Cartoon Corner- Summer Wars

Originally posted at the DL February 2016

At heart, Summer Wars is a very simple movie.  In the sense that it tends to be straightforward or obvious, and telegraphs heavily.

Which is good.  It's good to remember that simple things can be amazing.  That straightforward or obvious isn't the same thing as stupid.  That making something easy to follow and accessible doesn't make it somehow less.



Before delving into all that, it's worth noting the visual spectacle of the movie.  I mean, the Oz sequences ARE pretty cool.  Granted they're extremely similar to the director's first major work, to a degree I gather borders on shot-for-shot remake at times.  Which in a way is one of the weaker parts of the movie because the way the 'fights' in Oz play out don't always quite make sense with the narrative here where I'm sure they were just fine in a Digimon movie.  Like... what does flooding Love Machine do exactly?  Like the first part I can kinda translate into some logic, tricking the core of the AI into a private server and cutting it off from the rest of Oz where it couldn't do any more damage, but what exactly does damaging it in Oz's battle mechanics... eh, let's not dwell.  It's silly and doesn't make sense sometimes and is there to look cool and give urgency to the family drama.
The rest of the movie looks slightly washed out sometimes, but that might be deliberate thing to contrast better with Oz.  That said... I once saw a thing on one of the director's other movies, where the host talked about how Hosoda liked to have characters cry.  And was one of the few animators where crying characters don't look adorable and noble when they cry, actually conveying 'inelegant blubbering'.  Which yeah, being primed to look for it, it's definitely a standout thing.  Also a big emotional moment in the movie anyways of course.

So Summer Wars is obviously about family, communication, and togetherness, and what's interesting is mostly how each level of the story reinforces it.  A lot of the characters are motivated by trying to serve the needs of the family, which is fine.  Except it's not.  Blood being thicker than water and watching out for your own is natural to people, but it's not enough, which is really repeated point of the film.  Kenji's own small family is fractured, but while this means he takes a certain joy in the liveliness of the Jinnouichis it also gives him a sense of perspective their large, close-knit clan almost missed.  We live in a world where all of humanity is one community, made literal with Oz in this world (if you're actually unfamiliar with the film, imagine if Facebook and Google joined forces and world governments and major corporations all decided to run their private security directly through them.  The whole internet as a single system.)  Even in times of trouble, turning your gaze wholly inward and ignoring the human community is wrong, even if nobody would fault you for it.  Granny calls it what it is, an attack by an enemy.  Here it's a single AI, but it's basic behavior is that of an internet troll; Humanity's enemy is spite, maliciousness, capricious destruction for the sake of it.  Ignoring it to focus on your own grief and lives is natural, but you have to fight against that instinct or it'll run wild until people really get hurt.

... okay wow that was not where I expected that paragraph to go.  Let's refocus.

Regardless of how it happens, people have to be connected and reach out to each other to make the world work.  Being isolated leads you to mistakes because you lose all sense of how your actions might affect others, while rallying around each other and making sure everyone knows what's happening and that they CAN help and CAN do more than they think is the most important thing.  There's little cycles of this through the whole movie; Natsuki gets Kenji in way over his head in the beginning, but Granny accepts his presence and tries to nudge him into believing in himself.  Wabisuke makes a troll AI to recoup the family fortune, Sakae rallies the country to work around the damage.  The family turns inward to prepare Granny's funeral, Kenji pushes them to realize that a lot more people could suffer the same.  The world basically gives up on salvaging Oz from Love Machine, Natsuki's card game inspires everyone to fight back on their own.

They really, really wanted to make sure you picked up on this.

Granted I can only assume Summer Wars is a bit more All Ages kinda audience, or is intended as such, so they're very careful to lay out all the later plot points so you know it'll be important later.  Still, as much as the hammer the point, it works because the whole cast always comes off as very genuine.  Yeah, I've met some of these people, these guys all make sense, y'know?

Much as the movie's disjointed sometimes, the parts all succeed really well at what they do and the recurring theme being very similar in each keeps it feeling like one overall story even though it could easily have not.

Rating- 8/10