The first movie we saw for this year's Japanese Film Festival was サバイバルファミリ. It's set in Tokyo, and starts with a typical modern family: a workaholic father, housewife, and two kids addicted to their smartphones. The kids don't seem to have any care for their parents, complaining that the food cooked by the mother is disgusting, and that their father is lazy and useless. The parents aren't sleeping together anymore, and seem to just tolerate each other.
An unusual blackout causes some disruption in their morning. It's unusual because rather than just the mains power being disrupted, anything that has a battery also seems to have stopped functioning, including clocks and phones.
The father tries to go to the office, but it turns out the blackout has affected more than their apartment block, and the trains aren't working either. He gets to the office, only to find that nobody can get into the building because the automatic doors don't work. In the end, they resort to smashing the glass doors, with one of the senior managers telling the building caretaker that they can just add the cost to their bill. It's all for naught when they get upstairs and find that their computers aren't working. The father becomes quite distressed, as there's a financial report that they need to get out. He's also annoyed that some of the junior staff aren't around, but one of his co-workers points out that not everyone is as lucky to only live two stations away from the office that they can walk to work in a reasonable time. He ends up taking the work home, and doing a lot of the reporting by hand.
The children arrive at school, only to find that almost none of the teachers are around. The day is declared a study period until the teachers arrive, to the celebration of the students. On the way to school, the brother sees that a lot of cars are stranded, because they just stopped working. Someone points out that he's lucky to have a bike, and he rides off, seemingly concerned that someone is going to steal it.
The mother meets with other mothers, who all talk about how they're sure the electricity will come back soon, but they should stock up on food and candles just in case.
The power doesn't come back the next day. In fact, it doesn't come back for a few days. There's no water from taps, the toilets don't flush properly, food and bottled water are starting to run low. The family decides to make a break for it, to go and stay with the mother's father - someone who has his own farm, and enjoys fishing. Except... he lives in Kakogawa (I think this is the place - I know they pass through Osaka and Kobe, and it had the 川 kanji in the name).
That's how far it is. They were travelling on bikes, but they didn't have Google maps, or any kind of GPS software. In fact, before they left, they raided the local library, and the only useful thing left was a kid's map of Japan, which was quite simplistic. It didn't have elevation data, nor the best possible route. Plus, they hear rumours that there was electricity in Osaka, so that was their initial plan.
The journey starts out OK, but it's not long until they start to encounter issues. Someone steals a bottle of their water, and the son goes to chase them down, but when he realises they're stealing it to give to their young baby, he has a change of heart, and lets them keep it. It becomes apparent that the family has no wilderness survival skills, with the father resorting to starting a fire by rubbing a stick, and failing to even get a spark. He drinks water from a river, and ends up getting diarrhoea. At least the brother seems to have a decent head on his shoulders, realising they can use this coolant thing that's essentially purified water, that nobody else seems to have looted from the local hardware store. They also resort to eating canned cat food, lacking any other source of food.
The movie was a comedy, almost making fun of the fact that all the modern skills we've developed are mostly useless if we're forced to survive in the face of a large-scale disaster. Bikes really are king, when it comes to something like that, as they don't require fuel, nor electricity. Which reminds me, I really need to learn how to ride one. I don't have a clue how to start a fire (though if I've learned anything from The Hunger Games movies, starting a fire is just like painting a giant target on your back).
I'm pretty good at walking, so I have that in my favour. But I'm also not great when I'm hungry, so that's going to be a huge liability. I also wouldn't have a clue which plants are edible, and which are poisonous. The idea of hunting and cooking an animal makes me incredibly uncomfortable. There's a scene in the movie where they need to butcher a dead pig, and even though they're all starving and practically salivating at the thought of eating pork, none of them can stomach the idea of cutting up the pig.
I enjoyed the movie. It was a comedy, but it was pretty heartwarming at times. MrFodder pointed out that there was a bit of a deus ex machina at the end, and I agree, but I think the movie itself was well-paced, with most of the obstacles being solved in a realistic way. One of the bits of arcane knowledge shown by the brother was actually something he picked up earlier in the movie, and we do see the characters grow over the course of their journey, becoming a lot less materialistic, and a lot more practical. There's a scene in which the daughter whines about a shirt that she has only worn once being ruined, and she complains about not having had a bath in ages. When she goes from a princess to someone willing to eat cat food, you can see that her priorities have changed.
The father's character was almost heartbreaking to me. There's a scene where the family basically calls him useless, and you can see his heart breaking. I thought his character development in the movie was really strong, and the guy playing him did an incredible job making you love and hate him.
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