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REVIEW: Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop

The mall is the Aeon Mall in Takasaki, which you can find on Google Maps here. They recently held a stamp rally to commemorate the release of the film (check this link if you read Japanese).

I lived in Takasaki for three and a half years and often saw movies at the Aeon Mall, so I'm intimately familiar with the space. It makes watching this film a little strange, as they've made some odd changes—look at the south side of the mall, across from the satellite parking lot, and you'll see that they've removed the pedestrian overpass but kept the stairs leading up to it, creating a bridge to nowhere that is quite the safety hazard!—and the film's version of the mall is as it existed about two years ago, before a major expansion. I was very happy to see that it included the massive bank of gacha machines on the third floor, which had some of the best stuff I've ever found in Japan (they had a gacha machine that dispensed capsules with miniature gacha machines that actually dispensed tiny capsule with miniscule gacha machines inside them!) but was removed after the expansion.

The film also includes Daruma (the local product) and South American immigrants as local references (although it's weird they speak Spanish—neighboring Maebashi is home to a very large Brazilian community, so Portuguese would be more common). Takasaki's not exactly a tourist destination, but it's always nice to see a place you know used as the background for a light fantastic story like this.

PS: Actually, the kanji for "tooth" and "leaf" aren't really similar (歯 vs. 葉), but they're both pronounced the same way, "ha," which is how Beaver (Bieber?) made his mistake. Several of Cherry's haiku use the homonym in a more deliberate way.

For some reason I'd not heard of this before, but now I'm definitely sold on it! Even just the title has so much personality to it.

"湧き上がる" has more the feeling of a spring gushing up than it exactly does a carbonated beverage percolating, or even (often written with a different kanji) of boiling; it is also used to mean an emotional outpouring or uproar, which is why the word choice is just a tiny bit more interesting in Japanese than it can be in English. It suggests an almost violent inability to contain the words that "bubble up" doesn't quite manage (much as I like the official title).

Finally, if you don't know, in Japan "Cider" means this, and yes, in haiku it counts as four morae (sa-i-da-a)! Although I generally object to the term "soda pop" (I'm a "soda" guy), in this case I think it's a pretty brilliant translation that perfectly captures the feeling of the film.