This blog post examines how 「Turtles Swim Faster Than Expected」 uses fantastical elements to subvert the ordinary and the concept of reality, making them feel unfamiliar, through an analysis of the film’s narrative and characters.
Fantasy as a Genre
The English word “fantasy” originates from the Greek “phantasia.” Phantasia signifies the revelation of the previously unseen, or in other words, “to make visible.” This phantasia evolved through the French ‘fantaisie’ into the English “fantasy.” If realism possesses monistic and absolute characteristics, then the fantastic possesses pluralistic and relative characteristics. Rather than attempting to view life’s forms flatly like realism, fantasy adopts an attitude that seeks to grasp it more three-dimensionally and in balance. Fantasy’s unique characteristic lies not merely in reproducing what is visible, but in making even the invisible visible.
Humans in reality constantly question what is not real. The desire to resolve dissatisfaction with reality inevitably turns toward the unreal, and in this context, fantasy—which deals with the unreal—has long functioned as a device to alleviate dissatisfaction with reality.
Narratives borrowing fantasy as their subject matter have existed since ancient times. From the ancient myth “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” a tale of defeating monsters and seeking immortality in distant lands, to the ancient Greek hero’s tale “Ulysses,” and up to the relatively recent “Harry Potter” series, humans have continuously imagined unrealistic things and developed them into narratives.
Faced with such unrealistic texts, readers make two judgments. Tzvetan Todorov defines that when faced with an event that appears ‘supernatural,’ a person who knows only the laws of nature concludes it is naturally experiential, the story becomes ‘terrifying.’ Conversely, if one judges it to be something impossible to experience within the natural order, the story becomes ‘wonderful.’ He saw the hesitation that occurs while this final judgment is suspended as precisely what constitutes ‘fantasy’.
A prime example of the ‘marvelous’ is The Lord of the Rings. In The Lord of the Rings, not only the characters but also the audience accept the otherworldly realm of ‘Middle-earth’ without any hesitation. The events unfolding in this world occur in another realm spatially and temporally separated from reality. That is, since this otherworld is not placed in opposition to a culturally normal reality, it does not demand factuality or historical authenticity from the reader encountering the text in the first place. As a result, the reader naturally accepts this otherworld, devoid of any connection to this world, without hesitation.
Conversely, in texts possessing ‘fantasticity,’ both readers and characters hesitate in the face of unrealistic events. Todorov distinguishes fantasticity from ‘the marvelous’ through this core concept of ‘hesitation,’ analyzing it into three elements. The first element is the attitude the text adopts toward the reader. A text possessing the fantastic induces the reader to perceive the characters’ world as the real world inhabited by actual humans, while simultaneously causing the reader to hesitate between natural and supernatural explanations for the events that occur. The second element is that at least one character within the text must experience this hesitation. This allows the reader to identify with the character, and this hesitation is represented within the text, functioning as one of the work’s primary themes. Finally, the third element is the attitude the reader takes toward the text. The reader rejects the attitude of treating the work as an object for poetic or semantic interpretation.
「Turtles Swim Faster Than Expected」 is a work that distinctly possesses the genre characteristics of fantasy, specifically ‘fantasy film’. This paper aims to analyze 「Turtles Swim Faster Than Expected」 based on Todorov’s criteria for ‘fantasticity’.
Plot Analysis of 「Turtles Swim Faster Than Expected」
「Turtles Swim Faster Than Expected」 adopts the adventure narrative plot structure commonly found in fantasy films. Analyzing the film according to Vladimir Propp’s six-stage narrative structure, condensed from his research on Russian folktales, yields the following:
Exposition
The protagonist, Suzume, is an ordinary housewife who has led an utterly unremarkable life. Having gone through an ordinary school life and an ordinary marriage, her existence as an ordinary housewife is filled with repetitive daily routines devoid of special events, consisting mainly of housework and feeding her pet turtle every day. Within this routine, Suzume gradually begins to feel boredom.
Threat Stage
A crack begins to form in Suzume’s ordinary life when she receives a call from a friend inviting her to lunch. The repairman she calls to fix a clogged drain on her balcony spouts incomprehensible nonsense, leading to an argument with Suzume. Feeling upset, she visits a hair salon for a perm to lift her spirits. However, the stylist there also confuses her with baffling behavior and remarks. Next, in town, she encounters the owner of a monaka shop who uses a strange speech pattern ending in “~cho?” Then, while climbing stairs, she experiences an incident where fruit accidentally spilled by a fruit vendor above rains down on her.
The Move
As she ducks down on the stairs to avoid the fruit, Suzume accidentally discovers an advertisement for ‘Spy Recruitment’. Finding the location listed in the ad, she is selected as a spy solely because she is “extremely ordinary” and receives 5 million yen as operational funds.
Suzume’s mission as a spy is to “live undercover as ordinarily as possible.” She develops a sense of mission: she must remain unnoticed by anyone, even when shaking out her futon, shopping for groceries, or ordering food at a restaurant. As a result, she consciously strives to live an even more ‘ordinary daily life’ than before, and discovers that spies like herself, living inconspicuously and undercover, exist throughout the town.
Conflict Stage
When a friend wins a travel prize, Suzume goes with her to a festival in a seaside town. However, the discovery of a corpse in the sea plunges the story into full-blown conflict. Believing the corpse is the work of a spy, the Public Security Bureau begins hunting them down. In response, a cat-and-mouse chase ensues as the spies flee to evade the Bureau. As the spies are gradually cornered, an order comes down from an unknown ‘higher-up’ to deploy to a place called ‘Hell’.
Homecoming Stage
All the spies who were undercover leave the town, but Suzume remains behind alone, following the higher-up’s orders.
Consequently, she no longer needs to carry out her ‘ordinary life undercover’ mission. The ‘spy’ she once was returns to being a ‘housewife’.
Recognition Phase
Though Suzume is no longer a spy, her daily life takes on a completely different meaning. Having grown through her adventures as a spy, her everyday existence is no longer a space of boredom but a world of adventure. Whereas the Suzume before becoming a spy was timid and remained an ordinary housewife, she now witnesses the son of her high school first love being swept away in a river, rescues him, and suddenly gains attention. Receiving a reward from the senior’s wife for this act, she personally travels to Paris to rescue a friend who has been falsely accused and imprisoned. Now, Suzume becomes someone who seeks out things that make her heart race, not tasks assigned by others.
The Surrealism and Subversion of Reality in 「Turtles Swim Faster Than Expected」
Fantasy naturally contrasts with realism in that it deals with unrealistic events. However, the surrealism of fantasy does not merely present an unreal world disconnected from reality. Rather, it questions the very nature of reality itself, raising the fundamental doubt: ‘Does reality even exist?’
「Turtles Swim Faster Than Expected」begins like the travelogue of a housewife dreaming of escape from an ordinary life. The protagonist, Suzume, lives a life so ordinary it borders on mediocrity. Her daily routine consists of a husband who cares more for the turtle he keeps than for her own well-being, and tediously repetitive, numbing tasks.
However, when she becomes a spy tasked with “living an ordinary life in hiding,” her previously ordinary routine ceases to remain ordinary. Suzume begins to question the actions she had unconsciously repeated. The harder she strives to be ordinary, the more she finds meaning in every trivial act of daily life she once took for granted. She asks herself questions like, ‘What does it mean to make the bed ordinarily?’ or ‘What does an ordinary housewife’s grocery shopping look like?’ Yet the ‘ordinariness’ that once felt so familiar it was boring transforms into an unfamiliar and unstable concept after she becomes a spy.
Through her spy activities, Suzume comes to realize that the townspeople she once passed by without a second thought weren’t simply ‘ordinary people’ either, but rather ‘people living while masking their ordinariness’. The owner of the ramen shop, known for its mediocre-tasting noodles, is actually a ramen master. His deliberately ambiguous flavor is the result of meticulous effort to achieve “a taste perfect for when you happen to drop by, a taste for when you just happen to eat it.” The owner of the tofu shop next to the monaka store is a former sniper. Every day he closes his shop under the pretense of traveling abroad, he is actually carrying out assassination side jobs. Kaku-senpai, Suzume’s first love from her school days, still appears before her looking as handsome as ever. But the moment he takes off his wig, unable to bear the heat, the illusion she cherished shatters completely. Even the bench lady, whom Suzume considered the most ordinary person—the one who sat on the bench every day feeding ants—was a spy serving as a gatekeeper guarding the door to ‘Hell’.
As the reality she had unquestioningly accepted is revealed piece by piece, Suzume plunges into deep confusion. Observing her surroundings rapidly becoming chaotic just ten days after becoming a spy, she asks herself, ‘What on earth is happening?’ And this question is directly transferred to the audience watching Suzume. ‘Does the ordinary nature of everyday life truly exist?’
Even by the film’s end, Suzume remains unaware of which country she spies for or the purpose behind her existence as a spy. She merely receives orders from an unknown organization called “the higher-ups” and carries them out; any attempt to uncover the group’s true nature is repeatedly blocked. Even when all the other spies, except her, are summoned by the higher-ups and head toward “hell,” Suzume remains standing on the boundary between unreality and reality, unable to fully belong to either side.
While the film adopts a binary opposition structure, it never clearly presents which side is good and which is evil. Typically, audiences view the protagonist from a position of good, but her profession as a ‘spy’ is an uncomfortable one to place on the side of good. Conversely, the ‘Public Security’ opposing the spies, as a government-affiliated organization tasked with safeguarding national security, appears closer to the side of good. However, scenes like the security forces illegally entering a space suspected to be a spy’s hideout during a search, or wasting time with pointless jokes while showing little interest in national security otherwise, raise the question: might the spies, diligently carrying out their duties, actually occupy the more ethical position?
「Turtles Swim Faster Than Expected」 is not a film that offers audiences mere excitement or fear through unreality. Rather, this work takes our perception of reality as its starting point, rendering it unfamiliar, and in the process, erodes the realm of reality from within. In a world seemingly governed by rational, logical laws, we seldom question the familiar things surrounding us. Furthermore, we live chasing past memories and future expectations, failing to even recognize them as ‘familiar things,’ forgetting the meaning of the present—the very moment we are actually living—that exists between them. The film relentlessly probes these gaps in our perception of reality, simultaneously recreating the other side of ‘reality’ and posing the question: do the things we have believed to be ‘reality’ truly exist? It compels the audience to reconsider the present and reality itself.
In closing
The enigmatic title 「Turtles Swim Faster Than Expected」 implies that even within seemingly ordinary and mundane daily life, another unknown world may be hidden. By subverting an extremely ordinary character into an extraordinary one, the film decontextualizes the audience’s fixed notions about the everyday, offering a fresh perspective to reconsider it. Furthermore, through this subversion, it reveals the possibility that even within the mundane, one can dream of fantasy.
