Summing Up Summer Wars
Tokikake:
Summer Wars:
Sometimes I wish I was more of a graphic artist, so I can illustrate my points without words.
Let me open with an anecdote. I was talking to some guys (non-anime people) about this film I saw over the weekend. I am a person of few words, so I described Summer Wars’ plot as, to paraphrase:
“So you got this high school geek who somehow got tricked by this girl, who goes to her school, to help her out during summer vacation. He ended up going to her family’s reunion because there are a lot of old people and they need extra help. Stuff happens. Towards the end of the movie they ended up trying to save the world from a rogue AI who threatens to blow up some nuclear power plant or something.”
Isn’t that 24 in a nutshell?
I think that’s distorting what makes Summer Wars a good film. But as media consumers, what I’ve describes should flag as something, at the very least, intriguing. It’s one of those things that reminded me of anime from the 90s; it combined crazy hijinks with the outright ordinary. It’s catchy at least in concept, regardless of how the show may have truly been.
At the same time, my description above isn’t so far off the mark. I pulled some key elements of the show and threw them together–namely the basic setup and the driving force of the plot for the second half of the film. Maybe this is why Summer Wars is sort of a difficult thing to process. It’s got that stuff on top of your Tokikake-style family drama. And then the Google-Murakami world, the King T. Kazuma things. (T is for trap right?) Then there’s the action/tension vehicle. Then comes the meta references.
If we assume that a family film, a blockbuster formula, has to appeal to multiple sorts of audience, then this sort of mix and match is a good old try at it, yes?
But I think we all will agree that the mix in Summer Wars is a far cry from what we’ve seen in Pixar’s works. If anything, Summer Wars is a little too otaku-ish. It’s almost like a brilliant and almost-eloquent man, with good things to say, but waves his hands and glosses over the detail, presuming his listeners already have some idea what he was going to say in the first place. His constructs are like an intricate, 3D object made of paper, an origami that reminds of databases. It appeals on a visceral level but only very few can digest what it is in entirety, simply due to the background knowledge necessary to understand.
Thankfully that might very well be the right presumption; most do have some background knowledge necessary. But it’s the kind of presumption that I wish nobody had to make. It’s the kind of bets that good stories make and win, but the best stories don’t even bother with.
Well, unless you are that kid at the NYICFF showing that had to ask how do people play games over the internet.
BONUS: Summer Wars versus Tokikake summed up in one picture. In other words, Tokikake is missing:
And to think Tokikake is actually about a picture!
I want to see Summer Wars versus Children’s War Game summed up in one picture
It would be just a screen cap of mixi.
I think out of all the crazy things that happened in Summer Wars, the only element where I found myself at a loss was the importance of hanafuda. I get why it’s important in the narrative, but at the same time I don’t KNOW hanafuda the way I feel like I almost recognize Oz and the Love Machine. It’s like you say, a universe of assumed knowledge.
yeah as I stated before the hanafuda thing confused me as well.
If I were to sum up Summer Wars in a picture it would definitely be this one: http://timmaughanbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/SummerWars7.jpg
Wintermuted over at Animediet really touched on what it was I liked about the show. He said:
“Satoko Okudera’s script lays out a diverse cast of memorable family members that never stray too far from any real clan, and offers a grand argument for the bright side of technology, and its place in the contemporary family.”
And that’s really what I love about Summer Wars. Not the grand battles and the family togetherness but the embrace of modern technology on a multi-generational scale. For me, everything in that movie was set up to that scene where both the modern and the traditional patch things up and lay some whoop-ass on some malevolent AI.
This was one of the thoughts that came to my mind while I was thinking about the film. Overall it is fairly viewpoint neutral about the bad-new-tech schtik, even if we’re still beating on a rogue AI. Later on I think Hosoda confesses that a lot of what is in Summer Wars was inspired by exactly the use of sites like twitter and mixi, and how everyday life has changed in the past years in this area.
To say that Summer Wars is a bit too “otaku-ish” is like saying it was too Japanese. I doubt there is an easy way to substitute hanafuda with another game that viewers from all around the world could truly appreciate. I feel that it was not at all inappropriate for a Japanese production to feature a game known in Japan. It is with great ease that I can say that the movies most of us truly value as great works are filled with references that many people throughout the world have never been exposed to.
Regardless, the game has significance. The theme of history is prevalent in the art style, but also in the family unit. I’m not at all familiar with hanafuda, but the significance was in what hanafuda represented. It reminded me of the games I used to play with my family when I was younger. The game brought their family, and the world, together. I didn’t have to have intimate knowledge of hanafuda to contextually understand the significance.
This universe of assumed knowledge concept is a bit presumptuous. Clearly, those with the knowledge of everything presented in the film will enjoy the film. However, those without the knowledge cannot enjoy the film.
Of course, this is an oversimplification. There are varying degrees involved. If a viewer had no concept of the internet at all, then I would agree that he or she would have a hard time understanding the story. Other than that, I hardly think there was enough foreign content to take away from the film.
I feel that the overall emotions the film aimed to invoke were successfully achieved. Regardless of the rules of hanafuda or the “otaku” elements, the theme of family unity is clear. Whether or not one might be able to appreciate concepts like internet communities or over-reliance of central computer systems has no bearing on the main theme of this movie. If anything, those are intriguing side thoughts to an otherwise enjoyable family aimed film.
Hmm, I don’t think it’s too Japanese in the sense of Hanafuda–that is not a reference. What makes it “otaku-ish” is, for example, like the John & Yoko joke. There were a lot of random cultural references in there, and for what purposes? Why a RX-7? Why a Dell? Why the iPhone? Nintendo DS? It’s all there for good reasons, I’m sure, but weerrrrd.
>> Other than that, I hardly think there was enough foreign content to take away from the film.
Well, what can I say, if you don’t understand some of the key concepts in the film, you won’t understand some important plot issues and you may not be able to follow the plot well. A lot of what happens in Summer Wars seem beyond obvious to you and I but they are not so clear to a 6yo or some grandmother. And both of those kind of people are well within the target audience of this movie. It doesn’t achieve that sort of universality that better summer-blockbuster types can.
That’s not even the otaku-ish things I was talking about.