Boards : Fukasawa Ken
Music : Ueo Nooki
Cast : Siga Kotaro, Hirata Yoko, Yamaguchi Yukari
Production : Toei Animation Co, Ltd
Year : 2006
HD, Color, 48 mn, v.o. japanese with french ST
Unpublished
In an effort to escape from her past, Madame Willemsens has just rented Grenadiere House, a sublime property beside the Loire river. She lives a quiet life with her two sons and lady’s companion. Nobody knows anything about her. Only the children's private tutors are allowed to visit the house. They talk about this family with great admi- ration, evoking the simple pleasures of life. But she is diminished by a mysterious ailment. She struggles for her boys’ well-being and her own dignity.
It’s by using the Ganime technique, a procedure which consists in harmonising fixed images, paintings or photographs, with the story and the music, that Fukada creates this adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s short story. His camera ingeniously skims over and delicately outlines seventy impressionist paintings signed by Takeshi Fukazawa. The aesthetic power of the image, accompanied by refined study on the voices and music, add to the melancholic atmos phere of the text and offer us a unique, emotional cinema experience.