Voice Bubbles Up As Words Like Soda Pop

NOTE: This review contains spoilers. I highly recommend taking out 1 hour and 27 minutes of your time on the weekend to watch this film before reading this.

Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop (JP: サイダーのように言葉が湧き上がる / saidaa no you ni kotoba ga waki agaru) is a 2021 film which after procrastinating for four years I finally sat down to watch. Knowing nothing about the film except the Netflix synopsis, I was absolutely blown away by the film. With its vibrant colors, snappy and fun animation, playful character design and art style, and masterful sound direction, this was truly an experience.

In this write-up, I want to focus on the theme of haiku that is a major part of the movie. This was interesting to me because of the words "Flying Dog 10th Anniversary Project" that came up during the opening credits. Flying Dog is a major Japanese music label which I knew from nano but they have giants like Yoko Kanno signed with them amidst other huge animusic artists. I was intrigued seeing a music label help produce a film about a written art form. And while you can say music is poetry in motion, my notion of haiku felt far removed from lyrical music.

Of course, the movie blowing away this hesitation is probably the major reason I loved it so much.

Yui Sakura (Cherry) finds it difficult talking to people. He feels he can express himself best in the written form of haiku, which he often uploads online. His haiku get graffitied all over the town by Beaver, which certainly makes for an interesting-looking world. To this note, I found someone's writeup with their interpretations of all the haiku in the movie.

Beaver doesn't have the best grasp on written Japanese, and Cherry often corrects him. Here, he corrects 歯 (tooth) to 葉 (leaves). There's no particular reason I'm including this still here, not like this is a set-up for stellar wordplay, no sir...

Cherry dislikes having to communicate verbally, and hence finds solace in haiku. However, his senpai at work says: "But don't you think some scenes can only be conveyed when you read them aloud?"

I want to take a small tangential interpretation of the overall movie here. I think the movie also celebrates how art can add meaning in forms different from the one it was experienced, or even conceived in. Haiku may be a written form, but there are some feelings whose depth and poetry you can only express in words - a prime example of which I will mention later, which is the reason I'm even writing this review.

Yuki Hoshino (Smile) is very conscious of her buckteeth, and even though she was adored for it when younger, it grows into an insecurity nonetheless which she masks whenever she can.

With one measure of the track Sepia over Smile saying "好きだったけど…なんか…" / "sukidatta kedo... nanka...", the music volume swells perfectly as we see Smile look into the mirror. This shows how for her, even though she was loved for her buckteeth, her insecurity still appeared and it was not something trivial. The track ends after her eyes go wide seeing her masked face, thereby birthing the insecurity in the form it is.

A bit of a tangent but Smile's VA Hana Sugisaki also seems to have buckteeth, which is a cute touch.

One day, Cherry quite literally bumps into Smile, and after the comedic event of the pair accidentally swapping smartphones, the duo develop a fast friendship. When Smile asks Cherry to recite a haiku...

In this scene, after Cherry's exclamation, you have the streelights light up with the sound of bubbles popping. Absolutely beautiful direction, and this is titular too! Words from Cherry, like the lit streetlights, will bubble up through his voice like soda pop.

...the duo grow close, and Smile starts part-timing at the same daycare center Cherry works at.

The visual direction here is lovely, with the split-screen view of Cherry and Smile being a common device to meaningfully show events from each side's perspective without too much camera movement.

The movie's title is, in fact, a haiku that Cherry writes!

This can be separated as:

Around the midway mark of the film, we are now introduced to the focus of the second half: Fujiyama-san and the cover of the record Yamazakura that he always carries. We see why he is obsessed with finding the record - it was sung by his wife, and he doesn't want to forget what her voice was like - and the protagonists decide to help look for it. The duo go to the radio tower where the photograph for the record cover was taken, and with the help of Fujiyama-san's family and some friends turn over the entire record store (which was being closed down). While they do ultimately find the record, Smile accidentally breaks it. The scene where we see her try to fix the record is among my favorite scenes of the film: the camera is static so Smile's movements feel more meaningful. Her regret over the record and grief at learning that Cherry is moving away slowly build up along with the frustration of the record pieces falling apart. The music starts quiet, and the volume crescendos when she fully breaks down and is comforted by her sisters.

In a monthly haiku magazine on the kigo (seasonal words) for spring, Cherry finds the word Yamazakura. The haiku trivia section for it says, "Yamazakura leaves grow before its cherry blossoms (sakura), so people with buckteeth are referred to as yamazakura."

And now this gives me all the context to absolutely gush about this haiku that Cherry writes. It's a straight up confession to Smile. And you pick up on this if (1) you noticed the correction Cherry makes to Beaver's writing previously, or (2) you already knew the 葉 and 歯 homonyms. To explain the wordplay, the character for 葉 (leaf/leaves) is pronounced ha, and the character 歯 (tooth) is also pronounced as ha. And considering the dual meaning of the word yamazakura...

I remember pausing the movie, pointing at the screen and almost screaming when I realized it. The wordplay was gorgeous, and this is fully realized in the final scene when Cherry runs back to the festival and properly proclaims his feelings to Smile by reciting all his written haiku with more direct variations of the Yamazakura haiku.

This wordplay coupled with Cherry's heartfelt recitation of it is why haiku as a spoken form can impart so much more depth to what was originally written. In writing, there's a fixed meaning. But when you recite the haiku, it can mean something so endearing. For me, this made this film more than an adorable, well-made youth romdrama. Lyrical music can truly be poetry in motion, but even the act of reciting a written poem can impart so much color and emotion to what in principle seems like a defined expression of specific intent. Of course, this is, as usual, me reading way too much into something but it made Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop a brilliant and beautiful piece of art for me.

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