Summer Wars

Mamoru Hosoda is a pretty popular name these days among anime fans. As the director of films such as Wolf Children Ame & Yuki, and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, he’s released hit after hit. In 2009, Hosoda released a film called Summer Wars. The story follows a math whiz named Kenji, and his unlikely allies in a story about family unity, redemption, and determination.

	The story itself is very good. I cannot and will not spoil it, but it centers around a Second Life-esque virtual reality/social media service known as OZ. Billions of people use this service, including politicians and CEOs. Kenji, our protagonist, is essentially a QA tester for the service, when a girl he admires, Natsuki, invites him to celebrate her grandmother’s 90th birthday. But then, OZ gets hacked, possibly threatening numerous lives.

	 A remarkable aspect, I would say, is the animation itself. The character designs, by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, are very memorable. Of course, that’s arguably expected of Sadamoto, since he’s most known for working on the iconic series Neon Genesis Evangelion. The virtual avatars of each character never feel forgettable, such as a humanoid, kickboxing rabbit, or a yellow squirrel that takes a simple and humble design approach. Backgrounds are drawn with immaculate detail, and that’s without mentioning the amazing shading and texture detail. It never feels like a film that was made too hastily or sloppily.

	However, I think the strongest part of this film was the characters themselves. Despite Natsuki’s family being so large, every one of her kin seem to feel unique, usually in both design and character. So as a result, you don’t usually feel like they’re just there to take up space. There’s typically a connection between side characters in themselves, rather than everything just converging at the protagonist. The film feels like it wants you remember more characters from the film rather than the protagonist and the antagonist, and I think it does a good job at that. For example, Yumi is a slightly overweight aunt in Natsuki’s family who has a son named Ryouhei who plays baseball, so she spends a lot of time watching broadcasts of the games her son plays in hopes that he wins. Funny enough, the progress of Ryouhei’s championship game mirrors the main plot itself, making for some quite amusing match cuts.

	Some seeing Summer Wars may see parallels between the plot of this movie and the famed Digimon franchise, in which there exists a virtual world populated by various monsters that are, in fact, digital. There’s a reason for that, as director Hosoda has previously worked with the Digimon TV series and movies before branching out to direct original films like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. But Summer Wars remains a very good movie about family, and to compare it to Digimon would be like comparing Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress to Star Wars: A New Hope; they may share a “narrative skeleton” of sorts, but it’s filled in and covered with completely different material – a different take on a similar, yet not identical idea. Summer Wars is a film that I would recommend thoroughly, and after seeing it, you likely will want to learn how to play the classical Japanese card game hanafuda. I certainly did.