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.
=========
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
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