Anime: Ihatov Gensou: Kenji no Haru

Spring and Chaos is the tragic story of one of Japan's most beloved poets, Kenji Miyazawa who was born over a hundred years ago in 1896 in Iwate Prefecture and died at the age of 37. Kenji's literary works received scant attention during his lifetime

”Your stories make no sense. No one would read them”

and only two books were published before his passing. A great number of children's stories and poems were edited and published only posthumously, after which the richness and depth of his art finally gained wide recognition so this movie was originally released in Japan in 1996 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Miyazawa's birth.


The animation is mostly good to average: while the general animation in average (compared to nowadays anime!) the close up views – nature and facial expressions – are indeed great.
The use of 3-D animation is outstanding both in number and quality. Actually this movie contains some of the most beautiful 3-D animation sequences I’ve seen so far.


The music is very fitting, mostly creating a dark mood. The voice actors did a fine job; although I didn’t like Kenji Miyazawa’s voice at the very beginning I loved it at the end.


As mentioned above the story is about Kenji's tragically short life and his struggle to be true to his art and himself while being called a weirdo by most of the people. As most of the characters in Kenji Miyazawa’s novels were animals so they are in this anime. It’s rather interesting to watch Kenji Miyazawa (a cat) discoursing his impression of living:

“The human body is truly a bunch of molecules having a wild festival”


To sum up this anime is rather deep especially the try to show the world as it is seen by Kenji is really interesting with several philosophical ideas in it. And the dark mood is a good alternative to any happy anime. Although the last minutes are quite weird this anime is really recommendable.