Love & Pop – Hideaki Anno’s debut live-action film is an adaptation of novelist Ryū Murakami’s biting work about a girl who attempts to be a Sugar Date.
To show something is not to endorse it.
These are artistic polemics that audience members often forget. It was brought clear to me when watching co-writer/director Hideaki Anno’s live-action debut Love & Pop (from 1999). The film follows a young girl as she experiments with being a Sugar Date, and how this changes her. A Sugar Date, as is implied in the name, is a part of the Japanese Cultural landscape – where young women (often high school-age girls) are paid to go on dates with men (usually older businessmen or socially awkward men).
Anno is truly fascinated by the characters and not the sex. Any time sex is a component it is what you’d think it would be for a sixteen-year-old – terrifying and disgusting. It does make sense when you consider that Love & Pop is an adaptation of a work from novelist Ryū Murakami the writer’s whose most famous work is Audition (the basis for the Takei Miike film) and that work’s a very pointed and critical look at the Salaryman and their views on women. Though Anno’s work here is much more experimental and focused on point of view rather than the critique of the male-dominated culture of the time.
Love & Pop is a film that does not critique but allows these characters to exist in the world as it is not as it should be. That alone makes Anno’s first foray into live-action, like his animated work, a truly unique experience. One that fans of Anno’s work and those more adventurous cineaste will find fascinating more than twenty-five years later.
Love & Pop – Hideaki Anno’s debut live-action film is an adaptation of novelist Ryū Murakami’s biting work about a girl who attempts to be a Sugar Date.
To show something is not to endorse it.
These are artistic polemics that audience members often forget. It was brought clear to me when watching co-writer/director Hideaki Anno’s live-action debut Love & Pop (from 1999). The film follows a young girl as she experiments with being a Sugar Date, and how this changes her. A Sugar Date, as is implied in the name, is a part of the Japanese Cultural landscape – where young women (often high school-age girls) are paid to go on dates with men (usually older businessmen or socially awkward men).
Anno is truly fascinated by the characters and not the sex. Any time sex is a component it is what you’d think it would be for a sixteen-year-old – terrifying and disgusting. It does make sense when you consider that Love & Pop is an adaptation of a work from novelist Ryū Murakami the writer’s whose most famous work is Audition (the basis for the Takei Miike film) and that work’s a very pointed and critical look at the Salaryman and their views on women. Though Anno’s work here is much more experimental and focused on point of view rather than the critique of the male-dominated culture of the time.
Love & Pop is a film that does not critique but allows these characters to exist in the world as it is not as it should be. That alone makes Anno’s first foray into live-action, like his animated work, a truly unique experience. One that fans of Anno’s work and those more adventurous cineaste will find fascinating more than twenty-five years later.
Love & Pop played at Fantasia Film Festival 2024 on August 3rd
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