Firefly Dreams (2001)

What a beautiful movie!

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

A Brilliant Conflict

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

A young girl, Naomi is a typical bad girl of city. One day, she gets to go to her relative's home in countryside. Then she comes to take care of an old woman, Ms. Koide. Naomi is under 20 years old, so she must not drink or smoke but Ms. Koide does not blame her. Therefore she can behave as she is in front of Ms. Koide. Naomi comes to learn many things through the life with her. This is not only a story of one girl's growing but also an old woman's last story. The scene of Japan's countryside is also beautiful. You may get a good feeling through this movie.

This movie sets its story in two opposing contrasts one about urban life and country living, and another about young and old. Yumi, lives a shallow life like many teenage girls living in urban Japan until her father sends her to country side where their relatives live for the summer. She befriends Ms Koide, an old lady who used to be an actress.Removed from the urban life, and seeing the contrast between her who has whole life ahead of herself, and an elderly Ms Koide who has nothing to look forward to in life, Yumi begins to put things into perspective about her own life.This realization comes very gradually, so the movie seems slow, but the story is told in a very beautiful way. Almost all the people living around her in the city is very selfish, people living in the country aren't as privileged, but are more caring. Yumi gets a chance to reassess her life between the two opposing environment.Kind of a coming of age story for an urban girl, but also has message for all of us about what life is all about.Highly recommended.

This film alludes the life of a brat from Nagoya, problem teenager from a dysfunctional family, to the life of a former movie actress from the 1930s who is now suffering from Alzheimer's disease.Most of the scenes are cast in the city of Shinshiro, Aichi, and the town of Horai, Aichi (which will become part of Shinshiro in October 2005), both very small cities away from the visually overwhelming Japanese urban landscape. The unstaffed and deserted train platform of the JR Iida line, a small (and an actual) hospital, the unpolluted river, waterfalls, forests and the hot spring inns are remnants of old Japan, and so are the fireflies, fireworks and a summer festival at local shrine grounds.Director John Williams captures the beauty of rural Japan and the wide cultural gap as well as geographical contrast between the urban teenager's Nagoya (fourth largest municipality in Japan) and Koide-san's farm house up on the hill in the Oku Mikawa Highland region, while on the interpersonal and spiritual levels connecting the common elements between these two women from two different generations.

Firefly Dreams is a movie about the friendship between a young teenage girl and an old Lady who she visits in her summer holidays. Naomi is a spoiled brat and send by her father to the countryside, after her mother runs away. There she works at the restaurant of her aunt and uncle. Close lives also Mrs Koide with whom she used to play when she was a kid. From there the story unfolds. I have to praise almost all aspects of the movie. The plot is well thought and all characters are believable and very interesting even the ones who just appear in a few scenes. The photography is marvellous, the landscape is breathtaking and rounds up the plot very nicely. The aesthetic is very different from recent Japanese movies I saw (e.g. from Kitano). It is violent free and it is set mainly in a rural area. Maybe this is so because the director is English and chose a different approach for portraying Japanese life, but this is just a speculation. The acting is great and for me this is the first time I think I learned something about normal Japanese everyday life through a movie. Surely the development of Naomi, how she grows up - and indeed has to grow up - through friendship and also sorrow, is the driving force of the movie. The movie has a slow pace, so if you are an action-movie fan, don't go. Everybody else: you will not regret it!