Jarinko Chie (film)

Jarinko Chie (じゃりン子チエ), also known as Downtown Story, is a 1981 Japanese animated film directed by Isao Takahata. Based on the 1978 manga by Etsumi Haruki, the film was co-written by Takahata and Noboru Shiroyama, it stars the voices of Chinatsu Nakayama, Norio Nishikawa, Kiyoshi Nishikawa, Kyoko Mitsubayashi, and Gannosuke Ashiya. Taking place in a working class town in Osaka, the young and independent Chie navigates the adult world around her, seeking to reform her father's behaviour and keep her family together.

Produced and distributed by Toho and animated by TMS Entertainment, Jarinko Chie was Takahata's reintroduction to feature-length animated films after working in television anime. Production began in December 1980, with the animation style taking strong cues from the source material. Particular notice was taken to accurately portray the film's setting of Osaka, including research trips, the use Kansai dialect, and the hiring of Osakan cast members. The film was released in Japan on 11 April 1981. Jarinko Chie saw moderate box office success and has been praised, particularly for its social consciousness and comedy. Analyses of the film have looked at the story as a commentary on masculinity and the role of community. After its success, Takahata served as the chief director for a follow-up TV series. Chie herself has remained a popular character in Osaka.

Plot

Set in a working class district of Osaka, ten-year-old Chie is tasked with helping her troublesome, workshy father Tetsu run a local —an informal bar or pub. Whilst cooking, she sees a stray cat looking hungry.

Production

Development and pre-production

Jarinko Chie was produced by Toho and animated by TMS Entertainment. The film is based on the seinen manga by Etsumi Haruki. After finishing work on the production of the final episode of Anne of Green Gables, Takahata was approached by Yasuo Ōtsuka with the project of Chie from their boss Yutaka Fujioka. Ōtsuka, serving as the film's animation director, and character designer Yōichi Kotabe may have convinced Takahata to direct the film upon realising the manga's entertainment value. Takahata agreed to direct the film and decided that he wanted to balance the manga's story and comedic content with its depiction of the Osakan people and culture. After a research trip to Shinsekai—during which Takahata spent time copying Haruki's art style and reading his manga—he felt that the script's first draft, written by Fujimoto Giichi, was substandard. The final script is credited to Noboru Shiroyama, who wrote the script for the Furiten-kun theatrical film. The film faithfully adapts much of the manga's first few volumes.

Masaru Hoshi composed the music. Art director Nizo Yamamoto was working on the final episode of the Lupin the Third television series when he was asked to work on Jarinko Chie for the first time. Takahata was impressed by Makiko Futaki's work on The Castle of Cagliostro and employed her as an in-between animator for Jarinko Chie. Working on the film represented a shift for Takahata from working under an established studio (as he had done at Toei Animation) to making films independently. The author Jonathan Clements credits the production of Chie with the revitalisation of Takahata's career producing feature-length animation, and for once more allowing Takahata to collaborate with his former colleagues at Toei (who he would later form Studio Ghibli with).

Production and animation

Jarinko Chie started production in December 1980. The film intentionally copied the manga's artistic and tonal style by balancing realistic and impressionistic animation (e.g. the introduction of Kotetsu as a normal cat before showing him anthropomorphised). Care was taken to emphasise moments directly from the source material's manga panels. The animation used a deliberately stylised "uncool" look; Ōtsuka recalled being talked to by Takahata for drawing character poses that looked good, but artificial within the world of Haruki's manga. The production crew experienced some difficulty in drawing the cats in the film, due to their more human-like movements, while remaining faithful to Haruki's drawings. As a result of having a large interacting cast of characters, the number of cels drawn was larger than normal, with each frame averaging about five layers of cels. Yamamoto used thin, watercolour-like paints for the film's backgrounds and firm pen lines for shading, but the combination in certain scenes made inking night skies impossible. The production lasted only a few months, as a result, the style of the animation changed to be more solid as it was easier to animate than the manga's more sketched visuals.

This was the first film in ten years that Chie's voice actress Chinatsu Nakayama had been in. At the time, she was a sitting member of the legislature in Japan's House of Councillors. During her first meeting with Haruki, the artist revealed that he partially based Chie on Nakayama's character from the film Gametsui yatsu. The film's dubbing started on 7 February 1981 at Tohokushinsha Studio in Asakusa, with characters being recorded separately in Osaka, which began on 13 February. During the dubbing process, Gannosuke Ashiya's nearsightedness made it difficult for him to watch the screen to match his character's mouth movements. Commenting on the process, Takahata referred to the voice acting as "honest", but found that the pre-animated sequences limited the ability for experimentation. Due to the original manga's episodic narrative, Takahata had difficulty cutting material from the film during the editing process. The film's theme song "Chie" was performed by the band BG4.

Setting

Takahata and Ōtsuka tried to ensure accuracy to the area of Osaka they were depicting, in order to do so, Takahata reportedly stayed overnight in a doss-house in Osaka. The film is based in the north-east of Nishinari Ward, in a working class district of Osaka. The characters of the film speak using Osaka dialect, a way of speaking considered more casual and emotional by speakers of standard Japanese. Chie herself uses it increasingly in proportion to her level of anger, toning it down dramatically when she is with her mother.

Numerous references to regional culture are made in the film, for instance, 's restaurant serves which is considered a regional speciality, and Tetsu and Chie's is named Horumon (ホルモン), referring to offal, derived from Osakan dialect meaning 'to throw away'. Throughout the film, the Tsūtenkaku can be seen in the near-distance and Chie and her mother visit Tennōji Park together. The film also features many comedians in its voice cast, a form of double-act comedy associated with Osaka and the Kansai region. At this time, comedy was undergoing a boom in popularity on Japanese television. Clements attributes the popularity of to the reason the film focusses on the city's culture.

Reception

Jarinko Chie achieved moderate success at the Japanese box office, but the film's popularity proved especially notable in the Kansai region. The film was praised by critics and audiences for being technically complex and containing subtextual nuance but received limited attention. Since the premiere of the film and television series, Chie has continued to remain a popular character in Osaka and the Kansai region more broadly. Writing at its release, academic and manga critic Tomohiko Murakami said of the film that it was steeped in pathos despite its funny moments, that the fluid role changes between adults and children allow the mediating role that Chie plays to be the source of both its comedy and sentiment. Writing in 1991 in anticipation of the release of Only Yesterday, film critic Tadao Satō referred to Jarinko Chie as his favourite of Takahata's films, emphasising that the film had beautifully captured a human expression that could only be replicated through his unique blend of entertainment and social consciousness, referring to Takahata himself as a "social activist".

British film and animation journalist Andrew Osmond contrasts the film's "ungainly" animation with its "careful life observation". He analyses the film as a commentary on masculinity, drawing attention to the parallel plotlines between the human and animal elements of the story, however concluding that it is neither especially funny nor engaging. Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc, in their writing on Takahata's filmography, refer to the film as a "comedy of dysfunction". They view the film as a story about community interactions and emphasise the redemptive power of food, noting how the boss——and his underlings each open food stands, while Chie is left responsible for cooking meat at the family's. The author Helen McCarthy sees Jarinko Chie as embodying a magical realist element in its depiction of working class life. To her, the cats mirror the human world, commenting on the class and gender relationships in the story. Clements views the film as a commentary on the "erosion of traditional masculinity" in contemporary Japanese society, with many of the men having lost their authority, while Chie respects her mother over her father (despite her mother's imperfections and father's love for her). He notes that Chie alludes to herself as an orphan, and further sings "Quayside Mother", a song about waiting for missing people to return after the war, to express her relationship with Tetsu.

director	Isao Takahata
producer	Hidenori Taga Tetsuo Katayama
screenplay	Isao Takahata Noboru Shiroyama
based on	Jarinko Chie by Etsumi Haruki
starring	Chinatsu Nakayama Norio Nishikawa Gannosuke Ashiya Kyoko Mitsubayashi
music	Masaru Hoshi
cinematography	Hirokata Takahashi
editing	Kazuko Takahashi Masatoshi Tsurubuchi
studio	TMS Entertainment
distributor	Toho
runtime	110 minutes
country	Japan
language	Japanese

Jarinko Chie (film)

Plot

Cast

Production

Development and pre-production

Production and animation

Setting

Release

Reception

Citations

Bibliography

Books and journals

Magazines and pamphlets

Web

Books and journals

Magazines and pamphlets

Web

Further reading

External links