Shingo lives in a rural area near Tokyo and works as an electrician and sound-engineer. His life is uneventful and rather boring. Sometimes he hangs out with his former schoolmates Masahiro and Yukio. Since there is not much to do in his pastime he spends most of his free time out in nature capturing sounds on his tape-recorder.
On one of the tapes he hears a woman singing, which was recorded while he was swimming in the sea. He is immediately taken by the mysterious voice. While repairing a broken loudspeaker at a local strip club he encounters the stripper Chisato whom he immediately recognizes as the woman singing on the tape.
A few days later, while hanging out with his friends, he meets Chisato again. They get to know each other better and start dating, but Shingo is unable to disclose his feelings to Chisato. Meanwhile Masahiko gets in trouble when he tries to run away with Noriko, the mistress of the strip club’s owner.
Enomoto Toshiro’s debut film depicts the anxiety and vulnerability of his generation with an unusual sensibility. This sensitivity distinguishes the films of Enomoto and the other so-called shichifukujin-directors from the films of the preceding shitenno-directors. Enomoto had started his career at Mukai Kan’s Shishi Production as assistant director for Sato Hisayasu and Zeze Takahisa before being given a chance by Asakura Daisuke to direct a film on his own.
Slow Motion won him the Best Newcomer Award at the 1996 PG Pink Film Awards. Other than his fellow shichifukujin-colleagues Imaoka Shinji, Meike Mitsuru, Tajiri Yuji and Sakamoto Rei, whose films have had a continuous (albeit limited) international exposure by being shown at film festivals abroad, Enomoto has so far rather been neglected.
Except for his second feature film Glitter (1997), which was invited to the FEFF pink film season in 2002, only Nikomihoppy (2006) made it to the foreign festival market.