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.
June 9 to June 15 A photo of two men riding trendy high-wheel Penny-Farthing bicycles past a Qing Dynasty gate aptly captures the essence of Taipei in 1897 — a newly colonized city on the cusp of great change. The Japanese began making significant modifications to the cityscape in 1899, tearing down Qing-era structures, widening boulevards and installing Western-style infrastructure and buildings. The photographer, Minosuke Imamura, only spent a year in Taiwan as a cartographer for the governor-general’s office, but he left behind a treasure trove of 130 images showing life at the onset of Japanese rule, spanning July 1897 to
One of the most important gripes that Taiwanese have about the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is that it has failed to deliver concretely on higher wages, housing prices and other bread-and-butter issues. The parallel complaint is that the DPP cares only about glamor issues, such as removing markers of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) colonialism by renaming them, or what the KMT codes as “de-Sinification.” Once again, as a critical election looms, the DPP is presenting evidence for that charge. The KMT was quick to jump on the recent proposal of the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) to rename roads that symbolize
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In an interview posted online by United Daily News (UDN) on May 26, current Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) was asked about Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) replacing him as party chair. Though not yet officially running, by the customs of Taiwan politics, Lu has been signalling she is both running for party chair and to be the party’s 2028 presidential candidate. She told an international media outlet that she was considering a run. She also gave a speech in Keelung on national priorities and foreign affairs. For details, see the May 23 edition of this column,
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