Modest Heroes

An animated anthology of three short films. In the first there are tiny people who live under water. When their father is swept away, a brother and sister move along the river to find him; every drop and every fish is vast to them. In the second there is a boy. He has a severe egg allergy and his mother has to control everything; on a school trip he eats the wrong mouthful. In the third there is a man nobody can see. He is not noticed, not given a seat on the bus, skipped at the till, and even gravity does not hold him; he ties a fire extinguisher to his back to keep his body on the ground. What the three sections share is that none of them contains great heroism. In each, someone is dealing with an everyday obstacle and nobody is rescued. What the narrative is interested in is not adventure but visibility: the third section in particular turns a person going unnoticed by society into a rule of fantasy. The three sections have different directors and their styles differ markedly. The underwater one is fluid and soft; the allergy one is fast and realistic; the invisible man is cold and graphic. The production belongs to Studio Ponoc. The studio was founded by a producer who left Ghibli and the team largely comes from the same tradition; this is the studio's second feature-length work. Maaya Sakamoto, Fumino Kimura and Joe Odagiri are among the voices. Hiromasa Yonebayashi, Yoshiyuki Momose and Akihiko Yamashita directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes the short form and hand-drawn Japanese animation. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a single story; the three sections do not connect and the total running time is short.