the taste of tea – cherry blossoms, animators, and giants

My first taste of Katsuhito Ishii was his anime segment in Kill Bill Vol. 1. While I love what he did in Kill Bill, his visually stunning film The Taste of Tea (2004) shows both his versatility and maturity. Stylized and surreal, the feeling attained from watching it is somewhere between a barrage of bizarre experiences and hanging around on a spring day, while taking long sips of tea and staring out contemplating the grass. (exactly what many of the characters in this film do.) It tracks the journey of one quirky family – where the father hypnotises the family for practice, while the nine-year-old girl is stalked by a giant version of herself, while her brother has an ongoing crush on his go-playing classmate, while the mother animates by hand sitting at their kitchen table, using the grandfather as a model. But in between these amusing sketches are long, lingering, highly composed moments which made me take up tea drinking again.

(Knowing how much of a coffee addict I am, this is quite an accomplishment.)

It’s like the family’s life unfolds, but what ties it together are these long slow moments, where they can just take time out from feeling busy and strange. No matter how quirky their lives seem to us, they have a level of mundanity and comfort they can go back to. They all unwind – playing go, drinking tea, bicycling – going through slow moments. The images carries this out: trains pass through the boy’s head and the giant version of the girl sits behind her, and these moments don’t seem out of place or even unrealistic. They’re just part of life.