Shown @ Filmhouse, Edinburgh, Sun 19 Oct only
Yauhiro Yoshiura /Japan / 2010 / 106 minutes
Yauhiro Yoshiura is a director well known among Scotland Loves Anime regulars, with both the 2013 Judges and Audience Awards having gone to his beloved anime, Patema Inverted. Time of Eve (Eve no Jikan) was his previous movie – released in 2010 and not eligible for this year’s Judges Award, it nevertheless screens to a packed out audience at the Filmhouse cinema in Edinburgh.
The film is set a near future Japanese city, where human like androids work as assistants to the population. A Robot Ethics Committee has drawn up a set of rules to ensure the servants respect their masters; however, a young student named Rikuo stumbles upon a coffee shop called ‘The Time of Eve’, where robots and humans are viewed as one and the same. The café serves as a haven for equality and causes the student to ask questions about the purpose of the robots and the way they are treated.
As a piece of android sci-fi, Time of Eve has more in common with Steven Spielberg’s A.I. than it does with Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, but what all these movies have in common are their questions of the ethics and egalitarianism surrounding robots as they begin to take on human like traits and personalities. At times during the movie we see signposts stating ‘No Robots’, echoing situations such as apartheid and showing that this anime is more than just a light hearted and beautifully drawn comedy. There is a strong message and a lot of heart within the film, making it endearing and interesting to discover.
Time of Eve was originally released as a series of online shorts before a crowd funding campaign was initiated to bring these together as a feature length anime. This fact is not reflected in the movie, with the final film looking and feeling like a coherent and fully realised whole and never like a series of vignettes.
The cups and plates in the Time of Eve café feature a slogan: ‘Are you enjoying the time of EVE?’ Judging by the warm and enthusiastic reception the film receives from its eager Edinburgh audience, the answer to that question is a definite ‘yes’.