When winter comes to Hokkaido, a large island in the north of Japan, the red-crowned cranes that have arrived from Russia struggle to find their sustenance in the dried-up marshes for the benefit of human activities. In the spring, a family of bears is faced with the felling of trees in the forest that is supposed to feed them. Then come summer and autumn, the scene of the proximity of the raccoon dog “tanuki” and the fallow deer “shika” with humans.
In the documentary Japan, a new wild world, the directors Guillaume Maidatchevsky and Delphine Piau are interested in the evolutions of the behavior of animals confronted with man: “The human population is constantly increasing. This finding leads to a drastic reduction in the natural areas that are home to wild species. »
The country, by its insular character, presents natural borders. Impossible for species to escape. So they have to adapt. And the documentary to link the fates of animal “characters” presented in a Japan with the “incredible diversity” of landscapes and climates, from the tropical South to the cold temperate North.
Animals adopt coping strategies with varying degrees of success. One of them is to act more often at night. This is how the mongoose behaves in the Yanbaru Forest, which covers the north of the main island of Okinawa. This herpestid was introduced there to hunt the very dangerous local viper “habu”, but the human presence forces it to favor the night. These new practices are becoming widespread, say the authors, since, worldwide, the “nocturnal habits” of animals have increased by 70%.
Long sequences
Another way of adaptation is the daily integration of humans. Raccoon dogs thrive in the urban density of Tokyo, where they feed on trash cans left along train tracks. The shika deer of the temples of Nara (in the West) yield for their part to a form of domestication. Conversely, struggling to change their behavior, some animals risk disappearing: the giant salamander, the largest amphibian in the world, is a victim of pollution.
The somewhat grandiloquent tone and the sometimes long sequences do not prevent this documentary from offering beautiful images made possible by a discreet and patient camera, “at the height of an animal, as if we were filming an actor or an actress, at the closer to what he feels and perceives”, with the use of “technological innovations in night vision”.
Beyond the technical performance, the background would have deserved to break away from the usual clichés about Japan – the cherry blossoms in spring, the red leaves of autumn on music clearly inspired by the animated film Ghost in the Shell (1995), even the respect of nature by the Japanese, who “honor its power”. This would have made it possible to explain the choices of “characters” to the detriment of others, to explore the limits of the Japanese policy of protecting species, sometimes sacrificed for economic reasons, to explain whether the desertification of the countryside due to the accelerated demographic decline revived a wild life mistreated by the human presence.