School Days With A Pig

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Language: Japanese

Director: Tetsu Maeda

Cast: Satoshi Tsumabuki (Tears for you泪光闪闪) , Mieko Harada, Tomoko Tabata, Ren Osugi (Nightmare Detective) , Yumi Shimizu, Miu Naraki

Runtime: 109mins

Plot:

Elementary school teacher Mr. Hoshi (Satoshi Tsumabuki) comes to class at the start of term with an unexpected friend in tow: a pig, which he informs his students that they will be raising over the course of the year and then eating. Under the watchful eye of the kindly school principal (Mieko Harada) and her disapproving deputy (Ren Osugi), the kids take to the task with aplomb, christening their new charge “P-Chan” and building her a sty in the school playground. But as the year wears on, many start to have doubts about whether they can turn the class pet into pork chops.

Watched the movie on 4th April late night @ Cineleisure with Sylvia.

As always it is very interesting to watch children movie. Sometimes you thought they talk things ridiculously, sometimes they oppose maturely, sometimes their tears touch your heart, sometimes their laughter puts a smile on you. And there are 26 children in this movie to talk about, and most importantly, the main character - P chan, a class project and a pig.

There are many films featured about dogs, which are relatively easier animals to train and control for movie making. For pigs, all I know is Babe and CG did help a lot during Babe's filming. Not sure how they did it but I am for sure impressed with School Days as the Children in the movie aided alot for the making of the movie with this piggy.

The director gave his cast space to work with the material, and parts of the film have a loose, semi-improvised feel to them. The 4 class debates, 2 voting rounds, and numerous individuals confronting to decide the fate of the pig brings audiences into their project as well, by helping them to decide if P chan should be send to the meat centre or to let the juniors adopt her?

I feel that school play a big part of children's life when they are growing up. They spend most of the day time in school thus it is their sources for most of their knowledge and thoughts. They bring these back home and interact to their families. In the movie, I felt extremely pleasant when parents who initially refuse the idea of keeping P chan, slowly became interested and discussed the situations with their children by showing concerns.

I'm sure the teachers and the children learned a lot from this project, regardless the cast or the true class where this story was written from, as I believe I have learn a lot from this movie too. This experience definitely is going to be in their memories forever. I kind of regretted that I forgotten my box of tissue...

ah-deng says: 4½ /5 Highly recommended! Bring on the bacon… or not.