On March the 27th 2017, I watched an animation movie called “Ancien and the Magic Tablet（ひるね姫 〜知らないワタシの物語〜）”. The movie is based on two stories in parallel, one is in real and the other is in dream. These two stories become entangled throughout the progress in the stories. The director of the movie is Kenji Kamiyama（神山健治）, a famous director of “Eden of the East（東のエデン）”, “Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit（精霊の守り人）”, “Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex（攻殻機動隊 STAND ALONE COMPLEX）” etc. I think he tried to describe the entanglement of metaphors and the real worlds in this animation, with heartwarming feeling of a fairy tale suitable to adolescence. The main theme is “even an ordinary human being can fly through the air, if one has a good personality”. The word “good personality” is expressing the dramatic change of Kenji Kamiyama’s story from previous science fictions/fantasy dramas of him. As an animation, the background sceneries were full of motifs in reality, almost equivalent to live-action movie. However, the entanglement between reality and dreams forces this story to be an animation. As an example, magic can be interpreted as technological advances in the animation. One of the remaining questions is that the true character of “daemon” still does not appear in the movie. You can notice many motifs from famous fairy tales appear in this movie, such as “Momotaro”, and also animation stories of Kenji Kamiyama himself.
