Summer Wars

Fol­low­ing up the crit­ic­ally acclaimed and astound­ingly bril­liant The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was never going to be an easy pro­spect but with a timbre shift sure to cement Mamoru Hosoda’s role as a world-class dir­ector, Sum­mer Wars proves to be a worthy suc­cessor both cre­at­ively and aes­thet­ic­ally. Tak­ing the fluid­ity Mad­house gif­ted his pre­vi­ous film with, the anim­a­tion is dialled up until innu­mer­able char­ac­ters are all rauc­ously mov­ing at once — breath­ing, laugh­ing, talk­ing and liv­ing on screen. Pomp and flair help avoid the ste­reo­types that so often go with virtual-world stor­ies and though it still degen­er­ates into a touch typ­ing mara­thon, the excit­able charm it dis­plays through­out elev­ates it from the stand­ard, tepid block­buster fare.

“a blend of vir­tual worlds, rogue AIs, ques­tion­able math­em­at­ics and enforced time limits”

Kenji is asked by one of the pret­ti­est girls in school, Nat­suki, to help with a sum­mer job; unbe­knownst to him how­ever is that her grand­mother is soon to be turn­ing ninety and Nat­suki has told her fam­ily about a fic­tional fiancé that he must now assume the role of. Trav­el­ling out into the coun­tryside around Ueda, he is intro­duced to the bust­ling, var­ied per­son­al­it­ies of Natsuki’s exten­ded fam­ily and the pala­tial house and grounds that have belonged to the Shino­hara clan for gen­er­a­tions. In the vir­tual world of OZ how­ever, a malevol­ent entity is wreak­ing untold havoc — shut­ting down vital util­it­ies and gob­bling up user accounts with nobody able to stop it. Incon­veni­ence is only the start when it tran­spires the entity has a close link with the Shino­haras and it may only be Kenji, Nat­suki and other mem­bers of the fam­ily who can stop real world dev­ast­a­tion from occurring.

The world of OZ is a tech­ni­col­our explo­sion of stark lines and clean icon­o­graphy — the super­flat design inspir­a­tion of Takashi Murakami gift the film a strong visual iden­tity, how­ever it is the soft and nat­ur­al­istic land­scapes of Nagano pre­fec­ture where the major­ity of the story takes place. The jux­ta­pos­i­tion between the two areas is as brazen as inten­ded: whereas the den­iz­ens of OZ talk through speech bubbles and exag­ger­ated ges­tic­u­la­tions of their often anthro­po­morphic avatars, the fam­ily meals of the Shino­hara house­hold are rife with sub­text, infer­ences and replete with all the bed­lam a large and close-knit fam­ily can gen­er­ate. Com­mu­nic­a­tion plays a star­ring role through­out; whether it is cel­lu­lar or rotary phone calls, video con­fer­en­cing, SMS tex­ting and chat-room style avatar col­lec­tions facil­it­ated by OZ or the fine detail­ing of hand ges­tures and eye move­ments exhib­ited by the bar­rage of key char­ac­ters. Judge­ment is never passed on any method and the film is neither a cel­eb­ra­tion or a warn­ing of these dif­fer­ent ways to interact.

OZ and the inva­sion by the ludicrously named entity, Love Machine, provides the plot for Sum­mer Wars but it is at heart a char­ac­ter drama. Kenji, who begins as the prot­ag­on­ist, is left mostly unex­plored and other more eso­teric cast mem­bers are given the spot­light such as the shrewd grand­mother Sum­iko or the wasp-like Wabisuke. Kenji ini­tially plays the straight-man to the gen­ial mael­strom that is the fam­ily gath­er­ing but all too quickly he is over­taken by the keen tempo the film sets and the more out­land­ish char­ac­ters suit this per­fectly. Yoshiy­uki Sadamoto’s char­ac­ter designs shine their bright­est here and though ones like the smit­ten police officer end up being cari­ca­tures, this is more a symp­tom of the bul­ging roster than poor writ­ing. It says volumes when even incid­ental mem­bers of the fam­ily can be remembered long after the cred­its have rolled.

This breadth-first approach to devel­op­ment isn’t without its troubles though. Wabisuke — who had a guid­ing hand in the troubles that afflict OZ through­out the film — is never given the clos­ure his char­ac­ter deserves and only a short epi­logue con­cludes his key role; sim­il­arly his motiv­a­tions for the vil­lainy he is accused of are not explored and only his affec­tion for Sum­iko is stated. Kenji also suf­fers from a lack of con­text: his affec­tion for Nat­suki is implied more as ador­a­tion, yet the ancil­lary mater­i­als for the film describe a pre-existing crush. These are nig­gling con­cerns how­ever for what is oth­er­wise a bril­liantly craf­ted selec­tion of char­ac­ters that des­pite their dif­fer­ences have a delight­ful chem­istry together and, cru­cially, feel like a coher­ent and lov­ing family.

The strong cast lam­ent­ably doesn’t make up for the utterly ludicrous plot: a blend of vir­tual worlds, rogue AIs, ques­tion­able math­em­at­ics and enforced time lim­its. The world of OZ patches over many of the most egre­gious prob­lems with com­puter focused films, namely the bore­dom suffered from watch­ing a char­ac­ter type into a mono­chro­matic ter­minal as they go about their busi­ness. Unfor­tu­nately in this day and age, espe­cially for younger view­ers who are more tech­no­lo­gic­ally savvy, many of the pivotal ideas presen­ted don’t gel with the oth­er­wise real world trap­pings the film demon­strates. To even the most cas­ual observer the concept of numer­ous dis­par­ate ser­vices — traffic lights, health mon­it­ors, water flow reg­u­lat­ors — all under one umbrella secur­ity sys­tem is pat­ently ridicu­lous. It’s dif­fi­cult to believe this wasn’t entirely pur­pose­ful how­ever. Des­pite using Dell laptops, Sony mon­it­ors and run­ning Win­dows 7 within a vir­tual machine on a Linux desktop, the film deals in spec­tacle over nuance and abstrac­tion over detail. The OZ inter­face is instantly recog­nis­able to all and though it may fur­ther a com­pletely fic­ti­tious ideal of how com­puters work, it doesn’t bog down the oth­er­wise riot­ously enjoy­able characters.

Both the sterile clean­li­ness of OZ’s inter­face and the lush vis­tas of Ueda are rendered with a level of detail only a few top tier stu­dios in Japan could match; Mad­house have once again proven that with the right tal­ent and the right budget, abject beauty can be attained. The open­ing jour­ney taken by Kenji and Nat­suki is a mont­age of dif­fer­ent meth­ods of trans­port, each one gif­ted the kind of detail seen in works by Makoto Shinkai but injec­ted with the whimsy of sum­mer rather than the intro­ver­sion of winter. Other areas see the return of the ribbon-like device first seen in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and even shows hints of Satoshi Kon’s Paprika in some of the busy, cli­mactic moments. The vir­tual world of course echoes Super­flat Mono­gram but also some of the more out­land­ish cre­ations from the auteur Stu­dio 4°C. Bind these with a most emotive style of anim­a­tion and the res­ult is unique, iden­ti­fi­able and addict­ive to watch.

Sum­mer Wars presents itself in broad strokes and, true to it’s name, holds the soul of a sum­mer block­buster. It walks the line between a brain­less extra­vag­anza and pon­der­ous med­it­a­tion; know­ingly sim­pli­fied but never dumbed down it is a shift from the poignant time-travel of Mamoru Hosoda’s pre­vi­ous film and is an instantly access­ible romp through a col­our­ful and express­ive ima­gin­a­tion. Enjoy­ment and emo­tion trump the need for an over­arch­ing mes­sage and the film deserves all the plaudits and fin­an­cial suc­cess it has so far obtained. ¶