“Paco and the Magical Picture Book” gets a theme song... and it's not by The Arcade Fire

by Chris MaGee

Well, it looks like Google Translate is good for something after all. Normally I don’t report on the myriad of Japanese pop idols doing myriad chirpy and/ or syrupy songs for the closing credits of films, but doing my rounds of Varity Japan this morning something caught my eye. Tetsuya Nakashima’s latest film “Paco and the Magical Picture Book” premiered its theme song at a special screening that took place at the Hitotsubashi Hall in Tokyo on Tuesday. The film’s young star Ayaka Wilson was in attendance as was the songwriter of “Memories” the theme that, according to always unreliable Google Translate, is performed by The Arcade Fire (?!) I had to do a double take. Did they mean the Montreal indie band, “Neon Bible”, The Arcade Fire? A fair amount of digging confirmed that Google Translate is as useless as using a hammer to crochet, but I also found the actual theme song for “Paco”, and it’s not performed by The Arcade Fire.

“Memories”, which you can listen to for the time being in the YouTube video below, is written and performed by pop singer Kaela Kimura (in the above pic alongside Ayaka Wilson), who previously worked with Nakashima, writing some songs for his 2006 film “Memories of Matsuko”.

But really... How do you get The Arcade Fire from Kaela Kimura??? Stupid Google...