Sunday August 30, 2009
Attractive anime
Anime Review by MAKOTO FUKUDA
This heart-warming anime reminds us how precious family is.
IF you have any interest in Japanese animation, you must have heard of Mamoru Hosoda. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (Toki o Kakeru Shojo), which he directed in 2006, is considered his breakthrough movie.
This film, which was about a time-travelling high school girl, was initially shown in only a few theatres, but when its reputation grew by word of mouth and on the Internet, it finally came to be screened at more than 100 theatres in Japan.
The film won many awards, both in Japan and abroad, and Hosoda’s name became widely known.
But he was already well known among some anime fans, thanks to his distinctive techniques. He employed elaborate screen structures with the position of cameras in mind, as other directors would do with live-action films. He also used the same compositions repeatedly, giving them a different meaning each time, and used a lot of symmetrical patterns.
I think it is safe to say that, by such means, Hosoda succeeded in giving more reality to his animation than is found in many live-action films.
His achievements even led some of his avid fans to publish a magazine about real towns and scenery that became models for the backgrounds of his animation.
Hosoda’s latest animation film, Summer Wars, has been showing in Japan since Aug 1. The story is set in the near future, when the virtual world of the digital network is highly advanced and closely related to the real world.
In this film, a high school boy named Kenji, who lives in the city, is persuaded by his friend Natsuki, an older girl in whom he is interested, to visit her hometown for work during summer break.
The town is home to Natsuki’s nearly 90-year-old great-grandmother, head of a large extended family with a more than 400-year history. Kenji is surprised to find that his job is to pose as Natsuki’s fiance.
The plot thickens when the whole family of more than 20 must try to save the world after an identity thief pretending to be Kenji causes trouble on the digital network that throws the real world into confusion.
The film is filled with contrasts. A global fight at the centre of the world’s attention takes place in a rural corner of Japan while the electronic links in the world of the digital network intricately intertwine with the real-world human relations in a big family.
Director Mamoru Hosoda’s breakthrough movie is the entertaining The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. His latest anime, Summer Wars (top) deals with the children of the Internet age. Moreover, the film warms the heart. It reminds us of what we tend to forget in everyday life – the preciousness of family or the importance of believing in someone.
It is a great work offering both breathtaking entertainment and an emotionally touching story.
From the viewpoint of an old anime fan, however, Natsuki’s hometown appears to be the sort of bygone community where people are divided by neither age nor sex, like the village in Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.
Moreover, I cannot help but find similarities with Hosoda’s own 2000 film, Digimon Adventure: Children’s War Game, which greatly impressed anime fans with its high production values.
As Summer Wars’ depiction of its virtual world resembles the online world of Second Life, which seems to have lost momentum of late, I didn’t feel the same sense of fresh surprise that I had when I watched Digimon Adventure: Children’s War Game for the first time.
Still, Summer Wars is an attractive work with enough strength to overcome the grumblings of a nitpicky anime fan like myself. Hosoda told me he wants “to deal with the age” when I interviewed him just before the release of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (see review of this title’s manga below).
If “the age” that Children’s War Game focused on was when children began to venture onto the Internet, then Summer Wars vividly depicts the present time, in which the world of the Net, and the children who have grown up with it, has expanded considerably. And the “present time” must be a mirror reflecting the real world where we live. – Yomiuri Shimbun / Asia News Network
Makoto Fukuda is a Yomiuri Shimbun staff writer specialising in anime and manga.
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