Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (film)

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (French: Saules aveugles, femme endormie) is a 2022 internationally co-produced animated film written, produced, directed and composed by Pierre Földes.[4] A co-production between France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Canada, the film, set in Tokyo shortly after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, adapts 6 short stories from three short story collections by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, The Elephant Vanishes and After The Quake, focusing on a bank employee who is enlisted by a talking frog to assist him in saving the city from destruction by a giant subterranean worm.[5] To create a version of 3D motion capture animation within a 2D film, Földes filmed his entire screenplay as a live-action "reference" performance, following which the animators replaced the actors' heads with 3D models and then traced and animated their facial expressions.[4]

The film's voice cast includes Marcello Arroyo, Michael Czyz, Zag Dorison, Pierre Földes, Jesse Noah Gruman, Katharine King So, John Vamvas, Nadia Verrucci and Shoshana Wilder.

The film premiered in the feature film competition at the 2022 Annecy International Animation Film Festival,[6] where it was awarded a Jury Distinction,[7] and was later screened at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival as part of the festival's Contemporary World Cinema section.[8][9]