Yoshiaki Nishimura Interview for “Imaginary”: Inspired by a Tender Moment Between Father and Daughter

The Imaginary is a new movie on Netflix, brought to you by Studio Ponoc. Amanda is a young girl who has an imaginary friend in Rudger, but what happens when a man who doesn’t want to grow up tries to take Rudger away from her?

Ahead of the film’s release (based on the book of the same name), I sat down with writer Yoshiaki Nishimura to talk about it. Through a translator, we had an in-depth discussion about the film’s inspiration, and he told me that his daughter reminded him how a child’s imagination can sometimes be far more powerful than an adult’s.

“When I created the film, I thought about three things. One of them, the one you just mentioned, is memories and remembering things,” he said. “When my daughter was three years old, we would walk from our house to the shrine. It’s something that might take a minute for an adult, but for a child, it takes ten minutes.”

He then talked about his thoughts on the film and how his daughter inspired him by picking something up on their walk together. “My daughter had just started walking, but she had something in her hands, and then she opened her hand and found a little tiny flower that was like, to her, a mountain full of flowers. I was shocked. I stood up, looked down the street and I didn’t see any flowers.”

But he said his daughter’s imagination helped him understand the film. “For my daughter, the asphalt, the street, it was like a flower garden. So I thought this story could become a film. It’s not like they don’t exist, but adults, the speed of walking and the height of the view, you just don’t see. So I think it would be a wonderful thing if we could connect that memory and the fact that we can still see these things.”

A villain who won’t grow up

It is really interesting to look at our recent selection of films about imaginary friends. We had Imaginarywhich is a horror movie about an imaginary friend who wants revenge for being abandoned. Then came IFwhich is about imaginary friends trying to find a new place in the world. The ImaginaryIt’s a kind of lesson for all of us about growing up while keeping our imaginations alive. We just don’t have to resort to childish antics to do so.

When I brought up the differences between these films, Nishimura replied that he had heard of these other films but that he was trying to “create a work that uses imagination to revisit the past.” Nishimura pointed out that pieces of memory tend to become nostalgic, but he wanted this film to be different because it is aimed at children.

“As we create work for children, we thought about what imagination is that looks into the future. In reality, children create their own secret world when they are young. Sometimes this world is joyful, fun, but sometimes it contains something frightening.” This is how Mr. Bunting (Jeremy Swift) was born.

Mr. Bunting is a man who clung to his imaginary friend and refused to grow up. “In this world, the scary thing is Mr. Bunting. That’s something very real to children. There are a lot of scary things that are described in the original story, but we could have taken out all of those scary things, but we also had to keep that scary part because we didn’t want to lie to the children,” Nishimura said.

“We created this piece hoping that children have the power to overcome sadness, difficult things, scary things. That’s why we wanted to include these scary things, Mr. Bunting and this scary little girl next to him. I wanted them to kind of work as a metaphor, because I was thinking about what, when children grow up, is always following them and creeping up behind them. I was always thinking about that, and they’re kind of a metaphor for that existence.”

The Imaginary is on Netflix now!