Summer Wars
At a glance...
- Directed by Mamoru Hosoda
- Released in 2009
- Runtime 114 minutes
- Watched at home
- Final feelings: all style, no substance
Learning afterwards that Belle is a spiritual successor to this movie makes so much sense, both in terms of the content of the films and in my distaste for both of them. I think I just don't mix well with these virtual world anime movies. Or maybe specifically with Mamoru Hosoda's version of virtual worlds. Maybe Sword Art Online has killed my ability to accept these game-world isekai stories with any grace or humor, I just find them annoying and facile. I get frustrated because we do live in a hyper-connected digital world, but the ways in which we're connected online is fundamentally distinct from this oversimplified universal-Second Life style setting of both Summer Wars and Belle1. At least in the digital world of Digimon (the TV show, haven't seen the movie in many years), the virtual space is embodied in a way that makes it feel more complimentary to the interpersonal drama of the children and their lil' guys.
Summer Wars feels like a movie that's set in two separate lanes and is just swerving between them with reckless abandon. On one side there are these rather lovely and multifaceted characters who comprise the big Jinnouchi family, who are all gathering to prepare to celebrate grandmother Sakae's 90th birthday. Maybe it's obvious, but I enjoy the film most when we're exploring this part of the story. Big family dynamics are my favorite. The very first scene at the big dinner table was the most visually engaging and beautiful part of the movie for me. I love when characters all have to sit and eat together, and it's cool to see an animated version of that. I think there is very strong characterization that helps distinguish all these people, which takes skill to do. Every scene where we got to see the family drama play out is enjoyable to me.
On the other side is OZ, a digital world where you can have your digital avatar and do digital things with your avatars. And also, apparently OZ is the same place where every government and municipality connects every part of their civil and military infrastructure all in one place. I do not like this side of the movie. Maybe it's just my work life creeping up in weird ways, but this feels like such a contrived system to make up that is so stupid and bad that my brain can't turn off the part that's like, "if you hired a single security engineer to look at this system they would say it was a bad idea". Everything in this part of the film feels contrived, like just a giant hook yanking you from place to place. Suddenly the bad guy is doing this, suddenly the bad guy is doing that. Both this movie and Belle have these big climactic sequences where everyone comes together to support the hero in defeating the force of evil, but they happen in a digital world and so the magnitude and scale feels hollow and cheap. I just don't give a shit about colorful little digital avatars saying, "use my account!" against a plain white background. That is the definition of all style, no substance to me.
Ultimately this is just a classic shonen-style anime wish-fulfillment fantasy for young boys. There's nothing wrong with that. It's probably a pretty good version of that genre of film. It's just not very interesting to me anymore. I don't think it's that special to make a movie where playing video games is uniquely virtuous, where the most popular girl asks you (because this movie is about you, young teenage boy in the audience) to pretend to be her boyfriend only to totally genuinely fall in love with you. I don't think it's very fun to let your cop and U.S. military-informant family members enjoy the festive fun of saving the world when it's the U.S. military themselves who should be held responsible2. The most fun anyone is having in this movie is the auntie watching high school baseball and I wish that I had watched a character drama about this woman supporting her kid in the baseball tournament. Japanese baseball is fucking awesome. You play baseball in the summer and it's a contest, that movie could totally still be titled Summer Wars.
My final thought is this: Miyazaki is just doing it better when it comes to the depicting romance and love in his films. This movie is constantly telegraphing and pushing for a specific outcome in the relationship between Kenji and Natsuki and I think that's boring. I don't think it's sweet when grandma looks at the camera and says, Kenji you better take care of this girl, because I don't see any reason why either character should give a shit about the other. I'm a humorless scrooge, I don't enjoy most relationships in these shonen anime because they are all the same kind of wish fulfillment. In Miyazaki's films, he has a sense of balance and mutualism between the two characters to make it clear to the audience how each person grows to appreciate and love the other through complimentary acts of care, service, and devotion3. That's why Sophie and Howl are memorable, why Chihiro and Haku are memorable, why Ashitaka and San are memorable, and why these two placeholder high-schoolers are not. Maybe if this movie didn't have to be constantly telegraphing that romantic point, it could have done something interesting with its core characters. I thought Kazuma was a girl in the beginning and hoped for a subversive connection there (everyone thinks he'll end up with one girl but actually it's the other girl who wins because they have a common interest). Then when it was revealed that he was a guy instead, I wanted Kenji to have a gay summer fling with him while trapped in this big drama house. They are cowards for denying me this!
To elaborate on this point (which I also kind of do later in the review), in real life all of these systems are deeply compartmentalized. Hospital and health care systems actually do get hacked all the time, but they don't live on the same places as the servers that run public libraries or local governments or online multiplayer video games. That simple fact defeats everything about the premise of the "evil AI" antagonist in this film, which means it is operating on a fantasy that is so far gone for me that it's hard to care. And the reason why OZ is constructed this way goes back to wish fulfillment. If video games are happening in the same places as actual important civil infrastructure, we can have space to imagine that our idle gaming actually matters. God, it's not even that I hate online video games, but I guess my frustration comes out because it just feels silly to me to want to hero-worship through them? And I bring up Sword Art Online because that is an evil piece of media and it's doing the exact same thing. Maybe there's no consequence to making art like this, but anything that reminds me of Kirito is just gonna piss me off.
The movie does very briefly mention that the U.S. military needs to be held accountable through a single line in a TV broadcast in the background of the concluding scene, which seems fine, except that it also says that there were no casualties for this mistaken AI-gone-rogue. Which we already know is false! There is at least one casualty of this hack! It's grandma! Her heart monitoring tech was hosted on OZ for some god-foresaken reason and it obviously failed during the big hack and then she literally dies the same night. I don't care that the doctor son is like, it was just her time to go. How could you be sure if the monitor that was keeping her alive failed the same night? Just another frustrating hand-wave to make everything seem good and happy at the end.
The U.S. military killed you, Sakae. Pile your corpse on the mountain of bodies in Japan that the United States is responsible for, not even your own movie could acknowledge the real entity responsible for your death. Ugh, this is what I'm talking about with the no substance thing. We can't even talk about the consequences of the random plot points that are critical to the conflict escalation of the movie. Why are we even watching this? What for? To see what kind of cataclysm this family can resolve through the internet that will set up two idiot high schoolers? Shonen anime must be stopped!
I'm paraphrasing Miyazaki's own words from his book Starting Point 1979–1996, which have been quoted often, such as in this Medium article that I found via web search. In my experience with anime especially, romantic plotlines feel egregiously formulaic, which I acknowledge might totally just be a feeling I have based on watching way too many of these shonen shows and movies for most of my 20's. It's the fact that every boy character has to have the same haircut to flag that he's an unkept loser nerd and every girl has to be perfectly cute and secretly also such a loser that she can't find any other more interesting boys to have in her life that gets to me. Natsuki is functionally a demigod in this film going back to Mount Olympus (Mount Fuji, more likely) to meet with the family deities to pay her respects and she has no reason to actually care about these boys that she recruits. And nowhere in the film does it suggest she secretly already has a crush on Kenji, she clearly has the hots for her own uncle (which as far as I'm concerned is perfectly fitting for this mythological pantheon of gods metaphor I'm working with here).