Rainy Days
2014 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Vladimir Leschiov
Genres: animation, drama, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
An aging Japanese traveler rides a ferry toward an unfamiliar island while rainfall stirs recollections of his youth in Fukuoka and a fleeting train journey years afterward. Linked by a recurring woman and distant Mount Fuji, these missed possibilities lead toward an unexpected greeting amid another downpour.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a gorgeous meditation on regret, sure, but it's also exactly the kind of tasteful, wistful memory-film that gets programmed everywhere — Leschiov's doing something *sincere* here, which means it's probably not for me.
Rainy Days sits comfortably in the lineage of poetic animation essays — Takahata's sensibility lives here — and the formal choice to interweave three temporal moments through a single recurrent figure and geographical anchor (Mount Fuji) shows a curator's hand; the rain becomes both motif and structure.
The decision to animate this as something between rotoscope and watercolor — letting the medium blur and soften the temporal seams — is what sells the whole thing; without that specific textural choice, this is just a story about missed connections, but Leschiov makes you *feel* the years dissolving.