For
the generation raised on Marvel’s Star
Wars comic books, King Kazma will bring back memories of Jaxxon, the big
bad rabbit mercenary. This particular
battle bunny is actually one of many avatars in OZ, a virtual reality community
under attack in Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer
Wars (trailer
here), which
screens this weekend as part of the IFC Center’s retrospective tribute to GKIDS,
the animated film distributor and producer of the New York International Film
Festival.
In
about twenty seconds from now, our dealings in OZ will become just as important
as life in the real world. For a
socially incompetent high school math genius like Kenji Koiso, OZ is both a
more comfortable environment and a prestigious part-time employer. Through dumb luck, his out-of-his-league
classmate Natsuki Shinohara hires him to pretend to be her boyfriend at her
great grandmother Sakae Jinnouchi’s ninetieth birthday festivities. Of course, Koiso is painfully awkward around
her family, especially after he inadvertently launches a global emergency. Solving a brain-frying mathematical equation sent
from an anonymous email, Koiso unknowingly provides the code that allows an
anarchistic AI program to take over OZ’s systems. Obviously, mathematics is about all Koiso is
smart about.
Absorbing
the avatars of utilities managers and government officials, the so-called “Love
Machine” proceeds to wreak havoc on public safety with their passwords. However, Shinohara’s anti-social cousin
Kazuma Ikezawa still controls his avatar, King Kazma, OZ’s reining martial arts
champion. He and Koiso will mount the virtual resistance to Love Machine, while
the revered Jinnouchi provides spiritual leadership to her extended family of
first responders.
Arguably,
Summer is one of the most visually
distinctive anime features produced outside of Studio Ghibli (whom GKIDS also
sometimes distributes). Hosoda has
created an unusually baroque world in OZ.
It is quite a trippy site to behold, where the cute and the weird interact
in surreal harmony. He also makes some valid points regarding our over-dependence
online social networks and related time-sinks. However, placing some of the
blame for the AI debacle on the U.S. Army is an unnecessarily annoying bit of
anti-Americanism. In retrospect, it
seems particularly ill conceived at a time when China is essentially claiming
all of Japan’s air space as its own (and pretty much everyone else’s too).
On
the plus side, Summer persuasively argues
the case to kids that math and computer programming are cool. Satoko Okudera’s screenplay (based on Hosoda’s
story) nicely balances the multi-world threatening Armageddon with Shinohara’s
family drama. It also features strong
female characters, including the compassionate but iron-willed Jinnouchi and
the independent minded Shinohara.
