Maozi, the heroine who can't find a sense of belonging in the city, returned to her hometown Komori and lived a self-sufficient life of growing vegetables, chopping wood and cooking. In the film, Komori is in the northeast of Japan, occupying almost a quarter of Japan's territory, mainly in Yichuan and Qianze areas of Iwate Prefecture. This film faithfully records a local scene and a painting.
Iwate Prefecture has 10 counties, 14 cities, 15 towns and 4 villages. It is said that in ancient Iwate Prefecture, there lived a group of evil spirits who specialized in doing evil. The residents were so upset that they had to turn to the gods for help. After some fighting, the gods who heard the residents' prayers finally put the evil spirits back. In order to survive, the evil spirits who surrendered swore to the gods that they would never set foot on the land of Iwate Prefecture again, leaving fingerprints on the rocks as evidence.
The economy of this area has always been dominated by agriculture, and there is a big river flowing northward through Sichuan in the fertile northward basin. Through the construction of reservoirs, a large number of paddy fields have been developed and become one of the main rice producing areas in Japan. Legend is probably the evidence that the residents here rely on the gods and pray for a bumper harvest.
Among them, Aoyushan has a snowy climate in the sea of Japan in winter, with low temperature in mountainous areas, snowy winter and very sultry summer. As described in the movie, clothes are so wet in summer that they can squeeze out water, and in winter they can only walk because of heavy snow.
In reality, remote mountain villages in Yichuan District have no Wi-Fi or even 3G. It is a "place where cars, horses and postal services are slow". Like most mountain villages in China, the brain drain of young people is very serious. The scenery here is beautiful, but it can't hide the disadvantages such as remoteness and poor information.
Children in the city read books in summer and snow in winter, occasionally looking for cats and reading letters. Those who have direct communication with her in the village can be counted with their fingers, and there are no more than 10 people in total. For example, the grandmother who came to see her is Youtai, a young man, and his girlfriend, an uncle who cooks grilled fish, a messenger, and a worker who checks power facilities.
Those homemade foods: radish, kimchi, radish noodle soup, salmon and cauliflower pasta, which are called Huahua, are mostly light and tasteless. The Christmas cake made of spinach in Redmi is even more unique, which looks a bit like a dark dish in unknown so.
But it may be this closed and scarce environment that people are more willing to pursue the meaning and aesthetic realm of life in frugality and concentration. Compared with the domestic pursuit of "how many lives to live in a lifetime", locals may prefer "doing only one thing well in a lifetime". Farming, cooking and chopping wood, although daily, hard and boring, have become the focus of their lives. City residents need courage to adapt to this monotonous and repetitive life. Therefore, the city has been hesitant and entangled in settling in Komori.
The Little Forest is adapted from Daisuke Igarashi's comic book Komori Time. The original comic book is a portrayal of his three-year life in Yichuan District, and the house of the heroine Shizi's hometown is the residence where Fifty Lan lived in seclusion for three years. Speaking of why he lived in seclusion in a mountain village, he said:
Many brilliant life ideas have planted seeds as early as the student days. The days of physical labor, drinking and creation gave birth to You Tai in the film. You Taitai worked with the prince, who asked you Taitai why she returned to the countryside from the city. Didn't you study hard before you left? Mrs. You drove a pickup truck and casually replied, "I don't want to live the life of being killed by others and then spitting out the way to kill people." Perhaps what he wants to express is that the kind of life that can only be lived by others without personal experience but likes to judge is not what he wants. This is probably the author's own projection. When studying at Tama University of Fine Arts, cartoonists did not often attend classes, but were keen on walking. The university is in the suburbs, surrounded by forests. I recall my school days. At that time, cartoonists didn't like to meet people and tried to avoid contact with anyone, but they liked to "often walk in the forest, often get off at the tram stop on the way to school and wander there." More time is aimless dialogue with nature.
Shizi once lived like this. A small plot is that children in the city have been trying to make vegetables that taste like their mothers. After repeated experiments, he found that his mother's trick was to carefully pull out the roots. When he was a child, he missed this detail and complained that his mother was too lazy to cook.
When the mother ran away from home, the city children realized how much thought the complained person had spent on a meal and a vegetable. "Nothing is impossible." It was not until he began to prepare three meals a day that the city began to understand his mother. Those heavy manual labors not only connect workers with land and things, but also convey people's feelings through the connection between people and things.
Looking at "Little Forest", perhaps we are not only envious of the self-sufficient rural life of the city, because we understand that the noise and pollution of the city can't hide the fact that it is a highland of human civilization, and the country's complacency hides the risk of hardship and backwardness. But whether in the city or in the countryside, we are always eager to know ourselves and to establish a real and effective relationship with the people around us and the environment, and the city has been trying to do so. This is why the small forest moved me.