Summer Wars follows a young mathematical genius who poses as the boyfriend to a girl he knows as a favor when she attends a family gathering for her matriarchal quasi-warlord-like grandmother’s 90th birthday in the scenic Japanese countryside. The plot of the film concerns the threat of collapse of a digital environment called “Oz” that the world has grown to depend on at the hands of a rogue AI program that has been released by the American military that is absorbing the accounts of users and gaining all of the administrative privileges of said accounts which is in turn affecting anything that the owners of those accounts could do and generally wreaking havoc in the real world. *takes a breath*
If those two sentences seem at odds with each other, I wish to state that is entirely purposeful: Summer Wars is a film about conflict as implied by the title, but it’s about a conflict of different generations, of different worlds and how as things change the basic details remain the same and all adversity can be overcome through working together. It’s a very effective and beautiful film that’s admittedly a little strange in places and it takes a while to sink in, but the short version is that I would definitely recommend it to anyone that gets a chance to see it. A good fully dubbed / subbed slightly-more-English-language-friendly version is due to be released in March.
And now for the long version.
I realise in the above paragraph I have neglected to mention that Summer Wars is animated (although if I have now included a picture, that will I suppose be obvious). I don’t know whether I have written about my love of animation before, but I’m sure I will again and might even go into more depth one day but to summarize something that my friends will often roll their eyes at when I launch myself into it, I adore animation. As a child I had very little time for anything that wasn’t animated and was fascinated and enthralled by anything that was. Therefore, upon being introduced to anime at around about the time that Spirited Away made it big during my first year of university it was a no-brainer that I would love the Japanese style of animation too. The back catalogue of Hayao Miyazaki’s previous films and almost everything he has released since are stunningly beautiful with incredibly rich visuals and hypnotizing animation, with the weighting and timing of each sequence feeling perfect. I say this to qualify that my love of animation has never really gone away, so I am a little biased and critically compromised when it comes to anything animated (although as a side note anything that is computer generated does not get a free ticket because it triggers parts of my brain that tell me when I’m watching a cutscene in a computer game and they almost make me feel like I should probably find the control pad that I’ve clearly put down somewhere because it’s no longer in my hands).
Summer Wars by contrast is not quite as rich or artistic as Miyazaki’s work, but at the same time I find that they are similar styles by virtue of their differences. The sections of Summer Wars that spend any time in the virtual world of “Oz” made me feel that I was watching a Miyazaki film gone digital: Some of the elaborate fantastical elements were missing, but the basic imagery and themes of the world were still there. The point that I am laboriously dragging myself towards is that like Miyazaki and like any master of animation is that Summer Wars really makes the most of its medium to tell a compelling story through its unlimited visual possibilities. I remember watching a documentary about the Simpsons and one of the producers there was saying that the greatest thing about animation was that you could do pretty much anything that you wanted to do that you just couldn’t do with live action.
The contrast that Summer Wars presents between old and new is really drawn out with the animation. The ancient family home in the countryside that has a deep history traceable back to the days of feudal Japan where the family still draws a sense of honour and nobility from is starkly contrasted with the digital garish “Oz”, a sort of second life-facebook web 2.0 hybrid that all of the world is connected including ordinary people up to major corporations, courts of law and governments. The visual style of “Oz” is a really unique way of portraying an online virtual reality, yet at the same time it is instantly recognizable as a place where users have a say in their own space as it invokes all of the eye bleedingly conflicting colour selection found if you browse MySpace for any length of time, and the sort of cluttered organization that you might find in a Facebook feed. At the same time, it all feels clean and beautiful. It is both recognizable as the sort of thing that our internet is heading towards and completely incomprehensibly alien. When the film pulls out of “Oz”, it is instead focusing on the family home in the countryside, using very fertile greens and calm blues to invoke a place that is wholly serene and near spiritual as an ultimate contrast to the virtual world that everyone relies on.
The film plays around with pacing incredibly effectively. At first I was convinced that it was just slow, but instead, it just takes its time to build setting and allow us to savor the status quo of life with the overlay of “Oz” that facilitates every day life. This allows us to also fully experience the chaos of the fall of “Oz” and let us see that it’s not just the equivalent of The World of Warcraft going offline for a few days. Doctors receive information about the status of their patients through devices that interface with Oz, nuclear power stations are monitored through similar devices as are the trajectories and flight patterns of orbiting satellites, and as the rogue AI devours accounts that have administrative access to these sorts of functions, the world finds itself slowly realizing that they are wholly dependant on and at the mercy of this online environment that they have poured themselves into. As the film moves into its third act, the pace dramatically picks up and we feel the sense of desperation in the main characters and feel the plight of the rest of the world as we come to the same realizations that they do.
The ultimate message of the film is that you can overcome an adversity as long as you confront it in a group, or a team and work together, having faith in your team mates or family or fellow man. This is then abstracted out a little more to show that this is true regardless of the conflict. Throughout the film, the family keep talking about their ancestors who fought against insurmountable odds to hold the land by trusting in each other and being a strong unit, and it is with the exact same determination and team work that they are able to eventually overcome and defeat the rogue AI at the end of the film. This is also reinforced by the way that there are identifiably three characters who attempt to save the world, and all of them fail when they are working by themselves. When they do all finally work together, it’s not done in a clichéd Saturday morning cartoon kind of way where everything just falls into place effortlessly, but in a very natural and organic way of them working together towards a common goal.
In fact, I can’t quite work out in my mind if what I feel is the films greatest weakness is actually its greatest strength. I didn’t ever feel that the main characters ever really grew in terms of their relationship. They appeared to be people doing things in a similar environment. Whereas I completely believed the family and was able to see the relationship they all had with each other and was utterly convinced by the large family gathering, the romantic subplot between the two main characters seemed to drop in and out of focus and take odd leaps forward and the other character who you could argue as being a main character was almost forgettable for large parts of the film, and never really said anything outside of what was going on, meaning it was very difficult to actually work out what any of these characters were really like. On the other hand, this is further reinforcing the collectivist message of the film. Individually, these people do mean less, whereas taken as a whole and part of a group, they gain strength and gravitas. It’s not necessarily a message I agree with or particularly like, but its very well expressed and very well portrayed.
Summer Wars is definitely worth seeing, especially if you are also a fan of animation or feel like seeing something that I can’t honestly say “it’s like ___ but ____”. I suppose there are a few very weak parallels to Tron, and the plot could arguably be described as The Seven Samurai: Online, although that’s questionable. It has its oddities, which you come to expect from Japanese films and a few anime quirks that look a tiny bit out of place but never get in the way too much, but there really isn’t much I could say against it. Keep an eye open and pick this up if you get the opportunity. It tells a cautionary tale of the ubiquity of social and professional networking and the over reliance on online systems, but also gives the reassuring message that essentially, the more things change, the more things stay the same.
I’ve also embedded the trailer, which I thought was amazing.
Additional Notes:
Once again, I was bowled over by the trailer and had constructed a very different film in my mind which I would very much have preferred to see. I think there’s tremendous scope in creating fake trailers for films that will never exist, yet convince watchers that if they did exist, they would be the best film ever. Almost speculative film making. The places where films of books always fall down is that they don’t have the same ability to allow the audience to make their own stuff up, but of course, trailers can and do manage this all the time.