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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