Moving the Dead

Related Content

• The 13 Worst Songs to Listen to While High
  January 24, 2012
• Good Food Awards Brings a Beer Garden to the Ferry Building
  January 9, 2012
• Five Songs That Should Have Been Nominated For an Oscar This Year
  January 25, 2012
• The Top 10 Worst Film Performances By Musicians
  February 14, 2012
• Tough Guys and Long Legs
  January 18, 2012

More About

• Yojiro Takita
• Academy Awards
• Moving Castle
• Masahiro Motoki
• Joe Hisaishi

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Trailing mostly justified ill will for having trounced the critical favorite, Waltz With Bashir, for Best Foreign Film at last year’s Oscars, Yojirô Takita’s stately Japanese movie Departures, a runaway hit at home, enters American theaters at a disadvantage. But this solemn chamber piece about a depressive young city cellist (former boy-band singer Masahiro Motoki) who discovers his vocation and his better self practicing the ancient art of corpse beautification in a provincial funeral parlor, has its minor charms. Initially disgusted by the stigma of working with the “unclean” dead, this remote, subliminally angry young man soon finds himself strangely moved by the stories of the dead and the gratitude of the grieving relatives who gather to watch him spiff up their loved ones. Self-healing looms all too visibly on the horizon, but Takita’s unpretentious classicism and his candid delight in nature work their way into our sympathies, along with the plaintive cello pieces by composer Joe Hisaishi, who scored such Miyazaki treasures as My Neighbor Totoro and Howl’s Moving Castle. Amid the culture of cheating and heedless one-upmanship that has brought the globe to its knees, it’s a lovely thing to meet a movie that refuses to divorce what it means to be a professional from what it means to be a mensch.
May 29-June 4, 2009