Six loosely linked lives collide with a talking frog and a coming earthquake in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a hand-drawn adaptation pulling from Haruki Murakami's short fiction.
What is Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman about?
The film weaves together an unambitious bank employee, his frustrated wife, an accountant working through a personal crisis, and a handful of other Tokyo residents whose ordinary routines are quietly unraveling. A missing cat sets one thread moving; a looming earthquake ties them all together as a shared, ominous backdrop; and a giant, oddly persuasive frog shows up to nudge one man toward a task far bigger than himself. Rather than one continuous plot, the film moves between these overlapping lives, letting Murakami's blend of the mundane and the surreal sit side by side without over-explaining either. Loneliness, disconnection and the search for some kind of purpose run under every storyline, animated in a style that keeps its characters believably plain even as the events around them tip toward the fantastical.
About the cast
The English-language voice cast includes Katharine King, Shoshana Wilder, Jesse Noah Gruman, John Vamvas, Zag Dorison, Amaury de Crayencour, Mathilde Auneveux and Arnaud Maillard across the film's interlocking storylines.
Context & significance
Director Pierre Földes adapts several of Murakami's short stories into one connected feature rather than filming them as separate segments, threading his recurring motifs — cats, unexplained calls to action, dissatisfaction hiding under routine — through a single Tokyo timeline. The film is a co-production spanning Canada, France, Hungary, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, and its animation favors a grounded, character-driven look over broad spectacle, keeping the focus on the people even when a talking frog enters the frame. That restraint is part of what sets the film apart from more conventional animated fare aimed at younger viewers: it treats its adult characters' quiet dissatisfaction as seriously as the fantastical detours the plot takes, and it trusts the audience to sit with ambiguity rather than tying every thread into a neat resolution by the closing minutes.
Watching Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman on Ktime
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is available on K-Time with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, making it accessible to Farsi-speaking viewers either way. Browsing the page costs nothing; watching just requires logging into a free K-Time account, and the platform's interface is fully available in Farsi.