DIFF 2025 | Happyend: A Tender Tale Of Finding Political Consciousness

Neo Sora’s Happyend (2024) opens with the promise of grandeur. A rousing symphony (from an original score composed by Lia Ouyang Rusli) plays over a pitch black screen. Slowly, a text comes in small bold letters:  “The system that define people are crumbling in Tokyo. Something big is about to change.” For an uninitiated viewer, this opening promises an epic about the world that’s being quietly engineered by tech billionaires and the right-wing forces they’re in cahoots with.

But what follows for the next 113 minutes is a quiet, hopeful, and a rather tender look at the next generation amidst the rising techno-fascism of the present day. The film, set in near-future Tokyo, doesn’t indulge in making grand statements or wrapping itself with a cloud of pessimism that most filmmakers working today usually do (you can’t blame them either since the times are such that it’s easy to be carried away by the air of pessimism). Sora takes the hard path of informed optimism and paints a picture of youth that is daring, unapologetic, and sensitive. He sees hope in the next generation, or at least he chooses to. 

The film is about Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaka)— two high school friends who come from vastly different backgrounds but have grown up together. Their shared love for electronic music and risky pranks brings them together. One fine morning they pull a prank on their principal, who doesn’t take it lightly and labels it as a ‘terrorist attack’. He then decides to turn the school premise into a modern panopticon by installing a surveillance system that’ll keep an eye on the kids all the time. The kids are constantly watched and disciplined on a massive screen hung at the centre of the school.

Yuta and Kou react to this change differently. While Yuta is only focused on listening to music and hanging out with his friends, Kou finds a new friend who draws him out of his bubble and into the difficult truths surrounding him. This puts their friendship to test as both of them start veering towards different directions. All this unfolds against the backdrop of an authoritative government using the rhetoric of a ‘once in a lifetime deadly earthquake’ to scare people, make amendments to the laws, and bring a state of emergency to get full control of the state (rings a bell, doesn’t it!).

The contrast between the authoritarianism and surveillance practised by the government outside and the quiet rebellion of students against such forces inside their school is what gives the film a hopeful air. The film thus turns protest into an immediate and tangible thing rather than a grand idea. For most of us, the idea of protest evokes grandeur—sit-in protests, barricades, banners, a great number of dissenters and an even greater number of police, smoke grenades, and a clash between the people and the state. But dissent isn’t only meant to happen at such a scale.

What this kind of imagery does is turn activism or dissent into a thing you practise on the street occasionally, and not in your daily life. This is how many, who can clearly see the injustices committed by the state or police, easily overlook the smaller ones unfolding around them—

in their workplaces, schools, homes, and social circles. The epidemic of ‘left-wing men’ who regularly join protests and take part in all sorts of discussion around injustice, but don't lift even a finger at home is a symptom of this particular mentality (I’ve also been guilty of this). 

By making a school and a bunch of teenagers the centre of his story and politics, Sora tries to reinforce this idea of dissent being something that has to be practised in our daily lives. Through Kou’s journey of becoming more aware of the world he’s growing up in, Sora shows how politics is not only in larger-than-life gestures, but also in small moments of resistance. 

The film also makes it a point to show how class plays an important role in bringing such awareness. An important reason why Kou is inclined towards resistance is because he is the son of Korean immigrant parents. His mother runs a small joint which has paid for their little life in Tokyo. But even after being there for decades, they are still seen as ‘outsiders’. Modern technology in the film allows Tokyo police to scan anyone’s face with their phones and look up all their information. This also allows them to scan immigrants and ask for an identity card that’s issued to them by the government (again rings a bell, doesn’t it?). This makes way for constant harassment and checking. It makes sense then that Kou, who must’ve grown up with all this around him, would one day be able to see things for what they are. 

On the other hand, his best friend Yuta comes from an upper class family. He’s protected from whatever’s happening around him and  can therefore dream of chasing music as a career. For Kou, the urgency of survival leaves little room for dreams. When we’re very young, these differences are veiled by innocence and naivety. But as we start to grow older, these cracks begin to get bigger and bigger until they stand before us like a living, breathing thing. Realising that your life isn’t quite like your friends’ is a ‘canon event’ in all of our lives. It turns your perspective upside down. Kou goes through this change over the course of the film and begins to look at Yuta with contempt. He is shocked at how indifferent his friend can be towards things that directly affect all of them. He even begins to wonder that if they both had been complete strangers and met now, would they even be friends. This pushes both of them way further from each other. 

This was the part that resonated with me the most. I remember the exact moment when this illusion was broken for me. It was in 2016, and I was in 10th grade, closely following the telecast of the infamous JNU incident when a bunch of students, including Umar Khalid and the then JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar were arrested on sedition charges for participating in a protest against capital punishment. These students, who were practising their right to protest, were maligned on national television.

There were loud debates, countless interviews, long articles, and a lot of talk around the right to protest, freedom of speech, ‘anti-national’ activities and what not. I had read about all these words in school but it was taught to us in mechanical terms, completely devoid of any social or political context. For the first time, I saw what those words really meant. That moment pushed me to look deeper into the world around me. I had come out of my bubble. But it wasn’t the case with many of my classmates or friends. I began to notice a gap between how I saw the world and how they did, influenced by noisy news anchors and their own biases. The dissonance that Kou feels for Yuta is a little too familiar for me. 

But Happyend is not content with being just about that. It also shows a glimpse of the growing xenophobia and fights it quietly by having characters from different nationalities take centre stage in the film. It’s truly rare to see this kind of diversity in a Japanese film. These little choices thus elevate the film from being just another coming-of-age tale. 

It’s important to have stories of hope in dark times. It gives many the strength to imagine a kinder future that allows everyone a life of dignity. Such stories also act as small doses of reassurance that it's worth it. It’s worth it to resist—in any capacity whatsoever—just so we can have it slightly better than yesterday. It’s worth it to keep going against all odds. It’s worth it to speak against the tiniest injustice. It’s worth it, even if you are greatly outnumbered by the state forces. No effort goes in vain.