This blog post explores the strangeness and fantastical elements hidden behind everyday life, examining how film twists the familiar world to reveal a new sense of reality.
Fantasy as a Genre
The English word “fantasy” originates from the Greek “phantasia,” which implies the concept of “visible”—meaning something previously unseen becomes revealed. This “phantasia” evolved into the French ‘fantaisie’ and the English “fantasy,” inherently possessing the quality of making the unseen visible. Where realism emphasizes monistic and absolute characteristics, the fantastic reveals pluralistic and relative traits. Unlike realism’s tendency to capture life’s appearance flatly, fantasy maintains an attitude that seeks to grasp the world more three-dimensionally and in balance. In other words, fantasy’s characteristic lies in visualizing not only the visible but also the invisible realm, contrasting with realism in this regard.
Within reality, humans constantly question what lies beyond it. The desire to resolve dissatisfaction with reality naturally turns toward the unreal, and fantasy, which deals with these unreal elements, has long functioned as a mechanism compensating for real-world discontent. Indeed, narratives using fantasy as their subject matter have existed since ancient times. From the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh,’ which depicts defeating monsters and seeking immortality in distant lands, to the ancient Greek hero tale ‘Ulysses,’ and up to the recent ‘Harry Potter’ series, humanity has continuously imagined and expanded unrealistic worlds.
Readers encountering such unrealistic texts naturally make two judgments. Tzvetan Todorov defines a text as ‘the uncanny’ when a character, despite knowing only natural laws, concludes that a ‘supernatural’ event can be explained naturally. Conversely, if the event is judged to be utterly impossible within the natural order, it belongs to the ‘marvelous’. And when both judgments are suspended, and the reader hesitates—that very state of hesitation is what Todorov defined as ‘fantasy’.
‘The Lord of the Rings’ is often cited as a prime example of ‘the marvelous’. In ‘The Lord of the Rings’, not only the characters but also the audience accept the otherworldly realm of ‘Middle-earth’ with almost no hesitation. Events occurring in this otherworld belong to a separate dimension, spatially and temporally distinct from reality, and culturally, they are not placed in direct opposition to the normal, everyday world. Consequently, the text does not demand factuality or historical authenticity from the reader, allowing the reader to accept this otherworld—devoid of any connection to this world—without significant resistance.
Conversely, in texts possessing ‘fantasticity,’ both readers and characters hesitate in the face of unrealistic events. Todorov uses precisely this hesitation as the core criterion to distinguish fantasticity from the ‘marvelous,’ analyzing it through three elements. First, the text must lead the reader to accept the characters’ world as a real human world, causing hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations for events. Second, the characters themselves must experience this hesitation, through which the reader identifies with them. This hesitation is represented within the text and becomes a central theme of the work itself. Third, readers are required to adopt a specific attitude toward the text, one that rejects poetic or allegorical interpretations.
The film ‘Turtles Are Surprisingly Fast Swimmers’ is a work possessing the genre characteristics of fantasy, specifically ‘fantasy film’. This paper aims to analyze ‘Turtles Are Surprisingly Fast Swimmers’ in light of the criteria for ‘fantasticity’ proposed by Todorov.
Plot Analysis of ‘Turtles Are Surprisingly Fast Swimmers’
‘Turtles Are Surprisingly Fast Swimmers’ adopts the narrative structure of an adventure tale, a format frequently found in fantasy films. Analyzing this work using the six-step framework of narrative structure condensed by Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp yields the following:
Preparation Stage
The protagonist, Suzume, is a housewife who has lived an utterly ordinary life. After an ordinary school life, she married ordinarily and became an ordinary housewife. Her daily routine is a monotonous repetition of nothing but housework and feeding her turtle every day. She gradually grows bored with this extremely ordinary life.
Threat Stage
From the moment a friend calls inviting her to lunch, small cracks begin to appear in Suzume’s stable routine. The plumber she calls to unclog her balcony drain spouts incomprehensible nonsense and argues with her. Feeling upset, Suzume heads to the beauty salon to lift her spirits, but the stylist confuses her with inexplicable behavior and speech. In town, she encounters the owner of a monaka shop who speaks in a peculiar “~cho?” style. While climbing stairs, a fruit vendor drops produce from above, showering Suzume in a mishap. Her ordinary life gradually takes on an unfamiliar, alien aura.
The Relocation Phase
As she ducks to avoid the fruit, Suzume accidentally spots an advertisement for ‘Spy Recruitment’. Drawn by curiosity, she finds the location listed and is unexpectedly selected as a spy simply because she is ‘ordinary’. She is even handed 5 million yen as operational funds.
As a spy, Suzume is assigned a special mission: ‘undercover work requiring the most ordinary life possible.’ She develops an obsessive sense of duty, believing she must remain invisible to anyone’s gaze—whether tossing her blankets, shopping for groceries, or even ordering food at a restaurant. She strives harder than ever to embody ‘ordinariness.’ During this time, she discovers that other spies, living in plain sight just like her, exist throughout the town.
Conflict Phase
When a friend wins a travel prize, Suzume accompanies him to a festival in a seaside town. However, during this trip, a body is discovered in the ocean, sparking a major escalation of conflict. Suspecting the incident is the work of spies, the Public Security Bureau begins tracking them down, forcing the spies into a game of hide-and-seek to evade capture. Just as the spies are cornered, a new order arrives from an unknown ‘higher-up’: deploy to a place called ‘Hell’.
Homecoming Phase
All the spies who had been undercover leave the village, but Suzume receives a special instruction from the higher-ups: “Stay in the village.” This means Suzume no longer needs to carry out her ‘ordinary undercover life’. She sheds her ‘spy’ identity and returns to her daily life as a ‘housewife’.
Recognition Phase
Though she is no longer a spy, Suzume’s life is not the same as before. Having grown through her brief adventure as a spy, her daily life is no longer a dull repetition but a world filled with new possibilities. Before becoming a spy, she was merely a timid, ordinary housewife. But one day, she discovers and rescues the son of an old senior floating down the river, instantly becoming the village hero. For this act, she receives a reward from the senior’s wife, and soon after, she sets off to Paris to rescue a friend who has been falsely accused and imprisoned. Now, Suzume has become someone who actively seeks out thrilling adventures.
The Surrealism and Subversion of Reality in ‘Turtles Are Surprisingly Fast Swimmers’
Fantasy naturally contrasts with realism in its treatment of unrealistic events. However, its surrealism doesn’t merely present a reality-detached unreality. Rather, it fundamentally questions the very nature of reality itself, raising the question of whether the ‘reality’ we have taken for granted truly exists.
‘Turtles Are Surprisingly Fast Swimmers’ appears to begin with the simple desire of a housewife to escape her ordinary daily life. The protagonist, Suzume, stands in the midst of a life that is not just ordinary, but mediocre. Her husband cherishes their pet turtle more than his own well-being, and Suzume’s days are confined to the monotonous, numbing repetition of housework and routine chores. This is the entirety of her life.
Yet the moment she becomes a spy tasked with the paradoxical mission of ‘living ordinarily while undercover,’ that ordinary daily existence ceases to be ordinary. Suzume suddenly begins to question actions she had performed unconsciously until now. The more effort she puts into appearing ordinary, the more even the trivial, everyday acts she once passed over without thought begin to take on special meaning. “What does it mean to shake out the futon ordinarily?” “What should an ordinary housewife’s grocery shopping look like?” she asks herself. Yet the ‘ordinariness’ that once felt dull transforms into an unfamiliar, strange world after becoming a spy.
As she continues her spy activities, Suzume realizes that even the townspeople, who had blended naturally into her daily life, are no longer ‘ordinary people’. The owner of the ramen shop who made mediocre-tasting ramen was actually a ramen master. That “just-right taste for a casual stop” he deliberately created was the result of meticulous calculation. The owner of the tofu shop next to the monaka shop was a former sniper. He often closed his shop citing overseas travel, but the reality was he was traveling abroad for assassination side jobs. Kaku-senpai, Suzume’s first love from her school days, still appears as dashing as ever. But the moment he suddenly rips off his wig, unable to bear the sweltering heat, Suzume’s long-held illusion shatters instantly. Even the seemingly most ordinary person, the bench grandmother who sat quietly every day feeding ants, is revealed to be a spy guarding the gate leading to ‘Hell’.
Faced with reality being overturned piece by piece like this, Suzume gradually descends into confusion. Barely ten days into being a spy, she looks at the suddenly chaotic world around her and becomes consumed by the fundamental question: “What on earth is happening?” The audience, too, shares this same doubt through Suzume’s eyes. “Does the ordinary normality of daily life truly exist?”
Until the very end of the film, Suzume doesn’t even know which country’s spy she is. Without understanding the purpose of her espionage activities, she merely carries out orders from an unknown organization called ‘Headquarters’. Her attempts to uncover Headquarters’ true identity are blocked each time, and ultimately, when all the spies are summoned by Headquarters to head to ‘Hell’, Suzume is left alone at the boundary. Standing on the borderline between reality and unreality, she becomes an entity that belongs fully to neither.
While the film clearly adopts a binary opposition structure, it never explicitly states which side is good and which is evil. Audiences typically perceive the protagonist as belonging to the side of good, but the image of ‘spy’—Suzume’s profession—is somewhat ambiguous to be considered inherently good. Conversely, the ‘Public Security’ officers, who oppose the spies, appear closer to the good side as they are a government-affiliated organization existing for national security. However, their actions—such as forcibly entering a house suspected to be a spy’s residence during a search, or spending time chatting idly without much concern for security issues—actually undermine their legitimacy. Conversely, the spies, though operating covertly, appear closer to the side of good precisely because they faithfully carry out the missions assigned to them.
‘Turtles Are Surprisingly Fast Swimmers’ shakes the foundation of reality not by providing the audience with simple excitement or fear through unrealistic devices, but by alienating the framework of reality perception. In a world believed to be governed by rationality and logical laws, we unquestioningly accept the familiar things embedded in our daily lives. No, we live entangled in past memories and future ideals, failing to even properly recognize the fact of familiarity, forgetting the very meaning of the present moment. The film probes these gaps in our perception of reality, revealing another face of ‘reality’ and further questioning whether what we have believed to be reality truly exists. Through this, it guides the audience to reconsider the present and reality they inhabit.
In closing
The somewhat peculiar title ‘Turtles Are Surprisingly Fast Swimmers’ seems to imply a message: even within an ordinary, seemingly dull daily life, another unknown world may be hidden. By subverting an extremely ordinary character into an extraordinary one, the film decontextualizes the audience’s familiar notions of everyday life, compelling them to reexamine it. Through this, viewers realize that even within the mundane, they can dream and discover fantasy.
