Summer Wars (2009)

Fairly conventional anime with incredible design work by Madhouse, who also did the animation for Satoshi Kon's Paprika. Summer Wars has a lot of interesting elements interspersed with too much formula. The basic set-up is that a shy teenage boy math genius is invited to the country estate of a cute teenage girl, where her large traditional family is celebrating the 90th birthday of her matriarch grandmother. The girl wants him to pretend to be her fiance. There's also an all-encompassing social networking virtual world called Oz (which holyoutlaw astutely referred to as hyper-Facebook or hyper-Second Life), where all the business of the world (banking and gaming) takes place and which is suddenly invaded by a malicious artificial intelligence. Only geeks and gamers can save the day.

The design work on Oz is gorgeous and incredibly detailed, building on the sprawling phantasmagoria of Paprika to create a sense of tens of millions of avatars and icons. The large cast of characters, most of them from a family with a long, eventful history that they love to talk about, creates a sense of complexity and social depth. Unfortunately the teen romance and superheroics and family melodrama seem pretty rote and rife with wish-fulfillment. Or maybe it's just too benign for me. I prefer the uncomfortable weirdness of Paprika, which gets into some very disturbing psychosexual areas underneath the colorful design. Although Summer Wars does at least have a fairly bracing political subtext that's critical of the U.S. military (which is perhaps also reflective of its own Japanese nationalism). Also, kudos for the gratuitous Rudy Rucker reference, buried in a list of names that functions as a punchline.

Summer Wars was directed by Mamoru Hosoda, whose The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (Toki o kakeru shôjo, 2006) has a great reputation. Anybody seen that one?

QOTD

"It is perhaps scarcely an exaggeration to claim that, in this opera, the entire 'natural' musical order of things is inverted; 'inverted' being the operative (and in this case appositely loaded) word, since the result of inverting a perfect fourth is a perfect fifth, and what is the musical meaning of 'Quint' but a fifth? I am aware that this is in effect asking the reader to accept that the entire musical structure of The Turn of the Screw was motivated by a pun; and while I feel that Britten must have been aware of the musical implications of Quint's name, I think it likely that they unconsciously, rather than consciously, influenced his choice of vocabulary. Whatever the facts of this matter, we should not be chary of recognising Britten's achievement (a) in creating a sense of all-pervasive evil through the very musical formulas normally and naturally (but there is nothing 'normal' or 'natural' about The Turn of the Screw) associated with all-pervasive good, and (b) in avoiding totally the cliché of the augmented fourth/diminished fifth, the conventional, traditional diabolus in musica."

-- Christopher Palmer, "An Inversion of the Natural Order" (liner notes to Britten's original 1954 recording of the opera on Decca/London Records)