Fureru (2024) - Film Review

Director: Tatsuyuki Nagai

Certification: Unrated (My personal recommendation: 12A/PG-13 equivalent).

It would be impossible to know me and not be aware of my absolute adoration for Mari Okada, the anime screenwriter who made her name with quirky melodramas like Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day before branching out as a director with my favourite film of all time, Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms. Even after stepping out as the captain of her own ship, Okada has continued her work as a screenwriter, such as with a film that released last year and saw her reunite with her "Super Peace Buster" collaborators Tatsuyuki Nagai (director) and Masayoshi Tanaka (art director): Fureru (ふれる).

Although I had hope of an international release after Netflix finally acquired their previous collaboration Her Blue Sky, we had no such luck with this latest film, until the Japanese Blu-ray released with English subtitles! With my hands finally on a copy of the thing, I could finally watch the Super Peace Busters' latest film... but was it worth the wait?

Fureru is a story about the friendship of three men: the introverted bartender Aki Onoda, the outgoing retail estate agent Ryo Sobue, and the timid fashion design student Yuta Inohera. As children, they were brought together by Fureru, an adorable hedgehog-like deity that granted them the ability to reach each other's thoughts through tough (the film's title literally translates to "touch"). Having moved away from their island home and now renting a house together in Tokyo with Fureru kept hidden like a secret pet, the three appear to live an idyllic life of perfect understanding, until the arrival of others into their close-knit circle makes them question what it truly means to understand people.

The film explores themes similar to the Super Peace Busters' previous work The Anthem of the Heart (心が叫びたがってるんだ), and it could be argued that Fureru is a commentary on Japanese society, where it is often said people hide behind masks of platitudes, not expressing negative things but expecting you to understand them anyway. The Anthem of the Heart is more focused on the individual, with the focus on Jun Naruse, who finds herself physically unable to talk after the childhood chatterbox accidentally exposed her affair. For Jun Naruse, her film's climax is an outburst of pent-up emotions where she unleashes all of her pent-up emotions to classmate Takumi, finally spilling all of her thoughts - mostly ugly but some beautiful - about the people around her.

Fureru has a number of similarities - in fact, in the film's opening minutes, I did wonder if the introverted Aki was going to be mute like Jun. The idea behind the adorable Fureru and the power it has, a fantastical being in an otherwise realistic world, is also not dissimilar to the feather-capped egg who zipped Jun's lips shut in The Anthem of the Heart. Where the film expands on these ideas, is by making them more about the collective - outright asking if people can even genuinely be friends if they don't acknowledge the negative, and whether it is even a good or bad thing for people to fully understand each other. One of the friends even observes that the other two seemingly having no flaws made them feel worse about their own. This certainly tracks with concerns about how people express only their best sides on social media, with Okada herself noting that the film was influenced by how social media platforms censor negative comments, and the effects that has on a desire for genuine communication. Given social media’s dominant role in modern society, two concepts don't feel incompatible.

Being written by Mari Okada of course means that there will be melodrama, and this mostly presents itself in the most obvious way possible: the three boys' peace is interrupted by the arrival of two women: the shy Nana Asakawa, and the more brash Juri Kamozawa. Seeking refuge to shelter Nana from a stalker, the two women move into the boys' home, which disrupts their well-honed routine, and ultimately makes them question what a genuine connection is. While the stalker storyline is too obviously sign-posted and quietly resolved, Nana and Juri are welcome additions to the cast. Of course, hormones eventually find themselves in the mix, but in a way that carries Okada's trademark honest awkwardness, without getting as weird as her past works (looking at you, Maboroshi).

As expected from Okada, the character writing feels painfully natural. I remember reading somewhere that she was apparently nervous about writing male protagonists (notably, every past Super Peace Busters work has at least a female co-lead). However, Fureru shows a real understanding of male friendship, and how deep down, insecurity and pressure that eats away at us. As always, her writing feels human - even down to the awkward fumbles and giant missteps that had me pulling my hair.

Although not acknowledged in the film, Fureru and its protagonist Aki Onoda felt profoundly autistic - at least to me, as I read a lot a lot of my own autistic tendencies into the film. Aki has difficulty in articulating his thoughts to others, crashes out when he becomes overwhelmed, and struggles to imagine a future away from his familiar routine. Encompassing this all is the central theme of understanding others and whether that's a good or bad thing - basically, what autistic people struggle with every day. perhaps this is just me projecting myself onto the film, but that made its thematic thread more fascinating to me.

Fureru didn't resonate with wider audiences, however. I didn't hear any chatter from Japan, where it opened to #5 at the box office, and fell to #10 the following week - both times falling behind the re-release of The Birth of Kitaro: Legend of GeGeGe. The film also hasn't had a chance to find an audience internationally, with a notable lack of a western release. I think the biggest obstacle Fureru faces is that it's "just" good; it's not a major spectacle film like Your Name (although it certainly borrows from Shinkai), and it doesn't really stand out on a technical level for good or bad. Fureru is just a charming film with some fascinating ideas that deserves more love, even if the realities of the industry says otherwise. So, if the film does turn up a few years later like Her Blue Sky, I hope that you give it a go.

With regard to the physical release, I don't have the knowledge base to comment on the mastering with any authority, but I when inserting the disc, I was surprised to see (and hear) and on-screen message noting that an audio-described version will play automatically unless I specifically navigated to the disc menu (in Japanese, only). According to a friend who imports more frequently than me, this has become more common across Japanese blu-ray releases recently, but it's an accessability feature that just makes sense - of course visually-impaired people will face difficulty navigating menus themselves. It's certainly something I'd like to see western publishers adopt too.

Finally, Fureru is absolutely adorable.

★★★★

Fureru is available on Blu-ray in Japan, courtesy of Aniplex.