I Want to Eat Your Pancreas - 01/17/2020

A film is doing something right if it can start off with a character's funeral and another character saying what his final message to her was and then still make you cry when she dies anyway. I Want to Eat Your Pancreas is a story about the relationship that forms between a boy that shuts himself off from other people and a girl with a terminal illness. I find it kind of similar to something like Your Lie in April, where a boy with some mental hangups meets a girl who feels wild and energetic and helps turn his world upside-down for the better. But Pancreas benefits from being very focused. There really isn't anything to distract from Sakura and Haruki and the impact they have on each other. We first see Sakura's impact on Haruki. He learns how to care about her and becomes more open to reach out to others. The last thing that happens in the movie is Haruki reaching out to Sakura's friend after her death and then insisting that they should become friends. I think this is important because where before he just assumed everyone hated him, he now sees his own value as a person because Sakura saw it first and helped him learn to see it on his own. We see Haruki's impact on Sakura a bit throughout the movie, but it really becomes clear through the journal that we hear from after she dies. We know about how much she values the normalcy that Haruki is able to treat her with despite the looming idea of her death, but we also see how she admires his inner strength and the way he forges his own identity without needing anyone else. The strange title comes from an old myth that basically says that if a body's organ is sick, you can get better by eating that same organ. But it also says that that would allow the person whose organ you ate to live on inside you. So when these characters say this to each other, they're saying that they want to have the best parts of them live on inside them.

I also have to write about the actually reveal of Sakura's death because it hit me hard. That fact that Sakura dies is not a twist or a surprise. Like I said, the movie opens with her funeral. They're very up front about that. But I think the transparency about that fact leads you to believe that it will happen neatly with everyone having proper closure and all will be well. But that would be pretty boring and it isn't what happens at all. Instead of gradually succumbing to her illness, Sakura gets murdered right after being discharged from a hospital stay. When I saw that Haruki was typing the message that we know from the beginning was the last thing he sent to her, I sat up on my couch saying "No, that can't be it. Not now." It's not the way she dies that's important, but how sudden and jarring it is. Like Haruki, we're not prepared and it blindsides us. Thankfully that closure does come through the journal "Living with Dying" and Haruki's talk with Sakura's mom who tells him more about the affect that he had on her before she died. A lot of tears were shed from her death pretty much until it was over.

Verdict: a sad but beautiful story about the effect that people can have on each other and how people can make us want to be better.