As one of the main characters, Kana, would say “kando shita!”, “I was moved.”
If you think you can do something, you can, but if you think that you can’t, you become unable to – this is a key theme behind the movie Shodo Girls and something that the main character, Satoko, has to struggle with. Every member of the Shikoku Chuo High School Calligraphy Club faces some challenges throughout the movie, but it is the talented Satoko who must learn that the attitude she works with, is more important than the completed work.
Shodo Girls fits into a long list of “if you try hard enough, you can do it” movies that are often released in Japan. Just as Oppai Barei, another recent release, focused on the struggles of a group of untalented boys volleyball players, Shodo Girls, also chooses to set the stage in the transitional, versatile, and sometimes tempestuous time of high school.
Although similar themes have been seen before, Shodo Girls stands above many of its contemporaries. Mostly this is because it uses a special power that movies have always had, yet something that is seen less and less in movies today – it makes us want to become a better person. The audience realizes and has reaffirmed to them the importance of friendship and of not taking the lessons we can learn from others for granted; it reminds us of community and of working together.
A beautiful scene is when the club does a performance painting outside of the hospital where former member Mio is visiting her sick mother. Mio left the club after Satoko, the club president, became jealous of her work and chose to pick Mio’s struggling club attendance as an opportunity to guilt her out of the club. In an attempt to apologize for her actions, Satoko and the club paint each of their names on seven long rows of paper. The eighth row of paper, in the middle, remains empty – a gesture signifying Mio’s place in the club and the importance of having all eight members work together.
Although there sometimes seem to be a lot of overly positive, inspirational movies in Japan, there is also a fair amount of the stark, bleak and rather depressing (see the post on Woman in the Dunes below). Probably because of this and some of the reasons I've already mentioned above, I find myself watching movies like Shodo Girls and really, really liking them. This is an inspiring movie and one that makes the audience believe in the power of the cinema again, a feat which I think is notable in and of itself.
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