Monday, February 26, 2018

Short Film: Pica-Don (Japan, 1978)


"Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!"
Donald "Size Matters" Trump


What we have here is an award-winning and forgotten animated from Japan which, much like A Short Vision (1956), our Short Film of the Month for September 2015, is beginning to have possible greater relevance than had in decades. "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it," goes the often paraphrased statement by the Spanish-born philosopher poet George Santayana. Not a pleasant concept.
Pika-don was made by the husband-and-wife team of Renzo and Sayoko Kinoshita, who ran their own Tokyo-based independent animation studio called Studio Lotus. Renzo died in 1997. His wife Sayoko is still alive today. 
Much of the short is about the day in the life of a family in Hiroshima prior to 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945. A day like any other day….
To simply quote Wikipedia: "On Monday, August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m., the nuclear weapon 'Little Boy' was dropped on Hiroshima from an American Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the Enola Gay, flown by Colonel Paul Tibbets, directly killing an estimated 70,000 people, including 20,000 Japanese combatants and 2,000 Korean slave laborers. By the end of the year, injury and radiation brought the total number of deaths to 90,000–166,000. The population before the bombing was around 340,000 to 350,000. About 70% of the city's buildings were destroyed, and another 7% severely damaged."
Airship Daily explains: "Pikadon means 'flash boom'. It refers to what those witnessing the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saw and heard: first a blinding light, then a deafening explosion."
When it comes to nuclear warheads, the size of one's button in immaterial.

4 comments:

candoor said...

At once I am, omg, that is, I am all at once, almost, gasping, laughing, caterwauling, and generous globs of generally sighing with excitement and dread, slightly annoyed with an alas and rolling of the eyes, but mostly a deep innate inherent unspoken kinship of some unexplainable sort that can only be explained by babbling incessantly uninhibitedly without regard for convolutions of verbiage, word constructs, language accords, or grammatical conventions, but simply and distinctly infinitely random free-associative mind dumping of the sort no planet has experienced in the history of the multiverses and beyond (never give up, never surrender, either).

I, the butcher of English, insertor of random blanks and erroneous titles, Queen Mother of Hypergraphia, and all my other momentary titles, not to mention the vast majority of my 100+ blog without any consultation or aforethought, salute you.

signed,
Kindred Spirit
(quite possibly)

Note: This entry may have nothing to do with the blog post under which it is submitted, it is, in fact, an instantaneous, impulsive, and quite ignorant reaction to the first impression of the first few moments of exposure to your blog and reading Note and About in the right column therein.

PS... My latest non sequitur or seriously irreverent regret in this life may just be that I do not have time to know you through reading your words and becoming part of your wasted life as much as I would like simply because I am too busy writing about my wasted life...

PPS... Nothing is ever wasted if it is appreciated.

PPPS... Thank you for being out there, here, or out here, there, for, for no apparent reason, I suddenly feel less alone.

Epilogue: This short script is as much yours as it is mine. Mine it as you will. Mind it as you wish. I love your madness almost as much as I love my own. Even if neither is ever known.

Someday we all will understand.

Till tomorrow,
Oui zusammenkommen in the middle
(I blame google and collins)

Namaste too.

hl,
ric

Marco Pellitteri said...

Hello, Santayana was Spanish. I am not sure if he got Italian passport in the last years of his life (he died and is buried in Rome).

Abraham said...

We stand corrected — as does the blog entry. Raised in the US, born in Spain, he died an expat in Italy.

Anonymous said...

Well, this isn't horrifying at all...

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