Looks like keeping Music the hell away from my review schedule wasn’t enough to stop me from dealing with the topic of ‘inspiration porn’. For the uninitiated, no, we’re not talking about Tony Robbins’ sex tape (thank fuck for that), but instead an aspect of depictions of disabled people in mass media. Put simply, it’s how even the simplest of everyday tasks suddenly become ‘inspirational’, purely because they are being done by a disabled person. It’s basically a term for media that, while depicting and centred on disabled characters, largely exists for able-bodied people to feel good about themselves because ‘if this person (who I subconsciously consider to be in an inherently worse position than me) can do things, so can I’.
Speaking as someone with disabilities, I have mixed feelings about this whole conversation. Part of that is due to my previously-mentioned attitudes towards abled actors ‘passing’ for disabled characters, but there’s also how… well, I don’t really know how else to put it: Far as I’m concerned, I’ve done inspiration porn in the past with Employable Me. Don’t get me wrong, no part of me regrets taking part in that documentary… but I can’t say I haven’t, both at the time and even today, worried that I was simply becoming part of that same voyeuristic equation. That quick snapshot of disabled life that makes the abled consensus feel good for a moment, and then never consider that reality again until the next picture develops.
If this is already sounding a bit heavy for an introduction to a film, realise that a lot of this shit was floating around in my head while watching this particular animated feature. It follows budding oceanographer Tsuneo (Taishi Nakagawa) and his chance encounter with young artist Kumiko (Kaya Kiyohara), subsequently taking a job as her caretaker. While the narrative focus on Tsuneo over the wheelchair-using Kumiko (nicknamed Josee after a character in her favourite book) did bug me a bit at first, the film at large does well at balancing their perspectives.
With Josee in particular, the perspective given of her life and her circumstances feels natural and informed by the actual reality of things. How her grandmother coddles her and treats her like a child (even though she’s in her mid-20s), telling how dangerous the outside world is and how risky it is for her to do anything too strenuous. It’s one of the aspects of the carer side of the equation that is at once understandable and quite unhelpful, as it teeters right on the edge of genuine concern and preventing someone from living their own life as they see fit. Because if there’s anything worse than out-and-out hostility towards the disabled, it’s being infantilised under the guise of concern.
The relationship between her and Tsuneo develops quite nicely, even if it starts at the cliched ‘we hate each other to provide contrast for the affection later on’ point, and the way their dynamic makes them both actively confront the limitations that the world puts on them certainly rings true. Maybe it’s because I’ve also devoted myself to an artistic passion that most others would see as a pipedream in terms of actual employment, but when the social worker told Josee to stop being foolish and find a ‘real’ job… fucking hell, I felt that.
I won’t lie, this managed to get me to tear up quite a few times, especially in how Josee’s art becomes part of the narrative proper, but I can’t help but have that niggling little thought in the back of my head about who ultimately benefits from stories like this. However, between the accurate observations about the abled gaze (how disabled people are perceived by non-disabled people), how engaging the main relationship is between Josee and Tsuneo, and how hard it goes when it reaches for the heart of the audience, it feels like a story worth telling because… well, it meant a lot to me to see something like this brought to the big screen, and I can only hope that the abled majority aren’t the only ones who will get something useful out of this.
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