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.
The Nutbladder Ranking: 2010-02
February is 2 days too short I think. It’s jam-packed and I could use that extra time…at least so I can make more progress on the UC Gundam backlog. (I’m holding off on Unicorn until The Time Is Right. Even if that usually means RIGHT THIS MOMENT.) So much stuff, so little time. Let’s get on to it.
[Just to recall, this is just a list of things I found notable during this month.]
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