Category: Anime

NYICFF 2013: Wolf Children w/ Mamoru Hosoda

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narutaki Who wasn’t excited to hear about Mamoru Hosoda’s next movie? At this point, he is the anime film director I have my eye on most. Us New Yorkers have been very lucky to have his films appearing at the New York International Film Festival.

I often feel one of the main problems with success is that it raises people’s expectations for your next work. J. D. Salinger’s famous struggle with the success of The Catcher in the Rye immediately comes to mind. Mamoru Hosoda might not struggle with a pressure to the same degree but I feel fandom watches him with a certain amount of expectations after The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Summer Wars.  I know that Narutaki and I had a decently high level of expectations as our Summer Wars review clearly shows. So the question becomes does he live up those high expectations as one of the few young directors still able to make original anime movies that have a wide range of appeal? Does Wolf Children live up to high bar we set for it based on his previous works?

 Wolf Children is a film that I mulled over quite a lot after it and was able to realize a few things about the themes. That’s not to say that my gut reaction was irrelevant, but more that the story has layers that can be peeled away. This movie is told from the mother’s perspective of watching her children grow up, change, and move through life. And it is about accepting their decisions even if they aren’t the ones she’d choose for them.

Honestly, being the selfish twenty-something that I am, it was hard to accept the outcome and some of the choices of the characters in the movie. People don’t always turn out the way you want them to, but that doesn’t make their decisions any less relevant. Acceptance is a big part of this film.

Hana, a college student falls in love with wolf man and has two children with him. When he tragically dies Hana is left to raise Ame and Yuki by herself. As the troubles of being a single parent of two lycanthropes mount while living in the big city Hana moves out to the country in hopes that it will help her children. In a rural  environment Ame and Yuki mist choose between embracing their feral natures in the wilderness or integrating into human society.

There is quite a bit to love about the story told in Wolf Children. It is an interesting look at the lives of two children caught between two worlds where they don’t exactly fit into either. But the story is mostly from their mother’s perspective. We see how she raises them and how she deals with the decisions they make. A good deal of the first half of the movie is seeing what tribulations Hana must endure to raise her very unique children. The story then shifts when Ame and Yuki start going to school and Hana moves the background as the narrative focuses on the paths of the two wolf children.

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Ongoing Investigations: Case #205

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This week I decided to highlight some first chapters of series that were new to me.

xxxHOLiC Rei is obviously CLAMP realizing by getting rid of Yuuko Ichihara as a part of the ending of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle might have made a serious mistake. So in xxxHOLiC Rei she is back. It is not entirely clear why she is back. It could be that this is an alternate time line, it could just be stories set before the end of the original, or it could just go unexplained. But I have a feeling that with a title like Return, and knowing that CLAMP is CLAMP, I have a feeling it is much more likely there is some more roundabout explanation that might tie into that xxxHOLiC: Rō episode. But that is only something that will be clear as the series goes on.

The story is pretty simple in that it mostly establishes that Yuuko is alive, Watanuki is her cooking servant and assistant, and Doumeki can enter the shop which was not always the case in the original series. Other than that it is a little comedy and mostly set up for the first costumer for the shop. If anything hints to something major going on its Watanuki’s strange headache which cannot be random especially considering the scene that immediately triggers it.

The series still has a vibrant mixture of sexiness, comedy, and mystery. I’m sort of hoping being freed from being linked to Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle that xxxHOLiC might be able to better spread its wings. It always seems a bit caged in when it was the sister story to Tsubasa. I want to see where it could go on its own. Plus it is always nice to have Yuuko back.

sep-comics

 I read issues 1-3 of Cyberforce (2012) a revamp of the 90s American comic series which was funded through Kickstarter. The story takes place in a future where an evil corporation, CDI, with machinations of altering the world for their own purposes has taken to experimenting with cyber implants. A rogue group of soliders from said experiments is attempting to take them down and exact revenge.

Things really begin when Carin daughter of the heads of CDI learns of a dangerous plan called Aphrodite Protocol and runs away to seek out the help of Morgan Stryker along off the grid soldier. I of course love that Carin has a dog named Ninja who is a cyber enhanced badass, but he was captured and being treated badly!

So far the book is high on laying out the world and plot rather than fleshing out the characters. But there are explosions! And crazy cyber people! Also no one wears shirts? Anyway, it has been an entertaining read so far.

I super love the cover of issue 3.

You can read Cyberforce for free on Comixology.

The Ongoing Investigations are little peeks into what we are watching and reading outside of our main posts on the blog. We each pick three things that we were interested in a week and talk a bit about them. There is often not much rhyme or reason to what we pick. They are just the most interesting things we saw since the last Ongoing Investigation.

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Hotarubi no Mori e: Love That is So Close Yet So Far

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Two common things I hear people asking for when it comes to anime is more easily consumable titles and more titles for women. Back in ye olde golden days (which are never as golden as people member them) it was easier to find short little OVAs. They were often just commercials for much longer manga series but it was nice to be able to sit down and watch a series in a single sitting.

And no matter what the length it seems that while manga has a decently even split between the sexes when it comes to anime the medium always has had a male focused bias when it comes to what shows get made. Shojo anime is just uncommon enough that it is almost always appreciated by its target audience when it is animated.

So Hotarubi no Mori e (Into the Forest of Fireflies’ Light) is a wonderful combination of these two somewhat overlooked niches. It is a single stand alone shojo story that requires no outside knowledge and can be watched in a single 44-minute sitting. In that time it tells a  simple but bittersweet love story. As the original story of Hotarubi no Mori e was written by Yuki Midorikawa, of Natsume’s Book of Friends fame, you know that you will surround yourself in a relaxing if slightly melancholy story of yokai that pulls on the heartstrings.

narutaki I must admit that I’m a total sucker for human-falls-in-love-with-ghost stories. It isn’t too hard to see the beauty of love transcending the bounds of time and death. There is also the romantic yet inevitable melancholy ending that is sure to follow.

I also had a lot of confidence that this move would evoke those wondrous qualities because of Natsume’s Book of Friends similar feeling. Japanese myth and romance come together in perfect harmony in Hotarubi no Mori e.

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