Chie the Brat

An animated film set in Osaka. Chie is at primary school. She is also a proprietor: she runs the family's small restaurant. The place is a horumon shop. It opens in the morning, closes at night, and the child does all the work. Her father Tetsu does not work. He gambles, gets into fights, and brings no money home. Her mother has left the house. She lives elsewhere and Chie sees her now and then. From there the film proceeds through daily life. Customers, neighbours, school, creditors, and the neighbourhood's own rules. Chie does not complain. She takes the situation as it is and manages. Her father has a cat. Kotetsu is a fighting cat and the narrative gives him a line of his own, treated like a person. The cat fights are its strangest section and are taken entirely seriously. What the narrative is interested in is not childhood but responsibility: the film does not dramatise a child doing an adult's work, it makes it ordinary, and that is where the pain sits. The question of the parents getting back together stays in the background. Chie wants it and never says so. The humour is wholly local. The speech is Kansai dialect and the jokes come out of the region's own rhythm. Comedians and rakugo performers from the region were used in the voice cast, which separates the film's sound from standard animation delivery. The source is Etsumi Haruki's long-running manga. The drawing is plain. The backgrounds are taken from Osaka's working districts and there is no ornament. Isao Takahata directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes the realist, everyday vein of Japanese animation. Who it is not for: anyone looking for plot; the narrative moves episode by episode and has no interest in arriving anywhere.