Summer Wars
| Summer Wars | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Original Manga | N/A |
| Director | Mamoru Hosoda |
| Format | Anime (Movie) |
| Made By | Madhouse |
| Length | 114 minutes |
Contents
Genre
Sum it up in a Sentence:
A boy inadvertently helps a malicious AI to take over the computer network that runs the infrastructure of the world, and now must prevent the impending Apocalypse.
Main Description
Kenji is your typical teenage misfit. He's good at math, bad with girls, and spends most of his time hanging out in the all-powerful, online community known as OZ. His second life is the only life he has until the girl of his dreams, Natsuki, hijacks him for a starring role as a fake fiancé at her family reunion. Things only get stranger from there. A late-night email containing a cryptic mathematical riddle leads to the unleashing of a rogue AI intent on using the virtual word of OZ to destroy the real world. As Armageddon looms on the horizon, Kenji and his new family set aside their differences and band together to save the world they inhabit.
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Personal Opinions
IShallRiseAgain
I liked Summer Wars at first but it has a really terrible underlying message when you actually stop and think about it. Its basically all about having to conform to tradition, and the wishes of your family.
The entire plot starts off, because the female love interest is being pressured to have a boyfriend/fiancee despite it not necessarily being what she wants. She like everyone else in her family is being controlled by the desires of the family matriarch. The only exception is her cousin, who tried to run away from the old woman's control. He is punished for doing so.
The virtual world of OZ represents a new world order, one where tradition and family obligations do not hold sway over individuals. The hubris of having such ideas eventually leads to its destruction, and almost causes the destruction of the real world. The real world is saved only when the old world order comes to the rescue. The old lady's connections allows the catastrophe to be averted. Also, the evil AI is defeated by a traditional card game, and not something more modern.
Finally, despite their relationship getting hardly any development, the protagonist and his love interest end up together. This is because the girl's personal feelings don't actually matter. The protagonist earned the approval of her family, and so he gets the girl as the reward.
It does have high quality animation though.
PotU
I knew nothing about this movie before I started watching it other than the art style, which reminded me a lot of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, a movie I enjoyed a lot. It starts out pretty good and I enjoyed it at first, but when the stuff with the internet took over the plot, it unfortunately got worse and worse the longer I watched. It seemed like Digimon combined with the worse parts of Dennou Coil to create something that is basically Second Life: The Anime, which is a shame since it looked so promising in the beginning. The one thing the movie had going for it were visuals, but other than that I wouldn't recommend this movie at all.
Nate RFB
Mamoru Hosoda is a pretty cool dude. With Satoshi Kon's death, he is one of the last few "young" anime film directors worth following. Although he had some work previously (yes, indeed, the Digimon movie), it was The Girl Who Leapt Through Time that was his breakout work. However, without a strong follow-up, TGWLTT's success might have been written off as a fluke. I absolutely feel that Summer Wars has therefore fully cemented Hosoda as the go-to director to watch. SW is full of a charismatic energy that was found in great amounts in TGWLTT, and I would argue even more so in SW. Sure, much of it is silly and over the top, but every scene has so much spunk that everything feels very snappy and fun. Indeed, "fun" is the best description I can give SW. And this is all before getting into the production values, which are astounding. Pay close attention to background characters' actions and dialogue; there is always something going on, with everything in everyone's actions being very fluid and not static. Charming, vibrant, and gorgeous, Summer Wars was one of the best anime films to come out in the last few years. Some people will not care for the Oz segments which I guess is inevitable. It really comes down to how bent out of shape you get when anime decides to have a little fun with computers I guess.
linall
I tear up at the end of Summer Wars even now, years after I first saw it. Which is weird because the sorrow-filled portions of the movie are long past at that point. The main characters have overcome the conflict of the movie. The emotional tone of the movie has shifted to elation, there is even one of those kiss/nosebleed gags and the fade to credits is accompanied that moment (which is quite prevalent in Japanese media) where everything is blamed on Americans. Everything ends on a high note, but I find myself dabbing at my eyes with a tissue. There is just something about the end of a well told story. No matter how well it ends, it ends regardless.
My feelings on this point are complicated by a firm belief that the great storytellers never return to a moment. It's impossible to capture the same feeling, the same energy on the day the scene was finalized. The powerful moments in media, indeed in life as well, don't resonate because they were perfect moments, but because they were nearly perfect.
So I tear up (now anyway, I broke down entirely in the theater the first time I saw it, along with a good number of others) plagued by an ineffable feeling of loss. It's like coming to the end of a carnival ride. When the car slides to a stop and the restraints are relaxed, you are released into a completely indifferent world. While you can take some of the experience with you, or simply requeue, the feeling is never the same.
The only thing I've found to hold back the melancholy of endings is recommending the media to others, so they can share in it's triumphs and tragedies. So I guess the whole point of this long, purple post, is: watch Summer Wars. I don't know if it will speak to your soul the same way it did to mine, but I am confidant it's a conversation you'll enjoy having.
