Here in Japan, we’re finally emerging from a brutally hot summer. But after watching the new anime film “Tatami Time Machine Blues,” I’m already feeling a pang of nostalgia for those sweaty summer days.
The film, currently being released in episodic form on Disney+, reunites the characters of Tomihiko Morimi’s 2004 novel “The Tatami Galaxy” and its 2010 anime adaptation. That novel-turned-anime centered around an unnamed university student in Kyoto (voiced by Shintaro Asanuma) who rues the day he met fellow student and frenemy Ozu (Hiroyuki Yoshino), a demon-like figure the protagonist blames for ruining what surely would have otherwise been a “rose-colored campus life.” The surreal comedy series used the concept of parallel universes to explore the idea of free will versus destiny and to introduce a ragtag group of slackers who all hang around a dormitory on the verge of collapse.
Over a decade later, “Tatami Time Machine Blues” brings us right back to that rickety Kyoto dorm and its offbeat denizens. This time, the story centers on the production of a student film helmed by Akashi, the protagonist’s love interest (Maaya Sakamoto), shot in the middle of a boiling Kyoto summer. The cast and crew’s only relief from the heat comes when they retreat to the protagonist’s room, which houses the dorm’s lone air conditioner — that is, until Ozu knocks a bottle of Coca-Cola onto the remote control. Soon after, the crew finds a time machine built out of a tatami mat and decides to go back in time one day to retrieve the undamaged remote. As you might imagine, antics ensue.