I just finished watching my new Blu-Ray of...
Summer Wars - I'm a big fan of this director's previous movie, The Girl Who Leaped Through Time (if you haven't seen that lovely little movie, check it out!), so I picked up the Blu-Ray of this one today. I just finished it and...overall, I'm pretty conflicted about how I'd rate this movie. I liked it, but man this movie has problems. It's biggest problem is that it doesn't know what kind of movie it wants to be, as it's 3 movies in one: a story about some kids' first teenage romance, a story about the importance of family, and a story about a world run by an evolved version of World of WarCraft that's suddenly under attack from a rampaging virus. One of these 3 does not belong. Can YOU figure out which that is? Yeah, I thought you could, and it's a major distraction in a movie that didn't need a fantastical element. It doesn't help that this aspect of the story ends on a total Deus Ex Machina that feels cheesy and not very satisfying. The main character of the story also doesn't really get to do much until the end of the film, making me wonder for most of the film why he needed to exist. The main female lead also seems to disappear halfway through the movie, not emerging until the very end when it comes time for her to actually do something in the cyber-punk storyline.
When the movie isn't playing with being a surprisingly-not-pretentious cyber-punk story about mankind's growing dependency on the internet, it's a pretty good movie and reminds me a lot of Girl Who Leaped Through Time. A large focus of the movie is on this ridiculously large family coming together to celebrate their great-grandmother's birthday, and the movie does a phenomenal job of characterizing the family. If you've ever attended a massive family reunion (as I have), the family depicted here will see all too familiar. The animation is fantastic (even if it bears that "flat" look common in Japanese feature films due to their relatively low budget), but I really do expect nothing less from Studio Madhouse (though this is more cartoony than most of Madhouse's usual work). As for the English dub, it's well-done (especially considering the huge cast probably had Funimation scrounging through every studio they could find to get voices to fill the roles). I enjoyed my time with this surprisingly-long film (nearly 2 hours), but the director should have picked either the family story or the cyber-punk story and stuck with it rather than try to cram several different movies together.