A feelgood hit for the summer

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time came pretty much out of nowhere. I had no idea who Mamoru Hosoda was and I’m unfamiliar with Yasutaka Tsutsui’s ‘Timeleap’ franchise so didn’t know what to expect from it at all. It’s not a luxury that Summer Wars enjoys though because the fans, me included, were impressed with this newbie director and were expecting more wonderful things from him and his team. Summer Wars is indeed a wonderful thing: not as personal or introspective as its predecessor but makes up for this on the fun factor and sheer spectacle.

I can’t bring myself to say it’s ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than Tokikake because they’re quite different in themes and storytelling approach so I probably shouldn’t place much value on direct comparisons. And yeah, this is The Post I promised I’d write (thanks in no small part to the excellent pieces from Gaguri, Chaostangent and Ghostlightning); now the high-def version is online I hope there are finally enough people to share my thoughts with.

The film is very consciously intended to be the feelgood summer movie so its boundless enthusiasm, youthful energy and desire to have as broad an appeal as possible are very evident. One of the friends I watched it with on my first viewing commented on the online Oz community as being “how Second Life wished it was,” and warned me that we could be looking at the face of the Internet in ten years’ time. When I imagine Ebay and Facebook combined, I can see where he was coming from.

I actually found the rendering of Oz, and the suspension of disbelief required for the mechanics of how it all works, to be a little distracting. Don’t get me wrong, the CG is used effectively, the combat and other interactions are kinetic and full of fluidity but it seems to lean too heavily on Hosoda’s experience with the Superflat Monogram short. It looks awesome and all but it’s diverting attention away from the more subtle, meaningful and in my opinion more interesting stuff behind the pretty-shiny façade.

For me the online world of Summer Wars serves as a mirror held up against Real Life of the twenty-first century. Parallel to, and interacting with, this imaginative virtual environment is a good old-fashioned family film: the premise of a college kid staying with a his would-be crush to while away the school holidays is a fine excuse to examine how families interact in today’s world. We eventually learn that Kenji is so overwhelmed by Natsuki’s rowdy relatives because his own home life is of the all-too-common latchkey child/workaholic parents setup; her domestic situation on the other hand is of the more gregarious, traditional kind that their generation doesn’t experience very often any more.

One of the many issues depicted in Summer Wars is the celebration of the old-fashioned extended family in which relatives get together for special occasions in a big, comfortable country house with stories, jokes and traditional games. It’s set in Nagano (an area I saw at a distance from a moving bus window, and vowed to visit someday); if the idyllic small towns and sweeping shots of green hillsides look familiar to you, it’s also the region that Makoto Shinkai grew up in iirc so the same picturesque, nostalgia-inducing charms have overspilled into his work too.

The appeal to domestic audiences is pretty obvious then: it’s set in a well-known and popular area of the country and is a throwback to the traditional Japanese countryside holiday but the general summertime sentiment ought to be universal (I noticed a few scenes that reminded me of incidents in my own, Western, family). Just because it’s such boundless fun that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have much to say though: long after the rush of watching the story unfold had subsided, my mind was in overdrive in order to digest and appreciate the numerous underlying messages that accompanied it.

Summer Wars can still be enjoyed as ‘just’ a movie. Thanks to Hosoda’s eye for detail the narrative flows with his trademark playful humour and effortlessly gearshifts between the light and the more serious moments. I laughed one moment and fought back the tears the next but never felt as though it was forced and contrived; its sentimentality and sense of fun are refreshingly honest and unfold naturally. One particularly poignant scene is a long camera pan across the veranda with family members, Sakae’s favourite potted flowers and Kenji tentatively taking hold of Natsuki’s hand, showing his concern as best he can but unable to stop her tears. It’s one of the most moving and well-handled cinematic scenes I’ve seen in months.

Considering how the narrative uses a cast of varied and expressive personalities for their storytelling, Yoshiuyuki Sadamoto’s distinctive flair is perfect for the job of rendering the characters. Fans of his will spot his designs a mile off but I’m still amazed at how vibrant, likeable and full of life they are here; if there’s one misstep the film makes it’s the sheer number potrayed. I can understand why Hosoda went for such a large cast but is demanding a lot of the the storyboard writers to give them the attention they deserve and the viewers to keep track of them all.

If it overreaches itself on the character front it still manages to juggle a whole load of other themes and ideas with no problems at all. The juxtaposition of the traditional and the high-tech is one: the family are proud of their ancestors’ exploits but don’t hesitate to throw themselves at the challenge in the present. I’ve read of accusations at how it’s pushing some patriotic pro-Japanese/anti-American sentiment but personally I don’t think such things were on the writers’ agenda; it struck me as too innocuous for that.

Another recurring theme is that of communication: when Sakae orders everyone to get together and solve the problem there’s this wonderfully heartwarming and empowering sense that we’re all connected. Everyone has a part to play and has an opportunity to contribute their own individual talents, from the ageing matriach with her clear thinking and network of old friends to the outsider who’s drawn in through a misunderstanding but pitches in with the rest of them…just because it feels good to be among other people and be part of something that’s making a difference.

It’s easy to overlook these things at the time but when reflecting later on the big showdown, culminating in Natsuki’s online avatar going through a great send-up of the magical girl-style transformation and taking on the Love Machine with her family and millions of others behind her, Summer Wars has a lot of insight and intelligence that extends beyond giving what cinemagoers expect from a typical blockbuster movie. I got a suspicion that it’s not trying to glamorise the traditional, vanishing way of life; nor is it promoting or even condemning our reliance on technology.

The take-home messages are more complex yet simple at the same time. It shamelessly celebrates a way of life that many domestic audiences will see as escapism rather than realism, and portraying our love for electronic gadgetry as both a cause and solution for a lot of life’s problems. Fundamentally things are turned around by humans embracing the new, but simultaneously maintaining the age-old bonds that hold families and the big ‘family’ that is society as a whole together. While it lacks the personal focus of Tokikake and the longer moments of character study that accompany it, Summer Wars aims for bold and bright with warmth and relevance. And succeeds. When is the Blu-Ray out again?