Summer Wars (2009)

[randy_byers]

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?

Comments

[wrdnrd]

Yes.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Netflix has it, so I put it in my queue. (Actually I'm pretty sure I'd seen your review before and that it's one of the reason I think of the movie as having a good reputation.)

[jackwilliambell.livejournal.com]

You made this sound so interesting that I checked for it on Netflix. Not available for streaming, sadly.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

It's still playing at the Varsity this week.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

We saw Summer Wars this afternoon and found it pretty disappointing, though beautiful. I could have done with more development of the family tension and less of the run-of-the-mill omigod we have to save the world so we don't have to talk about why the black sheep had to leave hom. It's true that in normal life, ordinary Japanese schoolchildren rarely have to defeat a supercolossal threat to life as we know it, but in anime, ordinary Japanese schoolchildren have to do so all the time. It's about as ordinary an excuse for not doing homework as you can get.

One of the things that was so terrific about The Girl Who Leap Through Time was that the protagonist had to deal with ordinary social complexities and do her homework and her chores even though she eventually also had to deal with a threat to life as we know it (I know that you won't find that to be a spoiler; it's like saying that everybody dies in an opera).

That one insect in the crepuscular dawn was almost worth the whole movie, though.

Have you seen The Illusionist yet? It's very sad and very, very beautiful.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

There were flies and moths in the theater when we saw Summer Wars, and they got between the projector and the screen, casting shadows on the movie. It was very distracting and caused people in the theater to laugh. Those are the only insects I remember seeing, dang it.

The Illusionist was third on the list of movies that opened a week ago that I would've liked to see in the theater. Now it looks as though I won't even see the second, Ip Man 2 (a Hong Kong martial arts movie about the guy whom Bruce Lee studied under). Unless, that is, either movie sticks around for a third week. (I'm off to Corflu on Wednesday and probably won't have time to hit the theater before then.) In any event, I can always check out the DVD.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

There was a fly in the theater when we saw it, too, sometimes in the theater itself and sometimes in the projection booth. It's maddening that there isn't a live projectionist armed with a flyswatter to protect the film from such distractions.

The insect I had in mind was in the film, in the sunrise scene just after Kenji solved the puzzle. I can't remember if it was a grasshopper or a preying mantis. Whichever it was, it was perched on a plant in the center of the morning glories for a moment, then it flew away as the sky got lighter and a morning glory opened. It was a lovely moment of animation.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Ah, I do remember the morning glory unfurling, now that you mention it. Lots of morning glories in the movie.