The Story of Yanagawa's Canals

The town of Yanagawa in Fukuoka is built on a network of canals running between the houses. By the middle of the twentieth century those canals were polluted and stinking, and the local government decided to pave them all over. The documentary tells how that decision was reversed and how the townspeople cleaned the water themselves. The subject is not the environment but common property. The canal belongs to nobody and to everybody, which is precisely why nobody cleans it. The film's answer is social rather than technical: once the townspeople divide responsibility street by street, the water comes back. The form is mostly live action. Isao Takahata is directing documentary rather than animation here, with interviews, maps and water watched across the seasons. Animation only enters for the passages about the past, and Hayao Miyazaki contributed to those drawings. The production story is as strange as the film. The budget of thirty million yen was carved out of half the profits of Nausicaä. Takahata overran it, and the film was finished out of Miyazaki's personal savings. The result was the only production made independently in the Ghibli orbit, with distribution handled by Miyazaki's own office. It runs close to three hours. Who it is for: anyone curious about Takahata's documentary side and about local history told carefully. Who it is not for: viewers expecting Ghibli animation; nearly all of this is live footage and the pace is slow.