based on the aforementioned natural catastrophe, and one on the fact that more than 100,000 bodies lie underground in the Japanese capital, killed in the Tokyo Bombings in 1945, which are now buried forever after the construction boom brought by the 2020 Olympics. These two remarks are presented through the two arcs of the movie, one that takes place in the present, with a splash in the past though, and one during the Russo Japanese war, with the combination working excellently for the narrative.
The first part, despite the travel-in-time sci-fi element, actually unfolds in realism, in the usual style of the Japanese indie, with characters of different quirkiness meeting each other and somewhat changing through their interactions. As such, the meeting of Sosuke with Midori emerges as one of the most interesting and entertaining aspects of the film, with the antithesis of the two, as the former is a laconic, keeping-his-distance type and the latter cheerful and essentially nosy, being highly rewarding to experience. Even more so after the appearance of her family, with the way the protagonist changes through this interaction being another great trait, as much as a testament to Show Kasamatsu's acting and his chemistry with Junko Abe.
The second part takes a completely different path, unfolding in the Japanese snowy mountains where a man who is somewhat of a pariah is searching for a wolf to kill, only to eventually realize he was searching for something different all along. Koichi Furuya's cinematography finds its apogee in this part, along with the scenes in the fields, with the high contrasted images being majestic to watch, in another antithesis, this time between the visuals of the two parts, that works quite well for the movie. Kaneko's own editing is also very good, particularly in the way it places the two arcs within the narrative and eventually connects them, as much as the manga-drawing sequences which are equally interesting.
In the vast plethora of similar looking Japanese indie films, it is a true pleasure to watch one that manages to stray away from the norm in a way that works, with “Ring Wandering” being an exceptional movie, both in terms of context and presentation.
