"I'm your big brother, so I'm gonna teach you
a lot of different stuff, okay?"
The great power of animation is that it can take us places
that live action can’t.
And within anime landscape,
the exciting contemporary voice Mamoru Hosoda is exploring
one of the most interesting territories no camera can enter:
the insides of the human soul.
Hosoda -- whom some have called the Next Miyazaki, that titan of the medium --
is the director of Wolf Children, The Boy and the Beast and Summers Wars,
and now he has a new film coming out
that currently holds a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes
and was a hit with critics at Cannes.
It's called Mirai.
It's a surreal twist on the story of a toddler
adjusting to the emotional turmoil of becoming a big brother.
"Knock... it... off!
It's her nap time.
You need to let her sleep."
[Screams]
So as we get excited for Mirai, let’s take a look at Hosoda's filmography
to help us see why this director stands out in today’s anime world.
"First I'll take you outside.
And I'm gonna teach you the names of all the gods.
Dragonfly!
And I'll show you how you can see things in the clouds."
"Never turn your back on family, even when they hurt you.
Never let life get the better of you."
Always central to Hosoda is the theme of family.
Hosoda told Variety that Mirai was inspired by what he learned from watching his son
throw tantrums over having a baby sibling.
He said, “I saw the raw and bare soul of a human being.
Humans can’t survive without love.
That’s what I learned from my three-year-old son.”
Hosoda has also said that for him family is a motif
that gets at the mystery of how children develop
and the wonder of that process.
"You want me to take your training wheels off?"
"Um."
"Like right now?"
"Um."
"You wanna ride completely on your own?"
"Um."
Hosoda’s films focus on basic relationships like a brother and a sister,
a parent and a child, or a boy and girl falling in love.
There's something deceptively simple about these stories --
we can all relate, we’ve all been there.
On a deeper level, they’re encouraging us to see life from more perspectives
than just the limited view I have as this individual right now in time.
Mirai is told simultaneously from the points of view of the toddler,
his parents, the neglected family dog, and a variety of family members
at other stages of life in different times.
This is something we can’t do in real life --
fast-forward to the point when your baby sister can express herself,
"Alright, if you won't help me then you leave me no choice.
We'll have to play the B-game."
[Cries and screams]
or get to know what your mom was like before she was your mom,
"Will you get in trouble for doing that?"
"Probably, but it's funny when it's messy."
"Oh..."
even talk to the spirit of your dog --
"The prince?"
"Yeah, of this house."
but don’t we sometimes really wish that we could?
So there’s a joyous fulfillment her
of a fantasy that we may not even be conscious of having.
"So good!"
[Together] "So good!"
[Laughs]
Even more profoundly, Hosoda is getting at a deeper truth about our human experience
--
that we are made up of all the people we were once and will be,
and while others may view us as the distinct role we’re playing in this
instant,
our inner experience is a lot more complex and fluid.
A mom may still feel very much like a child,
even when she has to be the firm authority figure;
a toddler may only have a few years of life under his belt,
but his pain over having to share his parent’s love with a new baby
is a primal emotional reaction that we continue to feel in some form
no matter how old we get.
Hosoda’s films show how animation can give visible form
to our inner worlds and feelings.
The director zeroes in on simple, universal relationships,
and then brings in fantastical elements to dramatize these relationships.
So he uses animation to create a deeply symbolic storytelling.
Here’s what we mean by that -- in a lot of stories,
there may be a whole bunch of magic elements
that don’t correspond to any direct intended meaning.
But in Hosoda, the magic is there to directly express
the characters’ inner conflicts, emotions and relationships.
And this surreal layer brings out what usually stays under the surface
in our own seemingly mundane or "normal” situations.
The result is a story that speaks to us about what’s going on in our lives,
that manages to reveal something we didn’t notice before about our everyday
realities.
It’s finding a more out-of-the-box way to break through.
So in Mirai, the family members getting to see each other
in different phases of life
expresses how we want to relate to and understand our family
with this kind of intimacy,
but we struggle to do that in real life because we’re separated by time,
by the distance between where we each fall in the life cycle.
In Wolf Children, a parent’s struggle to let her children choose their own paths
is expressed symbolically in the story of a human mother raising kids
who are half human half wolf.
"But now that they're spreading their wings, I just... it's tough, you know?"
She has to watch them eventually
decide whether to lead adult lives as people or as animals.
“Wolves or people?
We didn’t know how to be either yet.”
many of us probably agree, to some extent, with the idea in theory
that parents should allow their kids the freedom to be themselves.
But watching a mother accept
that her 10 year-old son chooses to live as a grown-up wolf in the forest,
is painful to wrap our minds around.
“This is what you want?”
It accesses in a new way what all parents experience
as they have to let go of control over their children’s lives.
"You'll be fine."
In The Boy and the Beast, the father-son relationship is expressed
as the dynamic between a beast and a human.
“Well, every father in the world enjoys it
when his son imitates him, doesn’t he?”
And a young person's battle with darkness gets made literal,
as a black hole inside the chest.
"What if this boy gets possessed by that darkness?
Have you stopped to consider that?
He could grow up to become a terrible monster."
"Monster?"
In The Girl Who Leapt Through Time,
the painful intricacies of young love and missed opportunity
are explored through the concept of time travel.
"I'll be waiting for you."
In Summer Wars, Hosoda said he was inspired by his own marriage
and first experiences with having in-laws:
all of a sudden, you can “make a deep connection with a total stranger.”
"Please, Kenji, take good care of Natsuki."
"I don't...
really believe in myself."
So he translates this in-laws experience into the story of a boy
pretending to be a girl’s fiance at her big family gathering,
"Yeah, Kenji's my fiance actually."
and how he ends up having to bond together with these near-strangers in her family
to fight a dangerous hacker of a Second-Life-esque network called Oz.
"You can do this!"
"You're the only one who can break through the code."
"Solve it!"
One of the things that makes this symbolic storytelling satisfying
is the way that the director uses specific, arresting images
to visually crystallize the story’s themes.
He has a talent for letting symbolic moments breathe,
lingering on them so they stay in our heads after the film ends.
In The Boy and the Beast, the image of the sword inside Kyuta's soul
visualizes one of the movie's main messages --
that strength means never giving up, never allowing yourself to be beaten,
and the outcome of fight is inside of you.
“You need to grab hold of the sword that’s in here, in your soul.
You have one, don't you?”
"He said he would be the sword in your soul!"
In Wolf Children, Yuki stands by the window during a storm,
the wind blowing in her hair, and the curtain crosses over her face
just as she reveals her wolf identity to the boy she cares for.
The beauty of the image underlines the beauty of her dual identity,
and it communicates to us that this friend can see her beauty and accept her as she is,
"All this time, I knew."
[Gasps]
"Don't be afraid.
I never told anyone, and I'm never gonna."
unlike most people in her world who hate and fear wolves.
“How come the wolf always has to be the bad guy, mom?”
The moment also calls back to the scene when Yuki’s mother first saw her father
as a wolf,
and was able to accept him as no one else could.
So this movie, that kind of acceptance is very much equated with love.
“Are you scared?”
“No, I’m not.
Because it’s you.”
In The Girl Who Leapt Through Time we get an extended sequence
of our teen protagonist and her love walking through
a crowded intersection in Tokyo
evocative of the famous Shibuya crossing, while the busy commuters are all frozen around
them.
We also get plenty of sequences of physically leaping through time,
expressing the adolescent’s blind faith that they can go back
and fix any problem through sheer willpower and good intentions.
“I can always go back and do things over as many times as I want.”
In examples like these, the imagery has both a playful literalness
and a good-hearted humor to it.
"So what are you keeping in your treasure box?"
"Ready?"
"Yeah, show us!"
"Ta-da!"
[Screams]
Hosoda’s films reveal that what we’re all experiencing all the time --
in our families, our love lives, our growing up --
is deeply dramatic and profound, even if we don’t realize it much of the
time.
"You're gonna be alright?"
"Teach me."
They encourage us to make and value human connections --
to be generous with each other,
“You’re where you belong!”
to accept that change is central to life,
and to appreciate the gifts of family in whatever form we experience it.
After watching, we can take this awareness into our lives,
and look at experiences from multiple points of view
in order to more richly understand and appreciate each other and ourselves.
As he reimagines our everyday journeys as epic and fantastical,
Hosoda pushes us to confront emotional challenges with gravity, depth and respect,
and to arrive finally at a place of human warmth, acceptance and love.
Thanks for watching, and be sure to catch Mirai in theaters
starting on Novermber 29th.
Whether you're a die-hard anime fan or a total newbie,
we think you'll enjoy Mirai as much as we did.
So don't miss it.
Go to MiraiMovie.com for tickets and showtimes.
"Can we play it again?"
"Please?"