Stratosphere Girl (2004)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Fantastic!

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

When transitioning from the work week into the weekend or a short vacation, I like to watch a foreign film to transport my mind off into a different world. This movie about a European girl in Japan gave me a twofer, and filled the bill quite nicely. As a sci-fi, fantasy, and anime fan, I was intrigued by the title and subject, and was not disappointed.Chloé Winkel, in what's apparently her first feature film, plays angelic-looking Angela, a just-graduated (from high school) cartoonist who scurries off to Japan on the recommendation of Yamamoto (Jon Yang), whom she meets at her graduation party, and who gives her the name and address of a friend with whom she can stay.Once in Tokyo, Angela steps into a world of mystery, not just culturally, but also into one involving a missing bar girl. Entering the night club world herself provides Angela the opportunity to pursue the mystery; and her drawing what she "sees" blends imagination and reality into a mystery for the viewer.This film exhibits an unusual sense of continuity. Fueled by flashes between our heroine's drawings and actual live scenes (the multi-tiered inner-city roadways in Tokyo were particularly interesting to this never-been-there American), the tale is told not as a straightforward continuous sequence wherein one scene leads inevitably to the next, but rather as a series of apparently disconnected scenes which have the effect of making the action appear to occur over a longer period of time than it actually does, i.e., what seems like weeks in actuality are mere days.So what's real, what's imagination, what's flash-back or flash-forward? Suffice it to say that the ending, however "simplistic", breaks the wall between reality and fantasy, and resolves all mysteries for the viewer.

Well, it's actually not a movie about a foreign cartoonist in Japan.I watched this movie during JIFFEST 2004 (Jakarta Int'l Film Festival). A foreign girl left her country for Japan, hoping to find a new life. Back in her city, she had a Japanese boyfriend. He often told stories about Japan, and it made her interested. This girl loved to draw anything, especially things that happened around her, into panels. So it's very close to a comic.In Japan, I forgot what city, she shared an apartment with other foreign girls. Most (if not all) work in a nightclub. She also worked in the same club, for a living. While she's there, she drew many scenes based on what happened around her. And then something terrible happened...and she made her own investigation...and drew her findings/ imagination/ etc into papers.What I love about Stratosphere Girl is the ability to portrait a very nice-looking innocent girl, with a very imaginative mind, into a world of deception, crime, illegal foreign workers life in Japan. She followed her instincts to follow the mystery, although it would endanger her life.The cinematography was very good, and I really like the way it shot night-life in Japan. Her drawings (I don't know if it's actually her drawing, or the director have it for her) were very beautiful, only using colored pencils (if I'm not mistaken). I wished those drawings were available commercially as a comic book.This movie could fall into a thriller category, not just drama. I wished the director could made this movie more thrilling. But this is not a Hollywood movie=), but the director thrilled us in a different way.

this film is disappointing in several ways. 1. the end: the movie just kind of stops after having built up a quite exciting development; what i mean is, the solution is somewhat unsatisfying. this ending might be a good idea for a short film, but for a feature film it's simply frustrating.2. this is supposed to be, as i took it from the promotion material, a film about tokyo. well this it is not. it might almost as well have been shot in Paris or new york. the image this film gives of tokyo mainly consists of a few clichés. you don't get a feeling of what tokyo REALLY is like, of what makes this particular city unique. hadn't i read that it's supposed to be a "tokyo-film", i wouldn't have guessed it. (it's not at all a problem for the film that it lacks this dimension; the film has it's own atmosphere, that is quite interesting and suspenseful enough; i was just disappointed because it was declared as a "tokyo-film" beforehand). thus, apart from the ending, this film is not bad; i just wish we had skipped the last three minutes and made up our own finale.

even if it did stretch the bounds of believability more than just a little. I enjoyed the performances, found the pacing adequate, and the story interesting and different. Maybe it is a good idea, once in a while, to simply abandon audience expectations and simply tell a fantastic little story.Magnificent, slow-moving and well-told, "Stratosphere Girl" offers no intense drama, preferring instead a slow accumulation of subtle moments - shifts in color or seconds of eye contact - to express emotion and detail in the story. Such small, easily missed moments are surrounded by an eye-popping visual style - elegance is raised to unearthly levels throughout. An excellent film which has much to reveal.