Film: Summer Wars
Release date: 28th March 2011
Certificate: 12
Running time: 109 mins
Director: Mamoru Hosada
Starring: Sumiko Fuji, Ryûnosuke Kamiki, Ayumu Saitô
Genre: Anime
Studio: Manga
Format: DVD/Blu-ray
Country: Japan
From Madhouse, the studio behind The Girl Who Leapt Through Time comes Summer Wars, a story of love, family and a computer simulated world like no other. The film has already won several awards in Japan, including 2010 Japan Academy Prize for Animation Of The Year and the 2010 Japan Media Arts Festival's Animation Division Grand Prize. Summer Wars also has its fair share of accolades on the Western shore, having been an (unsuccessful) submission for this year’s academy awards.
Kenji Koiso is a young high school student with an exceptional gift in mathematics, who works as a part-time moderator for the massive computer simulated world known as OZ. When fellow classmate and crush Natsuki Shinohara offers him the chance to participate in the 90th birthday of her great-grandmother, Sakae Jinnouchi, he quickly accepts. What he doesn’t expect is for Natsuki to introduce him to her entire extended family as her fiancé.
While the celebrations are going on, Kenji receives a mysterious e-mail made up of mathematical code. After cracking the code, an artificial intelligence known as Love Machine uses Kenji’s OZ account and avatar to hack the mainframe, causing widespread damage. With the help of Natsuki’s cousin Kazuma, Kenji attempts to battle Love Machine. Failing, Love Machine continues to steal accounts and cause chaos across Japan.
Seeing the situation as war, the Jinnouchi family pull together to battle Love Machine both in the internet and the real world. With a satellite on a collision course to a Nuclear Power plant, it all comes down to a game of Hanafuda (a Japanese card game). But who will be the victor, Love Machine or Kenji and the Jinnouchi family?
From the very beginning, it is clear just how much imagination has gone into creating the virtual world of OZ. Opening with a virtual tour that displays how unique Hosoda’s creation is, we are presented a bright white world filled with a huge range of avatars – ranging from whales and pixelated faces to chipmunks and streetwise rabbits. These avatars are not only visually pleasing, but they also help define the characters and illustrate how different people can be between real and virtual worlds. While Kazuma comes across as quiet and withdrawn in reality, in OZ, he is the fighting superstar King Kazuma. With so many multi-player online games such as World Of Warcraft around, this is something that many people can probably relate to.
The distinctly bright colours of OZ contrast perfectly with the more subdued reality of the Jinnouchi estate, making the differences between the two worlds even more apparent. Nevertheless, the two worlds are undoubtedly connected, with the hacking of OZ taking effect in reality, and in turn the only way to tackle it is to defeat the Love Machine head on in OZ. While the way Summer Wars goes about it is distinctly in anime style, it still provokes a startling commentary on this world that has become so dependent on the internet. The film is also rife with product placement, with iPhones, laptops and even Nintendo DS’ appearing, just to make that connection even more hard hitting.
But for some Summer Wars won’t be a completely new experience, but more a cultivation of Hosoda’s work over his many years as a director. Anime fans might recognise the many similarities between Summer Wars and some of Hosoda’s earlier works, Digimon Adventure: Our War Game (released in the UK as part of Digimon: The Movie) and two short films he collaborated with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami on for French fashion house Louis Vuitton. Given the number of similarities and parallels between them, it isn’t a stretch to say that in many ways Summer Wars is very much an extended remake of Our War Game, but with the Digimon element removed yet fondly remembered in the form of the OZ’s avatars. With more time to weave a story and a larger budget, and a new technology to illustrate it, Hosoda’s dream of a virtual world has never looked more complete.
Despite this, Summer Wars still remains very much its own film, and what really makes that so is the characters. With a huge extended family, the variety of character traits in Summer Wars is staggering. Not only do the Jinnouchi family have to deal with the world going to hell, but also the kind of problems a family deal with in everyday life. When Love Machine creator and family black sheep Wabisuke turns up at the reunion, the family turn against him and treat him as an outcast. While Wabisuke is a horribly cynical person, his love for his Sakae is very real, as she loved and accepted him despite the circumstances behind his birth. And at the very end, a moment of tragedy within a crisis is what really solidifies them and brings them together.
With unparalleled imagination, visuals that are almost second to none and a powerful and heart-warming story, Summer Wars is a spectacle that truly has to be seen to be believed. With the potential to rival even Studio Ghibli’s masterworks, it is surely to be a film that will go down as one of anime’s modern greats. AJ
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