Beatle Queen (Jessica Oreck, 2009): USA / Japan

Reviewed by Anaiya Mussolini in Hollywood, CA at the Mann Chinese Theater as part of the AFI film festival 2009.

Beatle Queen Conquers Tokyo is a documentary about bugs and tries to capture the beauty in them. In Japan it depicts how there are many people who capture insects and sell them to people to buy as pets. There is a lot of comedy in this film which makes it easier to watch if you are not a fan of insects.

Although I am not too keen on insects I did appreciate the way in which they were so fascinated with something so small and unimportant to most people. I also liked how they showed the beauty that insects have about life. It is like insects have enthusiasm about life and that is why people like them. Though some insects were just downright disgusting, the transformation was extraordinary. To go from something so ugly to so pretty was a very important concept in this movie. Yet, as we all know, true beauty never last.

The editing was pretty well done. It starts out with nature, shooting back and forth to city life, with the camera shots being really fast when the city is shown and long shots when the nature is shown. This captures the idea that this documentary is a mixture of Japan’s old culture mixed in with new culture. There is also a cage in one of the bug stores that reinforces this idea. A bug is in the cage with a view of the city but it is trapped.

There is also another time in the movie where it shows a bug in a cage and people in a subway right next to it. This is showing us the relationship that we have between humans and insects. We both are out of a hole and struggle. The point that the director is trying to make is that life is always changing and the truth you may hold may in fact not be the truth at all. There is even a helicopter in the sky that resembles a dragonfly. It also shows people dressed in traditional garb representing minimalistic stuff. This signifies just how much we all get caught up in all of the materialistic things that we forget to cherish and appreciate the beauty in all of the small things.

The movie was not really about beetles, it was about Japanese culture. They just used bugs as a window to look into it. In the end what I took from the movie was that, to learn is to change, and they represented this very idea by mixing old culture in with new culture. I highly recommend this film. It will put things ito a new perspective for you and hopefully you too will remember to embrace the very simple things that life has to offer, for I now have. This documentary was just a little reminder of that.