JOSEE, THE TIGER, AND THE FISH (Japan, 2003)
Directed by: Isshin Inudo
Starring: Satoshi Tsumabuki, Chizuru Ikewaki, Juri Veno

Is Japan the only country on earth capable of making movies about the physically handicapped that aren’t sappy, sentimental piles of mush? Josee, the Tiger and the Fish wheels into action when college student, Tsuneo (Satoshi Tsumabuki), hears rumors at his job about a crazy old lady who pushes a baby carriage around town. No one knows what’s in the carriage, but speculations range from money to drugs. However, it’s Tsuneo who discovers that what’s in the carriage is the old woman’s secret shame: her granddaughter, Josee (Chizuru Ikewaki), who has cerebral palsy. Slowly, Tsuneo’s life gets wrapped up in the housebound world of the old woman and her scrappy, knife-wielding daughter.

Josee is an actual person, not an object of pity, and her sense of self and overwhelming confidence is an antidote to Tsuneo’s spineless, weak-willed college existence. She may be a pain in the butt, trapped in her house by her grandma who doesn’t want anyone to know she’s alive, but she’s the most fully alive person that he knows. 

A chronicle of the brief friendship between Tsuneo and Josee, JTF, doesn’t pull any punches in depicting that it’s not a Hollywood walk in the park to take up with someone who can’t walk, but at the same time it refuses to define Josee by her challenges. She’s a human being, not a life lesson, and not a diagnosis. This movie has a lot more confidence in the average human being than is currently trendy, but it comes by that optimism honestly. Bittersweet, funny, and deeply human, JTF is the kind of movie where you come out feeling a lot better about humanity than when you came in.