Ode to Joy (film)

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Movie
German title ode to Joy
Original title バ ル ト の 楽 園
Baruto no gakuen
Country of production Germany , Japan
original language Japanese , German
Publishing year 2006
length 135 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Masanobu Deme
script Motomu Furuta
production Tōei
Masatoshu Noguchi
Michael Schwarz
Keita Senoo
Riuko Tominaga
music Shin'ichirō Ikebe
camera Kazutami Hara
cut Shinya Tadano
occupation

Ode to Joy ( Japanese バ ル ト の 楽 園 , Baruto no gakuen , Eng. “Paradise of Beards”) is a German-Japanese historical film drama that celebrated its cinema premiere on June 17, 2006 in Japan. In Germany, the film was shown for the first time on March 8, 2007 at the German-Japanese Society Trier and then on May 16, 2007 at the Japanese Film Festival in Hamburg. The film was officially released in theaters in Germany on July 12, 2007 under the distribution of Buena Vista . However, the film was only shown in a few cinemas in some major cities, while it was a box-office hit in Japan. To date, the film has not been released on DVD in Germany.

It was directed by Masanobu Deme , a former assistant director to Akira Kurosawa . The main roles were played by the Japanese Ken Matsudaira as head of the prison camp and the Swiss Bruno Ganz as the German admiral.

action

Based on true events, the film tells the story of soldiers of the German Imperial Navy who were captured by the Japanese army in 1914, at the beginning of the First World War , after the battle for the Chinese colony of Tsingtao , and taken to the Bandō prisoner-of-war camp in 1917 the prefecture of Tokushima be brought into Japan.

In this exceptional camp, which is liberal compared to other Japanese camps, the soldiers spend the next few years under the just camp leader Toyohisa Matsue, who grants the Germans many freedoms, such as printing their own newspaper, making music and doing sports. When the war was lost for the German Reich in 1918, the prisoners of war lost hope of returning to their homeland (which for most of them will not take place until 1921).

Kurt Heinrich, the German rear admiral, sees suicide as the only way out. But camp manager Matsue convinces the broken man that only he can bring his men back home. To say goodbye, the former German prisoners, who had become friends with the Japanese over the years, play a concert at which Beethoven's 9th Symphony will be performed on Japanese soil for the first time .

In addition, the film tells the story of the girl Shio, daughter of a Japanese woman and the German Carl Baum, who hopes to finally find her father in the prisoner of war camp.

Others

  • Lüneburg students took part in the film as extras and singers. Many of the German prisoners of war, however, were not represented by Germans, but by other western students (US-Americans, Canadians, British, Swedes, Norwegians, etc.) who were recruited for this by universities in the Kansai region .
  • In addition to filming on original locations in Naruto and recordings in the Tōei studios in Kyoto , the film was also shot in Lüneburg , Lower Saxony .
  • The German title makes a conscious reference to Beethoven's 9th Symphony . This world-famous piece by Beethoven, who was already very revered in Japan, was performed for the first time in Japan on June 1, 1918 by German prisoners from the Bandō prisoner of war camp.
  • Bandō has been part of the city of Naruto since 1967, which has been a twin town of Lüneburg since 1974 .
  • The production costs of the film were the equivalent of around 12 million euros, making the film one of the most expensive Japanese productions ever.
  • The first part of the Japanese title - the German word "beard" - refers to both the beards tended by the camp manager and those worn by the German prisoners. The second part gakuen means paradise or elysium, but literally means music garden.
  • When Beethoven's 9th Symphony is being performed, you can see a poster in the background with an inscription in Fraktur . Several spelling mistakes were made by using only the "long s" (ſ) : "Orcheſter deſ Kriegſgefangenenlagerſ Bando". But it has to be correctly called “Orcheſter of the POW camp Bando”.

Reviews

  • Christoph Petersen from filmstarts.de criticizes that “Ode to Joy” is an old-fashioned historical cinema and the spectrum of the film ranges from dramatic war scenes to a bicycle comedy sequence, which together with its musical background could also come from the silent film era. He also claims that the film presents itself as an overly crude mixture of serious drama and shallow entertainment, of Asian and European filmmaking, of historical processing and sweetish transfiguration, and that it has little to offer apart from its overwhelming hymn to Japanese-German friendship .
  • Movie Section thinks the film is a stirring story that proves that humanity, respect and helpfulness are possible among war opponents even in times of extreme tension .

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for Ode to Joy . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , June 2007 (PDF; test number: 110 561 K).
  2. ^ Critique by Christoph Petersen on filmstarts.de
  3. ^ Criticism ( memento from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) on moviesection.de, accessed on August 31, 2019.