Get Reel | Film review: Wood Job! successfully combines humour and forestry
This back-to-nature coming-of-age tale has a story arc that's fairly predictable — all the more so if you're familiar with writer-director Shinobu Yaguchi's reputation as a feel-good, zero-to-hero film specialist.
Starring: Shota Sometani, Masami Nagasawa, Hideaki Ito
Director: Shinobu Yaguchi
Category: IIA (Japanese)
This back-to-nature coming-of-age tale has a story arc that's fairly predictable — all the more so if you're familiar with writer-director Shinobu Yaguchi's reputation as a feel-good, zero-to-hero film specialist.
Even so, it's hard to resist the movie's considerable charm, much of which stems from its agreeable portrayal of a bucolic Japan seldom shown in the films of a country with an overwhelmingly urban population and whose timber industry is in decline.
Adapted — like Yuya Ishii's sublime The Great Passage (2013) — from a bestselling novel by popular author Shion Mura (one of whose grandfathers was a woodsman), the good-natured comedy centres on a city boy who enrols in a one-year forestry programme after failing his university entrance exams and being dumped by his girlfriend.
Eighteen-year-old Yuki Hirano (Shota Sometani) seems like a fish out of water in the rural environs of the green cooperative where he receives his lumberjack training.
But Yuki reveals a persistent side after a chance meeting with Naoki Ishii (Masami Nagasawa). A picture of her pretty face on the forestry programme's publicity brochure was what lured him to a place which has lots of trees, mosquitoes, leeches and snakes — and no mobile phone reception.