Summer Wars

Mamoru Hosoda is quickly cementing himself as one of the best anime directors in Japan. Besides some movies best on cartoon series like Digimon and One Piece, he has directed two of his own films. First came an animated adaptation of a novel called The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, which took Japanese moviegoers by surprise upon release, and actually beat a Studio Ghibli film for the top spot in the box office. Now comes Summer Wars, his second feature.

Summer Wars begins by establishing the concept of OZ, which is basically a super-internet, where people have their own avatars and can do anything they want on it. Basically, it's the regular internet, made much more visually interesting. It follows Kenji, a teenaged math genius, who agrees to go on a long weekend trip with Natsuki, to see her extremely large, old, and respected family on her grandmother's 90th birthday. While there, using OZ on his phone, he is tricked into giving his avatar to an experimental virus, who then uses it to take over the internet, and wreak havoc on the world outside. Kenji and Natsuki's family must work together with their not inconsiderable resources (one happens to sell powerful computers, one is a government agent, etc.) to contain or defeat this virus that Kenji mistakenly let loose on the world.

Don't let the poster mislead you. More of the movie takes place in the real world than with the avatars in OZ. In fact, the Japanese poster is, unsurprisingly, a much more accurate representation of the movie.



Something I really like about Hosoda's first two films is that he takes these out there science fiction concepts and imbues them with emotional realism. The fate of the world depends on what goes down on OZ, basically an abstract dimension, and while Kenji and a few members of Natsuki's family spend much of the movie trying to solve this, the rest of the family continues going on with their day to day life. The OZ situation just feels like a game to them. One member can't tear herself away from a televised high school championship baseball game that her son is pitching in; to her, the fate of the world depends on this. In the end, the movie is a pretty good, uncynical portrayal of the way a family comes together and supports each other in a time of both emotional and external crisis.

The OZ stuff is visually spectacular. The world is populated with all kinds of avatars, from two-dimensional 8-bit people to animal people to floating logos. It's moderated by two giant floating whales named John and Yoko. There are all kinds of things to do, like games, shops, and classes. Very cool world-within-a-world. I also like that it's not one of those sci-fi movie where the characters jack their brain into the net and experience it first hand. What we're seeing as viewers is just a more vivid cinematic representation of what these characters are doing on their computers.

I liked Summer Wars about just as much as I liked The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Mamoru Hosoda is a filmmaker worth looking into. Both of his films so far are pleasant, positive science fiction metaphors for how we deal with the obstacles we encounter every day.