Table of Contents
Introduction
2020 was a warped year for everybody, with COVID-19 being declared a worldwide pandemic, which affected many lives (to put it lightly). However, anime continued to be made (not as many titles as usual, though), with probably the most prominent being the debut of Jujutsu Kaisen. One which relatively quietly came out in theaters in Japan on Christmas Day, after an appearance at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea, was the romantic drama movie Josee, the Tiger and the Fish (ジョゼと虎と魚たち/Jozee to Tora to Sakanatachi), based on a short story written by Seiko Tanabe in 1984.
I Swear, She Flew Right into My Arms
Tsuneo Suzukawa is one of those people for whom water is more than something people don’t drink enough. He’s a university student majoring in marine biology who works part time at Diving shop OCEAN STAGE in Namba, and he’s shown diving at the beginning of the movie, getting some great photos of the fish he encounters. One of his major bucket list items is to visit Mexico to swim along with a school of Clarion Angel fish, a beautiful species indigenous to that country.
Kumiko “Josee” Yamamura is a young woman who has been paraplegic all her life and uses a wheelchair to get around. She immerses herself in books (she’s so big on Françoise Sagan that she nicknamed herself after one of her characters), art and imagination to help take her mind off things. She lives with her grandmother, Chizu Yamamura, who rarely lets her leave the house, and this results in her being petulant and insular – at first.
A Month of Misery
These two meet one night when Josee’s wheelchair is bumped by someone and starts rolling out of control down Aizen-zaka Hill, and he’s passing by just in time to grab her in midair. After Chizu is assured that they’re both all right, Kumiko’s adrenaline settles down enough for her self-consciousness to kick in again, and she bites his hand and calls him a “hentai” for touching her.
Chizu invites him in for dinner, and, upon learning that he’s a cash-poor student, offers to hire him to “follow Kumiko’s orders.” So begins a month of misery on his part. When he’s about to quit, he goes to Chizu’s house to talk with Josee, only to find nobody home…but a lot of vibrant pictures with a sea theme she has done. He then finds out from Chizu that she has run away, and he sets out to find her.
Girl Meets…Caretaker
While the first impression that Josee leaves is bad, one thing to acknowledge is that she never bemoans her needing a wheelchair like in a standard Disability Drama™. It’s the only way she knows how to live. However, this doesn’t mean that she doesn’t wish to learn more about life outside her house, and the more time she spends with Tsuneo (including meeting other people), the more her world expands and the freer she gets. However, life doesn’t always go as planned, and both Josee and Tsuneo must deal with setbacks that it tends to throw at people, and how they affect how they relate to each other. Director Kotaro Tamura was careful to make these characters and how they interact complex enough to avoid many trappings on which regular anime often depends.
Getting Too High in Umeda
Seiko Tanabe spent the first half of her life in Osaka, and her work reflects that. Kotaro Tamura respected this by making several location scouting trips. Every spot listed above and then some are based on real-life places here, including the diving shop. The bright outdoor movie poster is set in Carillon Plaza. In one scene, Tsuneo and Josee ride the Ferris wheel on top of the HEP FIVE mall (note that the wheel is closed for renovations until late April 2026), and Tsuneo gets visibly ill from the 106m height. In the next cut, he is sprawled on top of one of the UMEDA monuments at Hankyu Sun Hiroba while she watches over him.
Given their fondness for fish and the sea, they had to immerse themselves in the sights at Kaiyukan Aquarium. The tiger in the title is the Siberian at Tennoji Zoo, which Josee insists on visiting to help her confront one of her biggest fears. Of course, the Glico runner sign at Dotombori appears (plus a later visual reference), since that seems to be required by law in any anime that spends at least a bit of time in this city. The deluxe Blu-ray releases in Japan and the UK include an illustrated map/poster of Osaka.
It’s Josee’s World, We Just Live in It
As movies sometimes do, some artistic liberty was taken here. While most of the locations are in Osaka, a few of them, including a beach which figures prominently, are based on Suma Ward in Kobe. One part shows Osaka covered in more snow than it customarily gets in winter solely for the story. In a great dream sequence, the city is suddenly submerged in water and Josee floats out of her house in a long, mermaid-like dress to be the only person swimming alongside dolphins and whales. The second movie poster above refers to this scene.
However, if you want to check out the real locations, Osaka Metro NiNE’s 2021 article sets out a route, but you might want to double-check to see if any changes have been made since then. Anime Pilgrimage’s 2025 map is so thorough that it even includes a couple of convenience stores, but you never know when you’ll need something they sell.
DVD and Blu-Ray Release Info
The movie’s official website is still active, but if it goes down, you can always look for it at the Internet Archive. If you want to buy this on DVD or Blu-ray, Kadokawa released it in Japan and All the Anime in the UK, while Funimation handled the North American combo release (no collector’s edition, but it includes the soundtrack CD by Evan Call, best known for his work on Violet Evergarden). Since Funimation has been bought by Sony and rebranded as Crunchyroll LLC, it’s unknown whether they’ll reissue the movie once the Funimation stocks run out like they have with other titles, but it’s still available at the time of writing.
All images in this article ©2020 Seiko Tanabe/KADOKAWA/Josee Project.
