Birds Eye Review: Koganada's 'After Yang' and Mending Relationships Through Nature
- Geana Robinson
- Apr 10, 2022
- 4 min read
Updated: May 1, 2022
RATING - 4.5 STARS
Welcome! As part of my first blog series A Bird's Eye Review, I'll be taking a look at After Yang (2021); its themes and what I learned. Honestly there is so much to unpack about this film stylistically and thematically, but I'll leave some deeper reflection to you. What did you think of the film? Let me know!
First Impressions
After Yang (2022) is about a family trying to deal with grief caused by a malfunction of their beloved A.I. son, Yang (Justin H. Min), who acted as a caring assistant to Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra’s (Jodie Turner-Smith) small daughter, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), who is beginning to understand what it is to be culturally different to her adoptive parents. When it is discovered that Yang was a part of a rare experiment to see if A.I. assistants could mirror human emotion, Yang’s memories reveal revolutionary information that shake the family’s dynamics, ideas and beliefs.
Opening
Something that drew me instantly to the style Koganada offers viewers, is his intrinsic connection to nature through composition and motif. His themes center around how we occupy space in and around nature, and questions weather it is disrupting or enhancing our humanity, emotions and freewill – a topic explored though futuristic technology in After Yang. It is through the memory of an A.I that the characters find themselves drawn back to nature. But within even the first few seconds, we see those all-too-familiar shots of light being reflected onto surfaces and objects from water or a window. A literal glimmer of hope. Hope that we can always find clarity and our true nature in the slithers of earth that penetrate the modern concrete jungle.
A Deeper Look
We see the little hints – these reflections, scattered throughout the film like seeds being thrown onto soil, but the only time we really see the characters interact with nature is through Yang’s memories. It is memory that triggers the theme of nature into the present emotional state of the characters. In fact, the first half of the film pulls us into a somewhat dark lit, Japanese noir-like subgenre, where the organic and cleanliness of Japanese design created uniformity – and nature falls under this uniformity, with house plants being diligently grown on shelves in the kitchen, and exotic fish of all colours and species are kept in luminescent tanks at a local store. It is only when Yang’s memories are accessed that we witness the wildness of nature. His memories are a forest. In his forest are his most core memories – love. What is ironic is that the A.I. becomes more human than the actual humans, thus questioning what it means to be one, and reminding those he leaves behind of what is most important in living a meaningful life. Jake even admits at the end that “ [Yang’s] existence mattered” – that he wasn’t just a robot, but was more human than he could have ever imagined, or at the very least, more in touch with his humanity than the characters we encounter.
Yang's memories teach Jake that he is overlooking what is most important to him - his family. And that even though Yang never physically ages or grows, his time was still limited, and his connections with people were stronger than many humans we meet in the film.
There is no real Ah-Ha moment here, but more of a slow drip of realization that Jake's neglection of his family, and his lack of involvement in his daughters life is creating more and more distance between them, and missing out on those all-important moments in Mika's life (a void that Yang clearly filled in Jake's absence). At the close of the film Jake finally walks into the forest and embraces the natural surrounding that had perhaps previously gone unnoticed.
Perhaps one of the most touching scenes is where Yang and his father Jake are discussing why Jake went into the tea business. Yang acknowledges that all he can contribute to the discussion are facts about tea – where is came from, and how it influenced Chinese culture throughout history. But Jake tells a different story – one that connects the themes of the film directly to the characters and script.
He tells a human story.
(About the main character in a documentary about tea he watched)
[Jake] "It was his searching that compelled me. You know, the pursuit of this illusive thing, this process that was connected to the soil, the plants, the weather. And to a way of life.”
Is this not precisely what Koganada aims to achieve in After Yang? A kind of rebirthing of ideas around culture, nature and the future of the human condition and relationships within the restrictiveness of technology. Going back to our roots as such. Going back to the earliest of human memory.
Jake then goes on to describe how, in the film, a man describes tasting tea and picturing walking through a forest on the damp leaves (again mirroring this at the close of the film by walking through a forest himself)
[Yang] “I wish I felt something deeper about tea. I wish I had a real memory of tea in China. Of a place. Of a time.”
This longing for the simplest pleasures we experience as humans is literally reflected in the multitude of mirror shots within Yang’s core memories. As his hair grows, the rest of him remains the same over the decades – but it is his mind, his memories and self-awareness that grows along with time.
Final Thoughts
The themes in After Yang all intertwine like vines around a tree trunk. They intermingle and highlight different perspectives and ideas, like cultural preservation, the importance of preserving heritage the right way – through nature; grief, experienced through nostalgia and memory; fixing the broken, literally and figuratively, and the reparation of relationships and redemption.
I learned that there is a future out there that Koganada imagines; a future where our worldview can be easily influenced by a separation from nature, and also from one another - the two simultaneously go together, that's the whole point!
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