Pompo: The Cinéphile

In the last five years, Japan has produced the two best films about life in the indie film trenches. In 2017, there was Shin'ichirō Ueda's loving tribute to the can-do attitude of the straight-to-video horror crowd in the lovable One Cut of the Dead. Now, there's Pompo: The Cinéphile, a giddy, heartfelt anime that celebrates how passionate people can be about moviemaking, even if that excitement is sometimes hidden beneath the veneer of formulaic film production.

"As long as the lead actress looks attractive, it's a good movie," producer Joelle Davidovich Pomponette (Kohara), aka Pompo, tells her hectored assistant, Gene Fini (Shimizu). She's the B-movie queen of Nyallywood (a thinly veiled stand-in for Hollywood), who got where she is because her grandfather gave her his company. Gene dreams of making high art, but he's hanging around the set of Marine, the next vehicle for bikini-clad lead Mystia (Kakuma). This is a world of nepotism and abusive bosses (Pompo appears to be about 12 and constantly demands sweet treats), where everything works to an equation, the ideal film is 90 minutes long, the bottom line is everything, and – quite bluntly – T&A and explosions sell. Is Gene the aspiring filmmaker about to get his dreams broken or – in an even more prosaic twist – quit this life to go off and make art?

If Pompo took either direction, then it wouldn't be a fraction of the joyous celebration of on-set life that it is. The story really begins when Pompo charges Gene with making her script: a performance-driven arthouse piece about a conductor who flees his life, only to reconnect with his muse on a mountaintop goat farm. And that's where everything unlocks. It's not just Gene who loves film, it's everyone around him, even if sometimes they need reminding, or an outlet.

Of all the directors to pull this off, Takayuki Hirao seems like the least likely. Best known for horror anime like The Garden of Sinners: Paradox Spiral and gruesome Junji Ito adaptation Gyo, here he creates the kind of ebullient, optimistic, but also informed and clear-eyed celebration of the moviemaking process that only an insider can understand. It's a film where hours in the edit bay are a kinetic, hyperstylized action sequence, as Gene wields a neon blade to make even a by-the-numbers trailer as great as he can. This may be the only film in which negotiating for completion funds for reshoots is turned into a nail-biting drama about artistic and business integrity. Heck, it may be the only film about filmmaking in which completion funds are a plot point.

It's all in the title: cinephile, as in someone who loves cinema. Never less than enchanting, constantly surprisingly exciting, and with a burning sense of optimism that maybe, sometimes, hard work and vision can really win the day, Pompo: The Cinéphile is a tribute to everyone who colors within the lines but make those colors all their own. Plus, take out studio vanity logos and credits, and it's exactly 90 minutes long. Pompo would approve.