In Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop, a young boy who calls himself Cherry (Ichikawa Somegorō) and a girl named Smile (Hana Sugisaki) find romance during their summer holidays. Or at least that’s what the brief synopsis leads you to believe, in this wonderfully soothing, uneventful little film.

Smile and Cherry are a variant of the typical teenagers one finds in mainstream anime: they’re the focus of the story, are omnipresent, yet they have a passive presence in the plot.

Smile — her real-name is Yuki — is a young social media star (in Japan, they’re called Idols) who is reticent about her buck-teeth and the corrective braces she’s placed over them. As a make-shift measure until her teeth are aligned, she wears a surgical mask which, even back in pre-Covid-19 times, was a regular practice in Japan.

Director Kyōhei Ishiguro, in a perceptive play on Smile’s circumstances, hides her self-consciousness behind a projection of her presumed personality — she smiles from behind the mask, and asks others to smile naturally with her online. She is a teenager who has to contend with a different type of peer pressure: she has to put on an act for the audience, while contending with her own issues.

Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop is a laid back piece of anime, concise, profound and relatable — like real life, where even the drama is often undramatic

Cherry, similar to any young lead in mangas and animes, shares a conventional trope of the two mediums: he’s a bright, dutiful son to humble, well-meaning parents, but has a withdrawn, introspective personality. To drown the distractions of the world — as he confesses, to avoid making eye-contact with people — he wears noise-cancelling headphones that aren’t playing music.

Despite his seemingly boring existence, Cherry is quite busy: his mind is overwhelmed with making up Haiku: short-form Japanese poetry of three or so phrases, that often has a cutting word (kireji, a structural necessity that builds, closes or breaks a stream of thought) and a seasonal reference (kigo).

As an amateur poet, Cherry mostly posts his work online in a social media group. It is picked up by one of his school friends, and is graffiti-painted over pillars, walls, the closed shutters of shops and the floor. It’s as if, even in the quiet, his thoughts are following him around like thought bubbles of a comic book, only much more apparent and tangible.

Throughout the film, Cherry chews over the formation of a Haiku — the eponymous title of the film. When he finally reads it out loud in the climax (as a recluse, he is scared of public-speaking), it is rough, sincere, somewhat amateurish and fresh.

Thematically, like Cherry’s Haiku, the film is a short-form exercise of self-effacing deliberation.

Ishiguro — also the co-writer with Dai Satō — is not out to make a grand, sweeping spectacle or a deep, message-laden lesson work of art that can be nitpicked for years ala some works of anime and manga. The film is surprisingly close to the spirit of Haikus; it’s laid back, concise, profound and relatable — like real life, where even the drama is often undramatic.

Cherry and Smile meet in the film’s only action-esque kinetic scene, when the latter’s friend flees with a pop-idol’s cut-out standee from a store in the mall (fandom in Japan and South Korea often goes to violent extremes). When the friend crashes into the two leads, Ishiguro wastes little time in taking down both characters’ respective shields: Cherry, his headphones knocked out, notices her buck teeth, and Smile, in a moment of uneasiness, runs away with his phone, which also has a small Haiku dictionary attached to it.

The two meet again in an awkward video chat, but the budding romance stays in the background. The inciting incident — a film term that adds a subplot to the story — has Cherry and Smile searching the whereabouts of a lost vinyl record of a senior citizen at the daycare centre at the mall.

The subplot, seemingly redundant, ties seamlessly into the ingenuous nature of the story and its overarching theme, yet stands as a polar opposite contrast to Ishiguro’s vibrant pop-art animation style.

The animation — a mix of hand-drawn characters and computer animated backdrops, clouds and vehicles — is stunning and consciously whimsical. There is astonishing finesse in sceneries and backgrounds, and an utter lack of it in long-shots with speaking and non-speaking characters (at times facial details are simplified to just points and strokes without details). Somehow this — and the wonderful score and soundtrack by Kensuke Ushio — adds to the subtext and texture of the underlying story.

During the 87-minute runtime of the film, Ishiguro finds nonchalant introspective moments that spell out Cherry and Smile’s personalities and self-doubt. Cherry and Smile, despite living in a small town, live in a world of natural juxtaposition.

Smile is a social media star in the middle of nowhere. Cherry, despite his reserved nature, has to fill in for his mom, who has a back injury, at the daycare centre.

Ishiguro and Satō have a passive-aggressive stance on the tangible nature of human connection and the subconscious and physical detachment today’s technology brings about.

At one point, when Cherry’s family talks about their impending shift to another city (it is a small point in the story), he simply says that he is fine with it, as long as he has his phone with him.

Technology is relied upon as an essential accessory — a contrivance that ties into normalcy. It doesn’t overpower the tactile quintessence of the setting (nature is prevalent in both Japan and Haiku), but it is also not without influence.

A scene in the mall, where Smile makes a social media post, is cut between the video from the front camera of her app — crammed with flying emoji hearts, a live-comment feed and a suffocating close-up — and the cutaway to a long-shot, where she stands out like an half-wit, with very few people around. The shots brilliantly convey the two jarring aspects of today’s reality, and the perception of how things really are, and what they’re made out to be.

Despite their deceptively simple natures, Cherry and Smile share commonalities in spirit: they are secluded, insecure youngsters who do not necessarily need — or are seeking — the right answers. Life can be artless, vibrant, pretentious and without airs — it can be a great many things, and nothing at all.

Streaming on Netflix, Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop is rated G and is suitable for ages 7 onwards

Published in Dawn, ICON, August 22nd, 2021