The Taste of Tea
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, August 9th 2005 at 11:53am
A six year old girl often sees a giant version of herself staring back at her, the adolescent boy has a train fly out of his head when the girl he had a crush on moved away, the grandfather is old and sings ridiculously weird songs (“YOU ARE A TRIANGLE… WHYYYYYY ARE YOU A TRIANGLE?”), Asano plays a sound recording engineer, there’s an uncle manga artist that wants to record his own single (“Yama yo… O’Yama, yama yo….” [Mountain, oh Mountain, mountain]), the mother is an animator trying to get back into the business and the father … well I have no idea what he does. Of course everything comes together in this decidedly absurd yet fantastic story in rural Japan. The Taste of Tea (“Cha no aji”) is lighthearted and amusing, but also has a lot of depth to it. It’s not just a comedy, or a drama, or a fantasy tale… It’s all three - sort of. It’s a trip through the absurd and the surreal. By far one of the most impressive movies from this year’s Fantasia stock!
