I was 18 years old when an adult friend I met at a summer factory job recommended that I see Federico Fellini's 8 1/2.
I could not make heads or tails of the movie, in Italian, in black and white, the story set in sophisticated arthouse celebrity space. I liked the images, but the whole thing was both boring and baffling.
I revisited the film in my mid-20s during a film class in university, while pursuing a chemistry degree. At that time, I could appreciate some of the filmmaking, and yet the ideas and emotions of the film were well beyond my ken.
Revisiting it once again in my late 30s, it was like I was watching a completely different film. Many of the visual ideas of creative paralysis of its main character, and his first-world crises, started to resonate. I recognized the search for identity and a lived authenticity, both in public and in private, and I could begin to deeply understand it as the master work that it is.
Revisiting it once again in my late 40s and the film is devastatingly emotional, to the point of it being almost too painful to watch. This is not so much to recognise the artistry of the form on display -- it is one of the great works of cinema -- but rather to feel the movie in my bones. I can only imagine how the film will play when I am 60.
Suffice it to say, in art, in movies, in music, in literature, we see what we want, or are best capable of seeing, with the experience through the lens of the life that we have lived. Art is not static, even if the physical manifestation is, more or less. You can watch the same movie, other than perhaps its format or projection or venue, which is objectively the same. However, you experience and understand it profoundly different, depending on who you are.
Which brings us to the pleasurable awkwardness and high craft of Cherry and Virgin. This is an independent, deeply experimental animated movie with the full backing and blessing of one of Japan’s biggest studios, Toei (who are profusely thanked in the opening credits).
The story follows the budding emotional and sexual relationship between two lonely manga artists on the cusp of their 30s. Both are inexperienced in partner intimacy, physically or mentally. The film constantly changes perspective from its two leads, Ryo and Ami, to help understand both their headspace and their potential collision together, as they struggle against the challenges of finding love, and trust, and partnership in the 21st century of digital and mediated isolation. The movie is not ironic about this, only truly, madly, deeply about such matters.
It is the classic sense of good art, wherein 'lies tell the truth.' Exaggerated pop culture and drawing of its two characters help to communicate the emotion of the story, using dozens of animation styles, from child-like primitive pencil-crayon sketches to sophisticated 2D anime illustration techniques, rotoscoping, video game CGI, and even scenes in live action. Cherry and Virgin purposes a real mastery of craft to challenge, to stretch, its audience and to contour the emotional states of its two characters as they take a bumpy, awkward road of trust towards a real, adult relationship.
On one hand, the movie keeps the stakes low, and the canvas small, but given its intent, this is also the highest of stakes. This is a life. This is two lives. This is important. This is serious stuff. It does not let its audience off the hook, even as it is relentless in its ability to entertain.
When one of Ryo’s roommates dies of cancer, he vows to ‘get out there’ and not die alone. He has been drawing erotic manga professionally, but has never held a girl's hand at 30 years of age. His world is in black and white (here I mean this quite literally) and he trudges, unkempt with his shoulders slumped, through his own comic-panel frame.
When her mother’s alcoholism becomes too much for her to stand, Ami moves out of her childhood home at age 28, determined to be independent and self-sufficient, trying to balance her office day job with her childhood dream of illustrating romantic manga, while processing the guilt and shame of ‘abandoning’ her mother for her own growth.
They meet on a dating app, and share a movie and cocktails at the bar afterwards to tell one another their stories, while guarding their dignity against the ills of online dating. His black and white world touches up against her brightly coloured world. They both exist side by side on bar stools until they talk through the night. Sounds are exaggerated, often put up in text on screen, like a comic book or an action picture. The animation shifts styles depending on the anxious or uncertain state that the two of them are in, in the moment. He hunts for the right words to say to avoid awkward silence. She thinks, “why do I pay for this torture?”
The date goes well; there is a connection. They choose to explore each other’s worlds going forward. You can tell by the animation that these two have a real shot in an indifferent world. When Ami lightly touches Ryo at the end of the date, some of her colour rubs off on his hand. It is a marvellous moment that can only exist in the movies.
The second act continues to follow the characters separately as they work up the nerve to have sex with each other. Both are adults, both have enough private space in their lives for uninterrupted intimacy, but their hangups around how the other person sees them creates a lovely tension.
The experience is from the audience POV; this is where we are rooting for them. It is both cringe and cute at the same time. It is what cinema excels at. The film briefly comes into full colour, and the couple share the frame in the same style for a brief moment in time. It's togetherness, made both literal and figurative. The awkwardness remains.
It reminds me of a moment in Xavier Dolan’s Mommy, where (*spoiler*) the depressed lead character, in a movie with a tight, square aspect ratio, experiences joy powerful enough for him to grab the edge of the movies frame, and through strength and will, expand the film into fulsome widescreen for a moment.
The third act explores misunderstandings and intentions in a way that recalls a standard romantic comedy movie challenge. Given the film's toolbox of animation styles, and its commitment to be more than simply a slave to the genre (either anime or rom-com), Cherry and Virgin offers a much greater depth to the incident; a breach of trust and the profound misunderstanding that results threatens the couple’s future, and expands on the film's core idea in a way that is invigorating.
At one point, after being broken down, shooting his shot, and returning nearly to square one, Ryo is devastated to the point where the animation falls apart into the most crude shapes and unshaded pencil lines; a culmination of how the film uses its own construction to showcase each situation.
If you are a manga enthusiast, the discussions of art and specific artists that Ryo and Ami bond over on their dates, as well as the extra knowledge of shifting style of faces and bodies in the medium, will likely offer even deeper pleasure and understanding. Cherry and Virgin works magnificently with an anime-curious layperson such as myself. I did get the Mamoru Oshii jokes, and I did spot the Boogie Nights poster on Ryo’s wall. So there is that.
But such a universal, and yet very specifically timed story can only be shaded by your own life experience, expectation, and familiarity with the art and the medium. Cherry and Virgin is a tiny masterpiece that punches well above its weight, emotionally, intellectually, and visual. It could very well be some young movie lover’s 8 1/2.