Ani-May: Summer Wars (Dir Mamoru Hosoda, 1h54m, 2009)

The year is 2002, and two important things are about to happen. In a few short months, Mamoru Hosoda, a Japanese animator will leave his position at the esteemed Studio Ghibli, after creative differences between himself and Hayao Miyazaki (A figure to which he, along with Makoto Shinkai, has all but been crowned successor), stymie the production of Howl's Moving Castle. Hosoda will briefly rejoin animation giant Toei, before leaving once more to Madhouse, the aptly named upstarts behind the previously mentioned Ninja Scroll, the fantastically popular Death Note and, of course, the works of Satoshi Kon, one of which we will arrive at next week.
Hosoda will go on to direct several of the medium's best works outside of his old employer, from the time-travel based The Girl Who Leapt Through Time to the spectacular magical realism of The Wolf Children and The Boy and the Beast, to the Oscar-nominated Mirai. If Shinkai is the technical mastery of Miyazaki, of astonishing feats of visual imagination, Hosoda retains the heart, the offbeat emotional moments of the godfather of modern anime.

Closer to home, it's the summer of 'Mon, as the titanic clash between the shonen grind of Pokémon's imperial phase and the emotive unpredictability of the young pretender, Digimon reaches its peak, and it's at this point that I and anime intersect. Whilst Pokémon's cinematic outings have varied from workmanlike to enjoyable fanservice, Digimon's sole cinematic outing until nostalgia kicked in a few years ago is a bizarre cultural document.
On paper, a far more technically adept piece of cinema, in execution best described as a hodgepode of three different movies, cobbled together into a cohesive narrative, soundtracked by the majority of the oddball one-hit wonders 1990s pop-punk had to offer, and frontloaded by the most visually disturbing CGI mess short ever put on the big screen. It is the gap between the 1990s trying to die and the 2000s waiting to be born in cinematic form. It is also the first time western audiences will ever see a Mamoru Hosoda film.

For butchered as they are, Digimon the Movie contains not one but two films by Mamoru Hosoda, Digimon Adventure, a twenty minute short that basically acts as a glorified trailer for the entire series, and Our War Game, a remarkably taut forty minute mix of 1983's Wargames and the series' tried and tested monster battling. That both shorts remain largely intact, as the first and second third of its American mashup release is a testament to how good a director Hosoda already was, even restricted by the necessity to sell a product in the film's scope and story. It's here, thus, that we finally arrive at today's film, for, in honest terms, Summer Wars is simply Our War Game on steroids, Hosoda finally free to explore his narrative, his visuals, and the very strucure of his first feature film from the floor up.

The films undeniably share a large amount in common, and these are evident, from our very opening, in which the online cosmopolis of Oz is introduced. Here, as with Our War Game, the internet is rendered as a colossal, endless white space in which spindly primary coloured objects hang in space, influenced by, whether an open homage or a mere riff on the superflat art movement, the work of Japanese artist Takeshi Murakami. But where Our War Game treats this as a nigh empty stage for the colossal battles of its film, Summer Wars' world is a crowded, astonishingly populated location, myriad digital avatars with almost every possible art style, and it is here that we are introduced to our protagonist, Kenji Koiso (Ryunosuke Kamiki/Michael Sinterniklaas), who, dragged along by Natsuki Shinohara Nanami Sakuraba/Brina Palencia) as her fiance, finds himself embroiled in a colossal cyber-plot that threatens the very existences of Oz.

What follows over the next two hours is one of the best anime films of the 2000s, a masterfully  and beautifully animated piece of cinema that runs the gammut between cyberspace thriller, as our heroes attempt to track down and, in several pitched battles, defeat the villainous Love Machine, a malignant AI loosed upon Oz, and emotionally resonant tale of family, of reunions and farewells, of family pride and the weight of expectations, all held together through superbly written characters, and a perfectly balanced plot.

It is with Kenji and Natsuki that the most obvious difference begins to make itself apparent between the workmanlike derivative work and the original story, where the gulf between the cookie-cutter protagonists of Digimon and the well-rounded, superbly written, voiced and designed characters of Summer Wars. Part of this is down, of course, to the passage of voiceacting as a medium in the west, but much of it has to do with how this film runs on emotion. Kenji and Natsuki are quirky-we are introduced to Kenji in his capacity as a maths wiz, as a slightly awkward but sweet guy who offers to help Natsuki with her problem, and essentially lucks into an off-kilter relationship with her that starts as a sham but eventually grows into something more.

He's also, for much of the film, on the back foot; as soon as the film has taken us from the busy metropolitian sprawl of Tokyo to the rural Ueda, so he finds himself the unwitting and prime suspect in a colossal hack on Oz that now threatens not just the internet but the real world too. It's here that the film's runtime plays in its favour, the suspense held for nearly five minutes of excellently interwoven information before it's finally revealled exactly what's happened. It makes the subsequent two acts all the more personal, pulls Kenji into this battle on his own terms, and makes their eventual victory all the sweeter.

Natsuki, for her part, is an even more complex figure; for much of the film, she is essentially the surrogate for her large family that bicker and row but pull together in the end, and, together with her great grandmother, Sakae (Sumiko Fuji/Pam Dougherty), the family's enjoyably firy and no-nonsense matriach who forms the emotional centre of the film, arguably is its driving force. This is not to say that the rest of her family aren't excellent characters; every single member of her family is a perfectly written, excellently animated, and even for the high bar of modern English anime dubbing, perfectly cast.
This is, of course, not to mention hers, and indeed her family in general's relationship with the family's black sheep, Wabisuke, whose relationship with the family is eventually mended, despite his close ties to Love Machine itself, and who, of all our characters, seems to go through the biggest, and the most rewarding, narrative arc. Nor is this a film who treats her as a passive heroine. Though she is given less to do than her cousin, Kazuma, whose alterego, King Kazma is the film's arguable poster boy as he goes up against malignant AIs in superbly animated fight scenes, it is she on whose shoulders the key elements of the denoument hang. King Kazma, for his part, is a wonderfully animated character, a reflection of the best that Japanese anime can bring in a hyperkinect figure of pure power.

Yet, despite this, perhaps the film's biggest battle is in its mix of tradition and technology, between family and honour. Whilst it's almost insultingly stereotypical to approach anime, and indeed any Japanese work with this in mind, Hosoda is utterly disarming in the way he leans into these with an utter lack of insincerity. Natsuki's family are fiercely proud of their ancestry, of their connection to the land around them, at one point using an old battle plan against Love Machine to trap it, whilst Natsuki's stand against the AI hinges around the utterly traditional game of hanafuda.
Perhaps, though, what Summer Wars does best is summed up in two things. First, its approach to technology-for a film that shows the perils of an ever-more connected world, it never overtly dismisses technology-whether we like it or not, we live in a world ever more reliant on the internet and on automation and Summer Wars is in no doubt that we cannot, despite what its characters wish, return back to a less connected world.

But the second is this. Mamoru Hosoda finally remade his first film on his own terms, unstymied by the needs of a colossal media franchise, or a forty minute runtime, or any mention of digi-anything in the mix. Summer Wars is many things; a triumph, a sensationally well paced and excellently animated film. But, perhaps, at least personally to me, it feels like that glimpse behind the curtain, into the world of Japanese animation has been transformed into a full blown panorama of visual delight. Summer Wars is a gorgeously animated masterclass in anime, from one of its still-rising stars in which the digital and the real worlds collide in epic fashion.

Rating: Highly Recommended.

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