MUSHISHI (BUGMASTER)
Japan, 2006, 118 minutes, Colour.
Jo Odagiri, Nao Omori.
Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo.
Katsuhiro Otomo directed Akira and made a breakthrough in styles of Japanese animation films. He began an industry – many of the films drawing on the comic books, the manga. He also directed the very striking Steam Boy, based on an English story set in the United States and England in the 19th century.
This is also a manga story. It shows a mystic shaman travelling through mediaeval Japan. The film shows his origins, his supernatural experience, his becoming a shaman. He also has the ability to see supernatural creatures, bugs, the mushi who move in and out of people spreading plague. As he travels through the countryside, people rely on him, this has an effect on his personality and on his relationships with others.
The film is made for a Japanese audience and a Japanese sense of storytelling which makes it far more complex for a western audience to follow. However, it also invites the audience to surrender to the beautiful landscapes, to the mysterious special effects for the bugs, to the mystical implications of the travelling shaman.
1.Japanese myths and legends? For Japanese audiences? Worldwide audiences? The use of the imagination? 19th and 20th century legends? Impact? How credible today?
2.The beauty of the photography, the mountain locations, the roads, the villages, the woods? The musical score and its atmosphere for legends?
3.The title and the myths? Introducing the audience to bugs as signs of good and evil, life and death, illness?
4.The visualising of the bugs – the white vapours, the black, insect-like letters? The special effects for their spreading everywhere?
5.The prologue, the boy and his mother, the beauty of the mountains, the sudden landslide, the chaos, the death of the mother, the boy surviving? Found by Nui, herself a bugmaster, her appearance, her eye, her hair? The boy and his surviving but forgetting? Growing up, the white hair like Nui?
6.The bugs and their effect on Nui, destructive? The quest to find the main bugs, their nests, where they resided, in whom they resided? Ginko and the bugs, the fish in the stream, his becoming a bugmaster?
7.Ginko in himself, genial, kind, travelling in the rain, staying at the inn, the owner and her kindness, asking him to see the staff, their deafness, his being able to heal them, the potions?
8.Continuing on his travels, his searches, finding Koro and his companionship, on the road, the difficulties?
9.His being urged to return by the woman of the inn? The girl, the contamination of her leg, its effect? Her having listened to the stories and written the scrolls? The bugs in the letters, their disappearing from the scrolls? The effect on Ginko, his own illness? Finding the cure, the woman caring? The story about the guests?
10.The girl, her recovery, her way of grasping the letters, swinging them from the wall and the rewriting of the scrolls?
11.Ginko, his illness, the search for what would cure him, his growing health and recovery? The impact of the letters? On the floor, on the roof, on the walls?
12.The build-up the story of Nui and Ginko meeting, her desperation in the woods, Koro and his help, watching? Her blindness? Ginko not knowing, discovering the truth? The flashbacks, the story, the resolution?
13.Japanese legends and symbols for life and death? The bugs as symbols? A story of healers and carers?
