Summer Wars

There are some anime masterpieces which can be recommended as a must-see to virtually anyone, and not only fans of the genre. Movies like Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, etc.

If you know them you will understand what I mean. In addition to being visually compelling these also have an original plot with some twists here and there, and will leave you with the feeling that you have just watched something really awesome.

Let's be honest: Summer Wars will not enter this eternal hall of fame, mostly because the plot is far too conventional and straight-forward.

On the other hand, a solid plot is not necessarily a bad thing, and makes this movie suitable for a broad audience. While a real fan of anime will probably be disappointed by the lack of weirdness and original ideas, Summer Wars might be a real good starting point for a newbie.

And if you are willing to excuse the fact that the plot won't knock your socks off, apart from that Summer Wars is a really good movie. It does quite an excellent job in introducing literally dozens of characters and still managing to give every single one of them a unique personality.

The story unfolds on parallel levels (the action part about saving the world, the part about the values of a family, the dangers of relying too much on technology, a little bit of teenage love story, ...) - while each level is too obvious and shallow on its own, they blend in together nicely. Reminds me of a virtual chop suey - nothing special, yet very tasty.

The visual presentation is quite good, too. The scenes in the real world are well done, and the cyberspace world is amazing.

In conclusion, Summer Wars is OK. Not really original and far from being excellent, but good nevertheless. No unique masterpiece, yet solid work, and if you won't set your expectations too high, you will enjoy it.

Summer Wars is another excellent movie from Madhouse and Mamoru Hosada, the director of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

Like TGWLTT, Summer Wars is a science fiction movie with heart. Instead of the humorous, poignant tone of the previous movie, Summer Wars focuses on family bonds and the inherent potential for mayhem that is an unavoidable part of our incredibly connected, increasingly virtual society. It's an easy to follow story that should have a lot of appeal for a broad audience.

The dubbing and animation are wonderful, and the fact that so much of the events play out in the virtual world provides a lot of opportunities for some eye-catching visuals. The music is fine, but not quite up to the fantastic score of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

I slightly prefer TGWLTT, but both movies are fully recommended and I've given them the same score. They're wonderful films, even in comparison to the amazing movies that have been coming out of Studio Ghibli for years. I can't wait to see what Hosada is working on next.

If you can imagine the easy going yet fascinating Hayao Miyazaki stories, with their kind heartedness and deep Japanese roots being mixed with Denou Coil, you will get Summer Wars. It has good animation, a really cute story and features a cyber battle between a Japanese family and a malicious A.I. inside something that can be seen as the future of Facebook.

What I found really nice in the film is that traditional family values are mixed with modern views of the world, a beautiful countryside scenery is mixed with the virtual cyber world of OZ. There are both moral values to be learned from the story as well as the excitement of a crisis and how giving your best can get one past it. I found brilliant the way the scenes of cyber battle were intertwined with scenes of Japanese baseball, birthday then dying rituals, the individual traits of all of the members of the family, all without losing anything, just adding more and more depth to each scene.

I highly recommend it for all anime fans and for people who might become so, after watching a masterpiece like Summer Wars.

Summer Wars does a wonderful job of combining touching human Japanese animation with weird monster-fighting stuff. The former is the frame of the movie in which a young man finds himself caught in a friend's family drama involving a really cool old lady and a snarky black sheep. The latter involves a facebook-meets-second-life-meets-everything-else-on-the-internet entity that gets hacked. The two sections are beautifully integrated into a single, fantastic movie.

There are criticisms I could make if I really wanted to. The technology really makes no sense at all, and some remarkable idiocy has to happen in the real world to worsen things in the virtual one. But none of that bothered me, because the characters feel real and the animation in both worlds is absolutely gorgeous.

Summer Wars is one of the most ambitious animes to exist, ambitious doesn't always equal greatness on film as a result of being over-ambitious but Summer Wars is one of those that gets it right. Some characters are better developed than others, the main family members are very compellingly real but some of the side characters are sketchily written. If the film had less characters than it did the character development would have been even better.

The animation is just wonderful though and stylistically unlike any other I've seen, the colours are eye-popping and the backgrounds are so richly detailed and textured. None of it felt confusing to me. The cyber-battles are particularly strong in this regard, the action itself is thrilling and the visuals positively dazzle. Summer Wars has a music score that is both rousing and ethereal, and luckily mood-wise when matched with the animation and the tone of the storytelling it never jars. There is also a thoughtful script that handles its emotional themes very touchingly and remarkably maturely, while the story covers a lot but despite exploring several themes it doesn't feel too much. The family themes are ones that really resonate and charm, and while the message is not the most original it's a truthful message that doesn't patronise. The lead characters are engaging and the voice acting, both in Japanese and dubbing, is dynamic and expressive.

All in all, a beautifully executed anime and shouldn't disappoint anybody who likes Wolf Children and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. It's ambitious but apart from the writing of some of the characters it doesn't feel too much so. 9/10 Bethany Cox