Her Sketchbook (2017) User Reviews

Really great film! especially for creative and anxious people. Brilliant stuff!

[mark-hall4 · 10/10 · 18 November 2017]

I was literally at the first western screening for this one! for Sydney that's quite unusual, so I'm pretty proud he he. I loved this film! the humor and the drama come together in way that is rarely done so well in film. A Kawaii (cute) film centered around a very serious subject indeed. The main actress is just priceless, not to mention her shut in friend- just classic stuff here, so funny and sad at the same time. Everyone in this film is just fantastic for that matter. Anybody who is a creative person will really relate closely to this one. Here, the story of the shut in is told through the prism of a creative person who runs into difficulty when her art is discovered by a co-worker. He gives her a job creating characters for a video game company. However, she finds it hard to perform under the stress of deadline and adulation. We get a sense here of the anxiety she feels. But really, this particular story line is just a part of a larger concept. The concept of the shut in- a unique outcome of the anxious within Japan . At the screening the director (we had a Q & A) mentioned that his own path as a creative person was very similar. I suspect that the director found a corridor of relation between his own struggles as an artist and the main character's struggles when he wrote the script. He said that he had never been quite a shut in himself, but definitely related to the main character throughout his creative life. This subject matter is absolutely perfect for the underlying issue, which is quite prevalent within Japan. Very sad. On an unrelated subject, here in Australia we are really suffering from the fact that nobody here releases DVDs of many Japanese films anymore. It just makes me so frustrated to think about how many great films I am missing when I do manage to see films like this. Hopefully Criterion Collection might have a look at this one. Just fantastic!