Synopsis
Tokyo schoolgirl Hiromi and her friends engage in a practice known as enjo kosai, or "compensated dating", where older men pay young girls for dates. Hiromi plunges deeper into this world to raise money for an expensive ring.
Love & Pop
1998 ‘ラブ&ポップ’ Directed by Hideaki Anno
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Alternative Titles
러브 앤 팝, 狂戀高校生, Любовь и попса, Love and Pop, ラブ・アンド・ポップ
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July 19, 1997.
The bubble has burst.
Japan's economic boom of the 1980's has long since passed, but the ramifications of the rapid expansion and technological development the country underwent still remains. Tokyo is one of the most densely populated cities in the entire world, with a staggering amount of financial capital concentrated in a shockingly small amount of space. It is the most monolithic of monoliths, all the towers and skyscrapers and monuments to the excesses of capital prosperity casting their shadows until all the light of the sun is totally blotted out.
Among these many shadows, in this Lost Decade of Japan's modern history, people still remain. A country stuck in an economic rut sees its problems cascading…
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truly inventive filmmaking — like a VR experience with the flatness of mini dv dimensions. it's often sweet and always unusual and reaches the discomforts of growing pains, including some truly harrowing sequences (all in the span of a day!), but even through all its surrealism it lands with such strikingly familiar resonance. blown away.
p.s. i laughed so hard when she went to the video store and stared at an adult film titled "if my back goes out, i've got my mouth."
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Some films just manage to transcend any rationale or objectivity. How do I talk about Love & Pop, and by extension Anno's entire oeuvre, in a way that both communicates how I feel about it, while also giving it an assessment that could be considered at all fair? After thinking about this for a while, I've decided that I just can't. Some films(series') are just too embedded into our own experiences that coming at them in a way that could be considered at all objective is impossible.
Love & Pop is an at once wholly inventive kaleidoscope of creative expression, completely disregarding typical filmmaking conventions, and an utterly devastating exploration on ones self-worth and value. Anno's dizzying filmmaking techniques unwillingly place us…
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Love & Pop In-Depth Analysis Part 1: Historical Background of Japan in 1998.
Love & Pop is a compelling critique of the state of Japan in the late 90’s. In order to understand why this movie exists and what it’s talking about you must learn what was going on in the country at that time. I’m no historian but I’ll do my best to break down what my research has uncovered to the best of my ability.
1. The Bubble Economy
Beginning in the Late 1970’s and expanding into the early 1990’s the economy of Japan underwent a period of extreme growth known as “The Bubble”.
Similar to China in recent times, Japan became a principle exporter of goods to the US…
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the first time i got catcalled was some evening halfway between a train station and a cinema. i was waiting for someone but this person must have been waiting for me, for an opportunity to shout in some girl's direction. if it wasn't me it'd surely be someone else.
i wondered - was it because he found me attractive, was it just because i was a woman he wanted to impose himself on, or was it because he actually didn't see me as a woman and instead fetishised my transness? deep down, in some perverse sense, i wished to probe what drove this man to do this, turn it back on him, but on the surface i just picked up…
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Directed by Hideaki Anno, most famous for Neon Genesis Evangelion and a bunch of other seminal anime of the '80s and '90s, Love & Pop is the sort of film likely to be seen (outside Japan?) only by those already familiar with his work. If you're into movies like Noriko's Dinner Table or Linda Linda Linda, though, you might want to look into this one. The hyper-edited style may not be for everyone — perspectives are restlessly shifted from camera to camera to camera, one tucked here and one tucked there, often with fisheye lens and flare blowing out the cheap video all over the place. I think it's gorgeous.
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Cut, cut, cut. Image over image. Hideaki Anno's Love & Pop pushes cinematic form with its experimental streak. It's a bold game of abstraction, floating above with a postmodern flavour and fisheye lens. Montage as a mess, incoherence as a triumph. There's a delicious lack of logical resolution, made complete by a final lengthy pop-culture inflected camera move to nowhere.
Self-value and self-worth are the defining interior struggles of life in Love & Pop. This is a story of a girl who has no direction in her life, living a life that may never provide any. She has value, but doesn't know she needn't degrade herself. Anno is concerned with the way that material objects won't fill the gaps in your life,…
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"Everything in the world's got a time for change. Men and women, grown-ups and kids. Maybe you've got two dads; or, maybe one day you're alive and are just a grave or a photograph the next. Things change and disappear before your eyes. It gets all blurry, and then it's not there. Things you think won't change... do, meaning that they can. Will I change? Will I be able to? All I knew was that I didn't know anything. Worldly things always end. Feelings, too. Then again, new places mean new friends. Maybe the world is just the same stuff, over and over. But that doesn't mean I can't try and catch it before it goes.
That's what made me…
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Claustrophobic, terrifying, and yet bittersweet in a way only Anno could achieve. If there’s another director who so seamlessly transitioned from animation to live-action, I don’t know them. The first shot so distinctly echoing the LCL sea Shinji and Asuka were framed against in End Of Evangelion proves it; is human connection the least we can ask for in a world so bludgeoned by capitalism?
In capitalism, sex can exist but only as a productive force at the service of procreation and the regeneration of the waged/male working and as a mean of social appeasement and compensation for the misery of everyday existence.
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I know there’s something wrong with me when I see cum and think it’s a Neon Genesis reference.
Hideaki Anno’s live-action directorial debut Love and Pop utilizes an unquestionably bold visceral style to examine the unfortunate interconnectedness between youth, liberation, industrialization, and perversion. It’s a film that works so incredibly hard to date itself, to label itself as a relic of the past.
With music, technology, and its at times visceral low-quality style of filmmaking, Love and Pop is very much a gem you’d find in a drawer next to your disposable camera. A product of time, one unashamed of its placement in the world, yet a film so focused on what it means to be on the precipice of adulthood,…
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Best known for his work on Neon Genesis Evangelion, which many (including a certain Callisto*) herald as one of the best anime series in history, this film sees its creator go live action with a surreal and rather experimental psychological horror story with a premise that does Anno some justice, though it also looks like something Sion Sono would direct.
Basically, the plot is about a teenage girl who becomes involved in a world of escort where older men pay these teenage girls to spend time with them, which occasionally reaches a sexual level. Anno handles the plot and the entire picture as if it were a nightmare into which our protagonist descends into. Again, the aggressive experimental approach with…