Ritual
2000 · Hideaki Anno
For a solitary, contemplative night when you want something slow, strange, and sad — a film to sit inside rather than be entertained by. Firmly on the challenge end of the spectrum, and rewarding for it.
What it's about
A film director hollowed out by success drifts through an industrial port city, where he meets a young woman who announces, every single day, that tomorrow is her birthday. Half fascinated, half in self-defense, he starts documenting her ritual with his video camera, and the two circle each other's damage — a strange, tentative connection built one repeated day at a time.
The experience
Hushed, melancholy, and hypnotic — it moves at the pace of someone convalescing, with images that turn rusting refineries and painted stairwells into something quietly beautiful. It's the kind of film that gets under your skin slowly and stays there.
The craft
Hideaki Anno shot it on early digital video in Ube, his own hometown, composing industrial decay with the same graphic precision he brought to animation. The casting is its own hall of mirrors: filmmaker Shunji Iwai plays the director, and Ayako Fujitani, who wrote the novella the film adapts, plays the woman — autobiography refracting in every direction.
Why it matters
Made under Studio Ghibli's boutique live-action imprint just after Neon Genesis Evangelion made Anno the most scrutinized figure in Japanese animation, it stands as his rawest self-portrait and a key to understanding everything he made afterward.
Reception & legacy: how Ritual was received, argued over, and remembered →
After Neon Genesis Evangelion made him the most scrutinized figure in Japanese animation, Hideaki Anno turned to live action for this hushed, self-lacerating experiment, produced under Studio Ghibli's boutique imprint Studio Kajino. An animation director hollowed out by success drifts through an industrial port city, where he meets a young woman who announces, every day, that tomorrow is her birthday — a ritual he begins to document with his camera, half in fascination, half in self-defense. Anno cast the filmmaker Shunji Iwai in the lead, a director playing a director for a director, and Ayako Fujitani, who wrote the novella the film adapts, as the woman; the layers of autobiography refract in every direction. Shot on early digital video in Ube, Anno's own hometown, the film treats rusting refineries and painted stairwells with the same compositional obsession he brought to animation — frames within frames, color fields, bodies isolated in industrial geometry. It is Evangelion's psychodrama replayed in flesh and daylight: a study of two damaged people testing whether a shared fiction can hold them upright.
Lines of influence
- Love & Pop (1998) — Anno's first live-action feature, adapting a novella on consumer digital video shot from hundreds of improbable clamped-camera angles — the DV-as-formal-experiment method Ritual directly extends.
- The End of Evangelion (1997) — Its live-action photographic inserts and raw self-lacerating breakdown of the burned-out author are the germ Ritual grows into a full flesh-and-blood psychodrama.
- Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert) (1964) — Externalizes a woman's psychic collapse by painting port machinery and industrial geometry into expressive, near-abstract color fields — Ritual's exact staging-plus-color grammar.
- Persona (1966) — Two women fused by a shared fiction, faces doubled and framed within frames while the film keeps exposing its own recording apparatus.
- 8½ (1963) — The creatively paralyzed director turning his own autobiography into performed psychodrama — the director-as-subject scaffold Anno adopts, casting a real director in the role.
- Woman in the Dunes (1964) — Japanese art-cinema abstraction of body and grain/texture into a closed loop of daily ritual entrapment, a lineage Ritual's birthday-loop conceit inherits.
- Mirror (Zerkalo) (1975) — Autobiography built from nested memory-images and long contemplative takes, licensing Ritual's diaristic, frames-within-frames confessional structure.
- Swallowtail Butterfly (1996) — Establishes Iwai's diffuse-light, handheld intimacy and drifting-outsider figures; in Ritual Iwai himself steps in front of the lens as the director-protagonist.
- Festen (The Celebration) (1998) — Dogme-era proof that grainy consumer DV could carry a serious, formally rigorous psychodrama rather than being a mere budget compromise.
- Timecode (2000) — Same-year embrace of digital video as a deliberate formal device, part of the 2000 art-cinema turn toward DV that Ritual belongs to.
- Perfect Blue (1997) — Dissolves reality and performance through relentless frames-within-frames, the shared-fiction-as-refuge/menace device Ritual works in live action.
- Millennium Actress (2001) — Cinema-about-cinema in which a woman's life is nested inside the frames of the films that filmed her — the frames-within-frames and shared-fiction craft, one year later.
- All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001) — Iwai's own DV feature carrying forward the digital-video melancholy and diffuse-light adolescence he brought to Ritual as its lead actor-director.
- Bright Future (2002) — Early-2000s Japanese DV art film that, like Ritual, stages alienation against an industrial waterfront using the texture of digital video itself.
- Vibrator (2003) — Handheld DV road psychodrama anchored entirely in a woman's fractured interior voice — the digital-intimacy, female-interiority mode Ritual helped open in Japan.
- Shin Godzilla (2016) — Anno's mature industrial geometry and obsessive frames-within-frames documentary compositing, the visual grammar first field-tested in Ritual's port-city compositions.
- Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time (2021) — Returns to live-action landscape footage and hometown/port autobiography as catharsis, closing the self-lacerating authorial loop Ritual opened.