#146: Summer Wars (2009)

Director: Mamoru Hosoda

Screenplay: Satoko Okudera

Voice Cast: Nanami Sakuraba as Natsuki Shinohara; Ryunosuke Kamiki as Kenji Koiso; Ayumu Saitô as Wabisuke Jinnouchi; Mitsuki Tanimura as Kazuma Ikezawa; Sumiko Fuji as Sakae Jinnouchi

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

Summer Wars is just okay. That will be a controversial opinion for this Mamoru Hosoda film, but the reason behind this opinion can stem back to when I first saw The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006). When I first saw that film, about a schoolgirl who can actually travel back in time by leaps, I once found the film collapsed in the final act, only for that finale to grow in a greater emotional power. The complexity and unexpected nature of that final were things that have stayed with me, and has to be considered in mind with Summer Wars, the film that followed it.

Math prodigy Kenji Koiso gets an offer to join the popular girl Natsuki Shinohara from his school at her great grandmother's birthday at their family home; to his surprise, he is meant to pose as her boyfriend, but a wider concern arises that, in a world of a very advanced form of the internet everyone is connected to, he may have accidentally allowed a sinister figure carte blanche to decimate and disrupt the online world globally. Production wise, Summer Wars is sumptuous. The internet's stand-in, the OZ, makes a fascinating take on the real version as a kaleidoscope of imagery between bright colours, floating environments and everyone having (usually animal) representations. Of interest as well is the use of hand drawn animation for the real life scenes and entirely digital for the OZ sequences for contrast.

The quality is not surprising when your film was made by Madhouse. They have changed over the 2010s, with key staff leaving (particularly producer Masao Maruyama who founded his own studio MAPPA in 2011), changing their work from this period of Summer Wars. It has not helped however that a scandal in 2019 revealed staff being overworked, when a production assistant involved could be working over 200 hours of overtime per month among other details leaked into public from their case¹. This is a shame as Madhouse were a king when it came to some of the most innovative and best productions, and they still produce very big productions to the current day. Hosoda himself is also someone with a fascinating progression over the years which influenced his creative skills, in which he came into attention as a journeyman for even directing Digimon: The Movie (2000) as his debut. There was also the period he worked at Studio Ghibli, which is a considerable achievement for him as it is an awkward event in his life, as unfortunately he never got to direct a film there².

Undeniably, he learnt this craft over the time, and alongside Madhouse they produced a spectacle film. It is an interesting film that, whilst it plays fast and loose with real life technology as this phantom menace is able to eventually manipulate nuclear plants, this has unexpectedly become more relevant as a premise in terms of our reliance on computers and the internet especially as it would come to be into the 2010s, the OZ a world of mass communication even with a real world outside having to follow it. It is also surprising to see this film in a world when in May 2017, a global cyber attack managed to hack  the National Health Service (NHS) in Britain with ransomware, the main non-private provider of health care in my country hacked by a virus, the dangers of relying on computer technology shown in an ironic prophecy here.

There is also an attempt to reconcile with family history and Japanese nationalism, excising any extreme right wing nature from it by showing from the perspective of a culturally rich and vast family in a humane light. This plot stems from the director's own history of being a single child who meeting his fiancée's family was encountering a traditional large Japanese family, and with explicitly the setting being the hills of Nagano, close to Hosoda’s birthplace in Toyama and historically a place that in conflict, the territory's samurai managed to fight off the country's shogun even if they still lost the battle³. What could be argued to be a conservative film attempts a lot of twists and turns in looking on fondly at the notion of family heritage, leaving with the most interesting content of Summer Wars of the film. 

Natsuki's family are of samurai heritage and her great grandmother, awaiting her ninetieth birthday talks of heritage in note of this. That the great grandmother for a large part is the strongest foundation does alter any reservations about this material into something much more wholesome, as for her (whilst she does threaten one of her grandchildren with an antique spear) even the act of calling of her family to cheer them on as the computer hacking wreaks havoc is a noble act.This entire aspect of the film is a complicated one which does pose questions it may have not intended but also fits what I liked about The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

Certainly, there is a huge dramatic shift where the grandmother is not the major foundation and the family has to figure out its strength. The film does show the attempt of the men to fight to success does not work, the conflict resolved by Kenji's intellect and by Natsuki being really good at a certain card game with chance called Hanafuda, but you also have the rest of the women in the family downplay the crisis in favour of their tragedy. It is something I will not just provide a glib comment on, and is one of the reasons this review has taken longer to gestate, as there is a lot more in mind and it adds a much needed dramatic weight I have to admire. Maybe the perceived bias to always view a traditional family as conservative is a bias of me left to expunge, but it is sweet nonetheless at its best.

Summer Wars' biggest issue though, as mentioned, is that it is just watchable. It was created as a crowd pleaser just from some of its producers, including Nintendo who were built from the success of its founder Fusajiro Yamauchi and selling Hanafuda cards when they were made legal in 1889, and was clearly put together to be for a wide audience. It is a very predictable film in how it is resolved, its tale told in broad strokes and some emotional depth, which is very well made and greatly told. This is unfortunately a type of film though, animated or otherwise, I do not get a lot out of in the slightest in my art and entertainment. Again, back to The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, what became divisive for myself in that film grew to become the best aspects and grow the film, whilst Summer Wars is not like that. The one moment which does evoke the earlier film is a tragedy, a tonal shift which is needed and where a moment of reality regardless of plot machinations exists because it sobers everyone. In mind of the acclaim Hosoda has, I am going to be much more wide awake for moments like that where he stands out.

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1) A link to an article elaborating on this HERE.

2) He was meant to direct Howl's Moving Castle (2004)¸which eventually Hayao Miyazaki helmed. It has been speculated that his film for the One Piece franchise, One Piece: Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island (2005), is a metaphor for that entire period so that film has always stood out of interest to see whether there was truth to it or not.

3) HERE

#145: The Island of Giant Insects (2020)

Director: Takeo Takahashi and Naoyuki Tatsuwa

Screenplay: Shigeru Morita

Based on the manga by Yasutaka Fujimi and Shu Hirose

Voice Cast: M.A.O as Mutsumi Oribe; Chiaki Takahashi as Mirei Jinno/Misuzu Jinno ; Marina Inoue as Inaho Enoki; Misato Fukuen as Ayumi Matsuoka; Momo Asakura as Mami Miura; Rika Tachibana as Chitose Naruse; Takuya Eguchi as Kazuhiko Kai; Wataru Komada as Atsushi Kamijō; Yurika Kubo as Ai Inō

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

Immediately into the 2020s, we have ended up with this curiosity, which is still having its history written and is still managing to soldier on. The Island of Giant Insects has also been a production that has benefitted from the Kickstarter era, which does mean that unlike years before, there is a target audience who have been waiting for this over the time. The title, adaptive from a manga, is a throwback to old school OVA or at least the idea, as this is not remotely like those late eighties and nineties titles but firmly in the era where shows like High School DXD (2012) get sequel after sequel, the not-quite-porn sold on nudity.

From the first trailer it was obvious, in this tale of students stuck on a literal island of giant insects, the main selling point was the transgression of nubile female characters being molested by the likes of giant bees and grubs. Does it say something bad against others and me that we even watched this? I admit a fascinating with the perverse, but by this point, there is a very different nature to "adult" anime in the 2010s from decades earlier, where whilst the older titles can be far more problematic (like Violence Jack), there is something significantly more insidious with a lot of the OVA level work of today, which is more tame in some areas but questionable, as well as a sense they are being manufactured to a target audience knowingly rather than some of the madness you got in older work.

Initially the film existed as a 2019 release short, not a short film but twenty minutes in the middle of the finale feature length work, knee deep into the hell hole of giant butterflies who suck people dry and other content that appears in the final work, just to provide a taster. The film itself is also not the entire work, merely early chapters of the manga, following a group of stereotypes from a manipulative older girl who uses her physical allure to a macho jock, the movie taking a fifties American b-movie but adding a lot more animated nudity and greater nastiness. There are nicer characters in the fold, the heroine Mutsumi Oribe luckily an insect enthusiast who is really of use on an island like this, to the point that whilst others like those above are stupid enough to try to continually get her killed, one male character immediately comes sympathetic because early on he realises her importance and listens to her.

The inherent issue with The Island of Giant Insects is that it is a paradox, between being very scuzzy but also in a very generic way. That sentence might raise some questions, but I am a defender of ero-guro-nonsense and all the deviations in Japanese pop culture, which proves an issue as Giant Insects is both just lurid for the sake of lurid, but not as shocking as it thinks it is and pretty average, not exactly more than trashy and not standing out in creativity. I think, in honesty having seen images, that even if the manga was not great it might be a superior version as that has more of the perverse surrealism that I appreciate even in this type of work. Especially if you check pages of it online, the art style is more distant and the content is stranger in a ghoulish way. The author in particularly really likes insects bursting out of peoples' face, none of which you find in the adaptation but is at least more memorable.

Said insects, as well as being cheesy CGI figures, are not used with interest either. It says a lot that I can just refer to the franchise Earth Defence Force, one of the few video games I have played as an adult, which are cheesy b-movie games which are not the best in graphics and content (at least in the one I have played), but made up for it by having hordes of ants onscreen even if they were also cheesy computer effects. In terms of the premise, the creatures in this are barely used to their fullest, especially in light of all the strange and unique traits of the insect kingdom has, all in spite of there at least being one person or a few involved providing some entomology research. One exception, the one good scene in this entire project, is the horrifying and real life concept of the Leucochloridium, that of a parasitic worm that invades snails' eyestalks, imitate those organs, and mind control that poor host to be out in the open to be eaten by passing birds, all with the intention that the worms breed in the birds' stomachs.  Naturally imagining this happening to one unfortunate human character, as it does here with additional gibbering, is the one single moment Giant Insects ever gets around to the kind of gross, weird and wonderful side of Japanese horror that the likes of Junji Ito or many an ero-guro creation does. If only this had happened more in the story.

Clearly of more interest is nudity, as this film does not hide it, even finding an excuse for all the female cast to bathe nude after a giant tick incident. The odd thing about the production though is that the twenty minute piece was uncensored, whilst the feature length version censors some sex, and almost completely censors the violence, obscuring it off-screen or in black. It could sound more progressive, as someone who has always found it problematic violence was more acceptable than sex, but it comes to the point how this is not like the old lurid titles at all. Say what you want about old titles that painstakingly drew the most grotesque detail in gore and organs, but a lot of OVAs nowadays are tie-ins to existing titles and usually an excuse for more nudity only. The censorship also does not mean these works cannot get away with some problematic content and tones even for me.

None of these characters are particularly memorable, another title with insanely generic female character designs which is always the worse sign, with even the ero-guro aspects deeply problematic for myself. The only sexuality that is nothing to do with the grotesque aspects is not a lot. The evil manipulative woman is not exactly feminist, and the curious lesbian subplot about a timid idol singer who is secretly manipulative too, taking advantage of the female track star in the group being likely gay, is jarring both in that one of the two is not probably a good character either and that it never goes anywhere. There are also the unsavoury moments. It is one thing to have the erotic-grotesque aspect of female nudity against insects, but that should not be the only thing, for the sake of both gender politics and true transgression. Then there is the scene where the evil female character and the jock go full evil, to which a certain piece of dialogue about gagging another female character with something below the belt is completely implying what that suggests, only to thankfully not happen.

It is strange to think that, for all the problematic content, a work like The Legend of the Overfiend (censored or otherwise) can be more defensible for pieces of it than this, but there is always something more problematic for me about anime which follows the rules dictated, i.e. censoring nudity for television, but still sells the uncensored releases and still gets away with some gross content in the censored broadcast. Likewise, a title here that had no excuse being censored, thus not experiencing a full version of the premise promised, which also has questionable content really comes off as hypocritical and far more a concern than a fully offensive work which people are warned about. A scene like lingering on a female character wetting herself in fear in detail just before a butterfly gets her, as seen here, is something which feels a lot grosser to witness than any titillation or gore you could throw at myself.

The production itself is also incredibly bland, and not in the cheap and compelling type. Even the music is terrible metal guitar licks which are off-putting for a metal fan like myself, egregiously cheap when I have heard solidly put together music even in incredible cheap anime. There is even a sequence which is an extreme form of padding, just of the lead character walking down an endless corridor with this music playing, and of nothing more which is pretty offensive in how pointless it is. The real baffling nature of all this is that this has managed to soldier on. As a b-movie premise, I can think of many other ways this could have been made, imagined versions which is better, but this managed to get a feature length cut and has been acquiring funds for an English dub. A complete lack of memorability is found here, but with the aspects there that leaves one feeling dirty rather than provoked. It is strange as well that, due to the unforeseen circumstances about COVID-19, which has effected everything including production of entertainment industries like anime, The Island of Giant Insects could be by accident one of the most prominent titles we know of from the year. That is maddening and baffling at the same time.