Summer Wars

Young math genius Kenji’s summer is thrown for a loop when his classmate Natsuki tricks him into posing as his fiancé at an extended family reunion—but that’s nothing compared to what happens when his math skills are exploited to crack the security for the worldwide virtual-reality network “OZ”.

An animation festival favorite in 2010, Summer Wars will appeal to both fans and non-fans alike, with both its striking visuals and its storyline about the primacy of family. Its biggest flaw is the rather haphazard plot details involving technology.

Kenji, still in high school, just missed representing Japan in the International Math Olympiad, and has resigned himself to spending the summer running maintenance checks in “OZ,” the virtual-reality network that integrates real-world and digital living. Then his classmate Natsuki dragoons him into coming along with her on a weekend family reunion, where he finds himself being pressed into the role of her fiancé. Why? To allow her nonagenarian great-grandmother to rest easy knowing she found a good man. Granny hasn’t let her age get to her, though: when the family black sheep turns up and creates trouble, she invokes the family’s samurai roots and (in one of her scene-stealing moments) routs him from the house at spear-point.

None of this is what Kenji had in mind, and he’s doubly uneasy around a family that large (twenty-plus members, all of whom have speaking lines!). He’s most comfortable when faced with problems that don’t involve the real world—like that 2,048 digit cipher someone sent him the other night in an email message. When he cracks it, he realizes to his horror he's allowed OZ to be compromised by an AI called the “Love Machine,” created by someone a good deal closer to the family than it might seem.

Already confronting one crisis (which I can’t reveal here), the family digs deep into all of their connections and resources to provide Kenji with the tools he needs to pull the Love Machine’s plug, and fight a war that's taking place in both the real and virtual worlds. But the Love Machine fights back, and in a way that threatens the lives of most everyone on the face of the earth.

A widely-ballyhooed anime release for 2010, Summer Wars (directed by Mamoru Hosoda, also of the outstanding film The Girl Who Leapt Through Time) played in festivals worldwide, garnered a Japan Academy prize for Best Animated feature, and FUNimation even submitted it for Oscar consideration in the Best Animated Feature category.

The praise was well-placed: it’s an original production, not a product placement, and with top-notch technical credits throughout. The scenes that take place inside OZ’s virtual realm pay homage to Takashi Murakami’s “superflat” style, and the scenes in Natsuki’s family home feel suffused with the passing of a thousand summers. That makes sense for a story that’s unashamedly about the pride and strength of families, whether biological or virtual. Kenji's never had a family behind him before -- or a potential girlfriend near him -- and their presence motivates him to create a miracle.

Most of the problems are with the OZ side of the story. The rules of the virtual realm are never well-defined, so much of what happens there seems terribly arbitrary. Those are problems common to most any story where hacking, computers or AIs are plot elements, though, and it’s counterbalanced strongly by the rest of the movie’s heart, humor and vigor.