It’s incredibly rare to have an anime director who is able to capture the human condition so perfectly as Baku Kinoshita, whose latest anime project, The Last Blossom, known as housenka in Japan, opened in Japanese theaters last week. Ahead of the film’s wide opening, Tokyo International Film Festival held a special English-subbed screening at The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan with the director for club associates and members of the press, complete with a Q&A before and after the showing.

Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) has been working with The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan (FCCJ) over the past few years to bring one film from their upcoming lineup to members as a special look. This year, The Last Blossom was that film, the first anime film shown as part of this collaboration. The screening was to highlight the medium of animation as an art form and the importance of anime to Japan, not just as a cultural export to the world, but as an economic one, where 31% of all content exported from the country is anime-related, making roughly 3 trillion yen (US$20 billion) for the economy.

It’s not often I’m in an audience watching an anime film in a room of people who don’t watch anime, but this was the reason for The Last Blossom’s showing at FCCJ — to bring anime to those who may dismiss it due to past prejudice. I used “past” here because not a single audience member failed to appreciate The Last Blossom after the credits rolled. 

Photo: Daryl Harding

The Melancholy of The Last Blossom

Coming off ODDTAXI, one of the deepest reflections on people as a concept from the last few years, director Baku Kinoshita had a lot of expectations placed on his pen, and he delivered a melancholic story about a man with a few regrets in life.

The Last Blossom is a story recalled by Akutsu to his flower while living out his last days in a prison cell. Akutsu tells the flower about his life as a yakuza in the late 1980s and how he fell in love with a single mother he homed shortly after she gave birth.

ⒸKazuya Konomoto /The Last Blossom Production Committee.

A lot of The Last Blossom comes from Kinoshita’s love of yakuza cinema and is heavily inspired by Takeshi Kitano’s 1991 film A Scene at the Sea, which follows a deaf surfing couple living by the Japanese coastline. The Last Blossom hangs on those small moments, letting the background noise serve as the film’s soundtrack and using silence to punctuate the scene. Kinoshita said during the conference that he “believes that emotions and storytelling can also be conveyed through stillness, composition, and lighting,” and a lot of The Last Blossom achieves that.

Kinoshita stated that “the essence of cinema is to portray human change, and that’s something I place great importance on in my own work.” Akutsu’s progress through his life as he comes to understand Nana, the single mother, and her son Kensuke while balancing being a yakuza during Japan’s bubble era makes for a gripping, if understated, story.

ⒸKazuya Konomoto /The Last Blossom Production Committee.

This comes from the script by Kazuya Konomoto, with whom Kinoshita worked closely for ODDTAXI as well. Kinoshita and Konomoto worked together to craft a film with a deep “attention to detail,” as the director put it. Konomoto believes that Kinoshita is “skilled at advancing a story through dialogue,” which is why the flower talks incessantly to Akutsu, while he just wants to reflect on a life past.

How The Last Blossom Came to Be 

Production on The Last Blossom started two and a half years ago, with Kinoshita wanting to create a film with an object that could talk, in contrast to ODDTAXI’s animal creatures. Kinoshita was looking at creating an anime film “that did not yet exist.” He explained, “I wanted to create something fundamentally beautiful, such as the blue sky and the sunlight filtering through the leaves, and I felt that doing so in hand-drawn 2D animation allowed us to bring another level of beauty to every frame.”

Photo: Daryl Harding

From the first planning stage, the housenka (the flower that is known in English as balsam — with a name like that, I can understand the change in title for the English release) was chosen as the “object that talks.” This was because the flower carries a seed pod that, when touched, explodes and spreads the plant’s seed. This dynamic external movement was something that Kinoshita found “fascinating” about the flower and paired well with the fireworks sequence at the start of the film and an overarching motif.

Both the movement of the flower and the song choices in the film came from scriptwriter Konomoto, who thought the use of the song “Stand By Me” was a great way to “balance” the movie. The song is hummed repeatedly throughout the film between Akutsu and Nana as they live their lives. The “balance” was to use such a popular song for a film that even Kinoshita feels has a “niche” audience, hoping that it’d garner more attention. 

Anime Past, Baku Kinoshita, and The Last Blossom

The TIFF Animation Section Programming Advisor, Ryota Fujitsu, said before the screening that Kinoshita “inherits a lineage in Japanese animation that traces back to Isao Takahata’s pioneering efforts.” Those subtle human moments that can only be found in anime, recreated by the pen rather than the lens. While Kinoshita cites Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki as influences — as would any anime director — he also said that Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino made an impression on him, which is evident throughout his works.

Kinoshita stated that he wants to keep anime made locally and anime about Japanese stories, all while continuing to make something brand new. The Last Blossom takes a lot of influence from anime and live-action films that have come before, but brings it all together to make something you’ve never seen before.

The Last Blossom opened in Japan on October 10 and will be screened during the Tokyo International Film Festival as part of its animation program with English subtitles starting October 27. Anime Limited and Plaion Pictures will release the film on an unannounced date in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Australia, and Switzerland.