ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Café Lumière (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2003) and I Wish (Kore-eda Hirokazu, 2011) reinterpret the founding myth of cinema—where childlike spectators reacted in horror to a train that appeared to be rushing toward them—as an animist encounter to propose a desirable form of human-nonhuman relationality. Both films situate the absence of this relationality in Japanese urban environments characterized by dense railway networks, a high level of technological progress, the ethos of globalized capitalism, and individuals’ blasé attitude towards social life due to the overdevelopment and overstimulation of the material world. Yet the two films envision how even such an alienating chronotope can be re-enchanted through the lens of a childlike figure’s animist perception.
