With Japanese manga film adaptations, it is not always easy to separate the gems from the dross, and a great deal of dross is screened on Taiwanese screens simply to feed an appetite for all things Japanese. With Summer Wars (Sama Wazu), we have most definitely got a gem. This is the sort of movie that rivals, and for the technologically oriented perhaps even surpasses, the work of Hayao Miyazaki, who created such classic animations as Spirited Away (2001) and Howl’s Moving Castle (2004).
The story is about Kenji, an 11th grade computer whiz kid who is invited to stay at the family home of Natsuki, a girl he has a crush on. He is asked to pose as her boyfriend in the hope that this will mollify Natsuki’s grandmother, who is not long for this world.
Uncomfortable with this role, he spends a sleepless night working on a puzzle that is sent to his cellphone. He solves the puzzle. What he doesn’t realize, until it is too late, is that he has just cracked the security code for Oz, a virtual world that has become indispensable to the real world. Oz is where people do their banking, meet their friends, monitor their health and calibrate their GPS. His solution to the puzzle has provided root accesses to a malign force operating within Oz. Millions of user accounts are compromised and then used to create chaos in the real world. Total social meltdown is imminent.
This sort of scenario is not new, but Hosoda’s film brings it to life as a piece of fun family entertainment that proposes an all too possible result of our dependence on and casual acceptance of the Internet. There are a bunch of appealing characters, from Natsuki’s grandmother, the aging matriarch of an ancient samurai family, an uncle who recounts in tedious detail the not altogether glorious history of the family and its retainers in various historical conflicts, and the sullen teenager whose real life is lived as King Kazuma (a rabbit with martial arts skills) and who spends his time fighting his way through the highest level of Oz’s combat championships.
The family supports Kenji as he tries to put things right. Much action takes place within the virtual world of Oz, where King Kazuma and Kenji try to contain the chaos as the malignant force goes viral. The conflict, in all its graphic art glory, is utterly unreal, and also curiously exciting. And the spillover into the daily lives of the characters is very believable, largely as it is so closely linked with things most of us do every day — namely communicate and act through various online systems.
Summer Wars does a splendid job in representing one of the hottest topics of the modern world — computer security — and presenting it in a way that is both thoughtful and fun. This may be simple flat animation that harks back to technologies many decades old, but in terms of quality, it leaves many recent 3D animations trailing in its dust.
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