Recommendation of the Week (10/04): Summer Wars

Increasingly as I get older, I am finding it harder and harder to care about anime. Its been 20 years since the boom of the early nineties where we were all amazed that there were cartoons that had 18 certificates and exploding heads and er tentacle rape. Since then the anime we have gotten in the west has mostly been series based and although people have tried, I just can’t get interested in Bleach, One Piece or Naruto. Apart from the work of the late Satoshi Kon and the occasional Studio Ghibli release there isn’t much else worth paying attention to. Now after The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and with Summer Wars under his belt, Mamoru Hosoda could be the natural successor to Hayao Miyazaki, a director whose work is stunning to look at but also engages the brain and heart. It may have been the fact that recent tragic events in Japan made me see the subject matter here in a whole new light which I wouldn’t have previously or that I recently have had tragic family related news but Summer Wars hit me hard and engrossed me in a way I did not expect. The nearest possible idea I can give you of how unique this film is, is to say its like The Royal Tennenbaums crossed with Tron with a sprinkling of Playstation game Little Big Planet.

Summer Wars takes place in a Japan which is dominated by the social network site Oz. People practically use it for everything, businesses do deals and hold meetings through it, customers shop through it and infrastructure manages the day to day dealings of running a country through its system. Of course there is also fun stuff like gaming and the social chat rooms and users are represented by often cute ,sometimes cool avatars. Oz is essentially the dominant media entity in the world.

At the beginning of the story we meet maths wiz and part time Oz code writer Kenji who is interrupted from programming by his secret crush Noriko because she needs somebody to pose as her fiancé for the weekend when she goes back home to see her large family ruled over by a no nonsense Grandma. Kenji agrees and off he goes to the large home of the Jinouchi clan in the countryside. Much embarrassment and awkwardness follows as Kenji is embarrassed or humiliated by Noriko’s aunts, uncles and siblings but Granny takes a shine to him. The first night Kenji is sent a text with a large code and a request to text back the answer. As he is unable to sleep and being a genius with numbers; Kenji sends back the answer. He awakes the next day to find news reports that Oz is suffering from some kind of virus and users are experiencing severe problems in the virtual world with several millions of user accounts being stolen. The news reports also claim that Kenji is responsible much to the disappointment of the Jinoushi clan who were just starting to warm to the boy. Kenji protests his innocence and the attempt to take him in is thwarted when the artificial intelligence program known only as Love Machine starts to jam traffic signals and other every day electronics that the country is dependent on causing floods and a disruption to essential services. Its up to Kenji and the members of the family to stop Love Machine from their house in the country and restore order to the country.

That’s as basic a summary of the plot as I can quote without spoiling it. There is a lot of stuff in there about familiar relations, estranged uncles with plot revelations and shy nephews coming into their own and kicking arse online. As well as the core love story between Kenji and Noriko which does not dominate the plot but plays out nicely. Somewhere around the halfway point in Summer Wars I found myself really invested in what was going on, the threat gets deeper and more serious as the story progresses and at one point it really does not look like any of the characters will make it to the end. Mamoru Hosoda wisely lets us get to know the characters and lets the situation settle instead of diving head long into the kaleidoscopic world of Oz and boring us with endless scenes of avatars fighting it out in a virtual world. Now don’t get me wrong, there are some cool scenes of arse kicking in a virtual world and they look as cool as you would expect, but the fact is they play out in a world that essentially is not real although they have real world implications. Wisely all the events that play out in Oz are shown to have an emotional impact in the real world which could have been silly but somehow works really well. Its something that the makers of Tron Legacy forgot; make the threat important. The key thing here is the animation , the scenes that take place in Oz are colorful and elaborate with no artist bound by the limitations that a real world setting would impose, by contrast the scenes in the real world are simple and unfussy creating a clear delineation between the two realms. It was a clever way of doing it to be sure and is never jarring or intrusive.

If you have written this off as just another anime, I would encourage you to give it a shot. Summer Wars is full of fun and pathos and a great example of what can be achieved by Anime when its not trying to titillate. Without doubt the recommendation of the week!

by Chris Holt

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