another lovely piece of work from hideaki anno! i really appreciated this movie as a commentary on the compensated dating phenomenon in japan back in the 1990s and it was quite insightful in that aspect. actually i find that most, if not all of the 20th century japanese slice of life movies i watch include at least one mention of sexual assault, which i guess just goes to show how that was definitely a problem in japanese culture. it still is tbh minors and underage girls are still unprotected and a lot of crimes against them go ignored or unpunished! but back then when this film was made, people could literally produce/watch child p*rn pretty much without any repurcussions and the legal age of consent was 13. crazy!!!! i did some research on the history of compensated dating and sex work in general in japan, and i found that it's quite embedded into their culture because their government essentially turned a blind eye to it during the "burst" stage of their bubble economy
but anyways i thought that it was a rather lovely film technically speaking. it seemed very experimental with the camerawork because all the scenes had at least 15 different angles and shots so i thought that was pretty cool + the whole film had the vibe that you were looking through someone's digicam gallery probably because of the quickly changing scenes and the colour grading :3 i recognised some common editing elements that were also present in anno's other works (e.g. evangelion series) but i'd say he stepped out of his usual style with this film which definitely worked out
another thing i appreciated about this would be the plotline and the story structure! sometimes i feel like slice of life films can be draggy and boring especially when there isn't really a defined conflict + resolution or any other kind of plot. but i felt that love & pop broke out of that and was able to sequence very meaningful scenes and events to get the story moving. i liked that there was a good mix between storytelling from the 3rd person and 1st person perspective by intermittently introducing some monologue and reflection. overall a pretty decent film and i enjoyed watching it
- j