stolen colours

It was a great day out. It’s really rare to have an off-day, so I made full use of the opportunity to stay out late last night.
Met lynn at Kino, bought pretty things and magazines (OMG why is Neo Genesis so expensive!), saw a cute guy in the paper shop upstairs with very aerodynamic hair, and rushed off to watch Smilers. And had supper at TCC after that. I haven’t been out till midnight since….the last concert I attended, lol.

Smilers is a fantastic movie. It’s a crying shame it was shown in the tiniest theatre ever, which was 30% full on a Saturday night.

A brief synopsis: Shuhei Sano (Mirai Moriyama) is a tap dancer and child psychology major from Tokyo who hurts his knee and has to give up dancing. He moves to Hokkaido to marry his flame, Shizuka Yamaguchi (Rosa Kato, impossibly beautiful because of mixed parentage), figure skating coach and daughter of the resident cranky elementary school principal. The girl’s father will let him marry her only if he coaches the junior ice hockey squad and wins the championships.

The ice hockey squad, named Smilers, is pretty sad at the beginning with demoralised kids and a shortage of players. But this movie is about making miracles! Sano’s background in child psychology allows him to motivate the players and come up with good strategies (pretty incredulous for someone who hasn’t touched a hockey stick before). They’re up against the reigning champions, The Thunderbirds, a metallically glossy troupe with an extremely poseur coach. But as Sano says, “You have nothing to fear from a selfish team like that.”

There’s a parallel story between the ace of the team, the silent Masaya Inotani (Kenji Sakaguchi), and a charming young figure skater, Reina Shinohara (Anri Okamoto). She’s afflicted with acute leukemia; so the team’s fight is for her as well.

I’m going to start raving about how much I love this movie. Real spoilers start here.

Mirai Moriyama is perfect as the hyperactive coach who speaks rubbish 50% of the time and good sense 50% of the time, infecting everyone with his enthusiasm. He doesn’t yell commands at the boys during matches, instead tap dancing on the stands.

The boys are all extremely adorable. Each one has a sad background story, like being orphaned, having a disabled sister, divorced parents; but all these are never harped upon. It’s a very forward-looking movie.

The short story between Masaya and Reina is beautiful. The entire team is behind her, of course, abducting her from hospital so that she can skate on the ice for the last time with Masaya holding on to her. (at which point lynn and I just melted into puddles in our seats.) How does the movie title come about? They skip school once, and end up watching a movie where the female lead tells the male lead, “I’ll be back some day in a different form and call you once more by your nickname, SMILE.” The movie starts and ends with them, in this vein. It’s also heartwarming how the team fights with her; after every match they win in the tournament, they rush to the hospital and make a ruckus cheering for her outside her window.

There are scattered little quirks all throughout the movie, to the effect that I was laughing every 5 minutes. Sano comes to work each day, dragging a huge fake animal (one day it’s a crocodile, the next day it’s a turtle) while he ponders what to do with the team. Behind him Hiroshi Tamaki (Chiaki in Nodame Cantabile) is a science teacher trying to get a lightbulb to work. At the instance the bulb lights up, Sano finds a new player for his team, be it a small Russian boy dancing or a rejected young sumo wrestler. It’s PRICELESS. You have to see it.

And the idiot coach from the other team in his trenchcoat and sunglasses and entourage of screaming women flinging handkerchiefs and underwear at him? Hilarious.

The ice hockey scenes are adrenaline-packed, the players shooting across the ice, colliding, passing. Music has a very, very strong presence in the movie. The Smilers’ theme is happy swing music, the rhythm driving them on as Sano tap dances on the stands and the players performing various Sano-invented techniques ( you have to watch them display each one, it’s priceless). The Thunderbirds’ theme is heavy metal: when they’re overwhelming The Smilers, there is so much discordance and one can really feel their helplessness in Sano’s struggle to tap dance despite his rhythm not following the heavy metal.

One of my favourite Christmas carols, The Little Drummer Boy, is a prevailing theme in the movie. It’s the song in Masaya’s music box (left behind by his dead mother); and the song that Sano starts singing at the finals to motivate his team. That escalates into a very, very grand choral involving the entire stadium. I seriously need this soundtrack.

On the whole, a very good movie. 4.5/5.

[p.s. there is so much ramen in this movie. mmmm.]