Cocoon – One Summer of Girlhood Review

If you turned off the adaptation of Cocoon – One Summer of Girlhood before reaching the halfway point of its short, sixty-minute runtime, you’d likely mistake it for Japanese military propaganda, which is unmistakably curdled by what comes after. Although the location, time period, and details of the ongoing conflict are left unspecified, everything about it screams World War II. The bombing raids by “the enemy”, the brutality enacted on the few occasions the two sides come into contact, and the all-consuming nature of the war. The story concerns a large group of school-age girls who live and work on an unnamed Japanese island, rebuilding infrastructure and constructing and staffing ad hoc cave hospitals for the soldiers. The girls find companionship and remain in high spirits through trying times, pushing each other to work ceaselessly as a means to support their country. The tone stays light enough despite the looming threat of violence…until the enemy finally makes good on it.

Once it arrives, the cascade of horrors makes clear how indebted Machiko Kyō’s manga (and thus Yukimitsu Ina’s debut feature) is to the experience of the Himeyuri students. The rug pull clarifies that the earlier gentility was very intentional, calculated to to soften your defenses and to endear these girls to you, greatly heightening the emotional impact of the terrifying toll war takes on civilians. In that moment, their peace is irrevocably shattered, and soon after, the girls are instructed to leave the caves, despite the entire island remaining under siege by the enemy. Still, they make their way south as a group, beginning their march through Hell in an endeavor to reach the cape, more out of desperation than any sense that therein lies their salvation.

San (Marika Ito) is a year or two younger than her friends, and struggles to find the confidence that her voice matters through both phases of the movie, despite her repeated level-headed assessments in private. Hina (Rena Motomura), Tamaki (Yoko Hikasa), Mayu (Hikari Mitsushima), and a few others provide varying levels of support and companionship. And while all come-of-age as a result of being thrust into a situation too intense even for those many years their senior, none have the wool pulled from their eyes quite as drastically as San. An off-handed comment early on causes her to fixate on the life of the silkworm, and her mechanism to cope with the trying times is to prod the older girls for more information, in order to better relate her own life to that of the unassuming creature.

The screenplay is quite heavy-handed with its focus on the silkworm, long past the obvious metaphor of their own perilous journey to adulthood and the ways society makes it even more difficult for young women. There’s one particularly lovely visualization of this parallel, in one of San’s daydreams as she silently communes with an oversized version of the bug, but it more often loudly and clunkily calls attention to itself. That’s representative of the storytelling until the turn; with less tension, writers Ina and Taku Kishimoto eschew subtlety. But the more visual and anxiety-inducing second half builds on many of those ideas more quietly, amplifying their power in ways beautiful and upsetting. It doesn’t entirely fall away, most notably with the insistence on spelling out Mayu’s past after allusions to its mystery. However, that’s hardly enough to break the spell that’s been cast on you by the end, especially given how few punches it pulls regarding the ugliness of war, although a handful of the worst moments are (thankfully) implied rather than shown.

The strongest details come when the filmmakers find the confidence to lean into subtlety. They refrain from highlighting San’s survivor’s guilt, although it’s written all over her face whenever she has a chance to catch her breath. With the exception of the wounded soldiers and military officers who commandeer the cave, there are no men on the island, making seismic each time the girls come into contact with one. And although there are no explicitly sapphic gestures in the film, the bond between San and Mayu is so intense and gentle that the deep emotions behind their friendship nearly become text anyways, even as later revelations complicate it.

The animation is good, but nothing to write home about most of the time. The style is roughly in line with the bulk of the more grounded anime films that make it to markets outside of Japan: vibrant and expressive, but a little simplistic in its hand-drawn characters and backgrounds, with periodic exceptions during which the watercolor sky makes its mark. That said, the animation team picks a handful of excellent and impactful instants to knock you back with the power of their compositions and framing. The aforementioned daydream, an air raid seen through the trees, sunlight streaming through the forest, and a breathtakingly impressionistic vision of how young San experiences the eruption of violence around her for which she feels heartbreakingly responsible. But the most impactful decision is a quiet one, a subtle shift that captures the moment of San’s metamorphosis, and signals that the events we’ve witnessed have bred a willingness to face reality, albeit at great cost.

While its short runtime, didactic nature, and on-the-nose narrative make it a tougher sell for audiences Stateside, it’s a solid outing for a new studio and a new director. It lands amongst a brave new world in US multiplexes, where it’s not just Studio Ghibli’s masterpieces that post strong showings at the box office: more and more anime films have won the weekend in recent years. That the most prominent tend to be series continuations, implying homework if you’re to understand what’s happening, makes stand-alone movies like Cocoon – One Summer of Girlhood a breath of fresh air, no matter how much they cut their warmth with indelible bleakness.