At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Studio Ghibli was presented with an Honorary Palme d’Or — the very first time in the festival’s history that a filmmaking studio was ever acknowledged with this prestigious award. It was a bold and defining act that explicitly demonstrates not only the growing recognition of anime movies within respected cinephilic venues across the past couple of decades, but also, more inherently, acknowledges the ever-growing, worldwide success and irresistible appeal of the anime genre, whether in film or series format (One Piece has just hit its 1119th episode). The uniquely colorful subculture developed in anime’s wake is rooted in appreciation of the genre’s limitless scope of imagination, out-of-the-box storytelling modes and expressions, over-the-top visuals, and often larger-than-life characters, qualities which have always easily attracted young audiences but which increasingly transcend such demographic delineations. Bearing this in mind, it has also become evident throughout anime’s rising international appeal that not all of its entries are able or even try to manifest as massive mega-hits, and increasingly we are seeing more projects that exist at more low-key levels with more modest narrative and visual ambitions, which far from disappointing, in fact act to add new pigments to anime’s larger panoramic canvas.
Masahiro Shinohara’s debut theatrical feature — coming after a handful of collaborations both as a storyboard artist and director in different domestic series — Trapezium settles in on the anime spectrum closer to the small-scale iterations that accrue cult followings than the outsized blockbuster examples. Adapted from Kazumi Takayama’s coming-of-age novel of the same name, the film opens with its calm yet joyful protagonist Yū Azuma sitting on a train with her headphones on. We later find out that she’s a freshman at Joshu East High, and from early age had studied ballet in Canada before returning to her homeland after 8th grade. She’s a whimsical and ambitious young girl who fantasizes of becoming an “idol” (specifically, the social and cultural influencers in Japan who gain fame as musicians and dancers). In order to achieve her dreams, through dedication and strict adherence to a certain set of rules and plans, she embarks on a journey to find and convince three other distinctively different girls (from the south, west, and north of Japan) to form her ideal all-girl idol group. Her quest — that takes up roughly a quarter of the film’s runtime — at last finds success, and Yū subsequently befriends Ranko (a rich and lady-like girl), Kurumi (a smart student from the robotic research club), and Mika (a former primary schoolmate who Yū almost completely had forgotten about). From this moment on, Trapezium pleasantly narrates a modest, bittersweet, and heartfelt melodrama of sorority friendship, heartbreak, failure, and success, alongside folding in more pensive notions of selfishness vs. selflessness, showbiz vs. reality, and life vs. memory, all contextualized within the current age of clickbaiting and like-gaining.
Although Trapezium’s generally simple story — which falls squarely within the popular Shoujo subgenre, and boasts a few catchy bubblegum J-pop ditties (those in addition to the film’s opening theme song, which famous VTuber Hoshimachi Suisei performed vocals for) — has enough superficial charm to easily persuade and resonate with its target female audience of a certain age, but what truly stands out here are the different aspects of technical virtuosity achieved by the painstaking efforts of the animators and production crew at large, which their artistry makes to feel deceptively effortless on screen. Via the combination of both old and modern schools of animation-making (featuring both classically hand-drawn frames and computer-generated renderings), Trapezium finds an outstanding balance in establishing an exceptional animated world that’s continuously energized with ever-changing color, lighting, and painterly details. There’s a remarkable attention to the multiple environments that are crafted here, especially the architectural spaces — just look at how Yū’s bedroom is realized, or the bookstore scene — as well as regular switch-ups in characters’ clothing and style that not only keep everything fresh and bewitching to the eye, but more essentially exhibit a particular, alluring aesthetic that may lead one to recall similarly fashionable live action efforts such as Clueless or Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
Along with the film’s evident passion for such textural and stylistic details, Shinohara is also successful in delivering a delicate depiction of seasonal change throughout the film, an approach which vividly reveals Trapezium as a wistful survey of youth’s years and accordant vulnerabilities — this is made further clear in one particular scene, where Yū’s photographer friend Shinji captures all of them at their seemingly realest, happiest, and more carefree moment of existence, an act of preservation for adulthood and perhaps eternity. At times, Trapezium even seems to invite viewers to consider it as something like a modern-day, semi-musical anime riff on the likes of Jem and the Holograms, Lizzie McGuire the Movie, or Hannah Montana — after all, in their time, those were arguably as monolithic for their teen audiences as present-day anime is for its. But in subordinating the saccharine foundation of those projects, Trapezium offers viewers a welcomingly more serene, measured, and moving survey of adolescent girlhood.
DIRECTOR: Masahiro Shinohara; CAST: Azaki Yuikawa, Hina Yomiya, Reina Ueda, Haruka Aikawa; DISTRIBUTOR: Crunchyroll; IN THEATERS: September 18; RUNTIME: 1 hr 34 min.
