Short of the Week: ‘Good Morning’, a Satoshi Kon masterpiece
Over the years, many pioneering artists have revolutionised animation in innumerable ways, but there has never been anyone quite like Satoshi Kon. The Japanese filmmaker sadly passed away in 2010, but it’s safe to say that his work has been immortalised within the popular consciousness, especially due to the global impact of gems such as Paprika. Through his unique approach to animation, Kon radically broadened the possibilities of the medium.
Ever since Kon’s first feature – Perfect Blue, it was overwhelmingly evident that he possessed a remarkably different way of looking at the world. While the anime industry is often praised for the beauty of the images they generate, Kon utilised that very beauty to expose the overwhelming ugliness of modernity. Many of his films function as cinematic nightmares, enabling audiences to oscillate between the horrors of reality and the illusions of fantasy.
During a conversation with Anime News Network, Kon said: “Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress are set where both dreams and reality are blended. If you make things the same way as you always have, things can get redundant. So I decided to work with a different kind of story. The feeling like I wanted to face the challenge posed by that kind of work was strong. When films are made, and the divide between dreams and reality is blurred, the story can become overtly theatrical.”
For this edition of Short of the Week, we have chosen an incomprehensibly perfect short by Kon. Although it’s only one minute in length, it conveys more thematic revelations than are present in most feature-length productions. Titled Good Morning, it depicts a woman waking up from her sleep while processing the fabric of the world around her.
When asked about his approach to female characters in animation, Kon once mused: “For me, creating female characters really isn’t my strong suit. The image of women that appears in Japanese animation, on the whole, is something that should be approached as a pre-existing stereotype. Women like the ones in anime don’t really exist in reality. I don’t appeal to realism as if my life depended on it, but with visuals, characters and the story, there’s a reality amongst all that. The characters that appear in that reality – anime fans, stories, male characters – it’s not like I present those in a purely realistic way either. Women are women, and women characters also have their own intentions and personalities, so I set the story in a way that it lets those personalities come out.”
Good Morning is simply sublime, constructing an experience that is as transiently beautiful as the mysterious space that we inhabit when we transition from the incompatible domains of dreams and reality.
Watch the film below.
