Summer Wars
Director: Mamoru Hosoda
Production: Studio Madhouse
Released: August 1, 2009 (Japan)

For the true otaku, the story about Summer Wars began about 10 years ago with Hosoda's two Digimon films. The second of the two, Bokura no War Game as it was called in Japan, featured a similar story in which children and digimons banded together to fight an unknown menace from the internet, with very real consequences in real life. In a nutshell, Summer Wars doesn't stray from that formula a whole lot. (The US release of the Digimon films were edited, changed and remixed; the two Hosoda films made up parts 1 and 2 of the North American Digimon: The Movie. Over 40 minutes of original footage was removed.)

The biggest difference between Summer Wars and Tokikake (and Bokura no Wargame) is perhaps also the most important thing about Summer Wars--and that is the message of a family that learns to live, love, and forgive, to work together to save the world. And saving the world is where the fun is.

The online menace in Summer Wars is a rogue AI who has taken over "the internet," or rather, OZ, a massive online world that controlled all aspects of modern living. Like a good cliche, you can do all sorts of things with OZ, from playing cards over the net to paying your taxes. The lead male is a typical 10th-grade nerd, Kenji, who is a bit of an introvert and is unsure of himself. The lead female character is the charismatic, energetic high school idol, Natsuki, who predictably drags the helpless Kenji to her extended family reunion, and her grandmother's 90th birthday.

While Kenji's motive to go along with the selfish demands of the school's hottest chick may be self-centered, soon the devil's bargain comes to light and Kenji has to live with Natsuki's 18 relatives through the next three days. It doesn't help that Natsuki's clan, perhaps a better term than merely family, traces back several hundred years before the era of warring states; one of Natsuki's numerous uncles retell the glorious detail of how 2000 clansmen and subjects fend off Nobunaga's many-times-larger army on their home soil.

Things get worse when Natsuki's ulterior motive surfaces--Kenji is to pretend to be Natsuki's boyfriend, in order to appease the clan matriarch, grandma Sakae, so she can pass on without regrets. The wizened old woman, however, catches on much faster than Natsuki realizes, but accepts Kenji anyway out of some kind of foresight that only 90-years-old Japanese clan heads can explain.

Long story short, the audience suffer and rejoice as Kenji does, from one awkward moment to another, along with Natsuki and her extended family. Action mixes with drama when the big family buckles with stress, and action in OZ translates to slick CG fight scenes on the screen. Romance blossoms, jokes fly, OZ renders its Google-white palette onto our retinas glued to the silver screen. It's a ride.

The link between OZ and the real world is my favorite part of Summer Wars. People's portable electronics got good screen times, as everyone in the film had their preferred internet device, from a Dell XPS to Nintendo DS Lite to the iPhone. At one point in the film, everyone in the extended family logs into OZ, as each held out some kind of device, may it be a phone or a game console or a computer, for dear life.

And just like how personal electronics surrounds the lives of both the young and the old, Summer Wars is a film that will appeal to all ages. The visuals are overwhelming at times, to say the least; there are all sorts of tidbits that will appeal to someone, at some age segment. It's an energetic experience that keeps you wondering what will show up on screen next.

In the same way, it's a little tough to process the movie as you watch it. It isn't that the story is confusing, but rather there are so many little things that you can pick up, may it be some subtle hints between two random relatives that point at the history they may have had, or even just some simple jokes about a Japanese fisherman's penchant for squid, and where have I seen it before? It seems to be too distracting.

Perhaps in this way, Summer Wars is a messy experience. The characters and their interactions still managed to be organic enough, despite being mostly an action-adventure vehicle. However it was tough to make sense out of it, a contrast compared to the Girl Who Leapt Through Time. And while we could ponder about Tokikake's moving space-time drama in the life of a girl, it's much more difficult to see that sort of depth in any one character in Summer Wars.

At the NYICFF showing, none of that was a problem. Being a certified children's film festival, the screening was packed with well-behaved children who ate up Summer Wars like some awesome new toy. At the same time, the kids all picked up on the important things in the film--the visuals, the awesome antics of King Kazuma, the plot, and how being in a big family can be a great thing. I was sure at the end of the screening, regardless of age, everyone left home with something to talk about.