AllMovie

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a 2022 animated anthology drama film written, produced, directed and composed by Pierre Földes. An international co-production of Canada, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, the film, set in Tokyo shortly after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, adapts six short stories from three collections by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, The Elephant Vanishes and After the Quake, focusing on a bank employee who is enlisted by a talking frog to assist him in saving the city from destruction by a giant subterranean worm. To create a version of 3D motion capture animation within a 2D film, Földes filmed his entire screenplay as a live-action "reference" performance, following which the animators replaced the actors' heads with 3D models and then traced and animated their facial expressions. The voice cast includes Marcello Arroyo, Michael Czyz, Zag Dorison, Földes, Jesse Noah Gruman, Katharine King So, John Vamvas, Nadia Verrucci and Shoshana Wilder.