A Tale of Family and Online Clashing Reality: Summer Wars

Synopsis

This is the story of a world named OZ, a digital world that has spanned worldwide and has become a place where just about everything is done, from shopping, to tracking markets and to even being a control center for traffic lights and alert systems. In the corner of this vst digital world, there works 17-year-old high schooler and math genius Kenji Koiso as an OZ moderator. With summer in the air he believes that he will have nothing to do but spend his days away and work.

But everything changes when his upper classman and crush Natsuki Shinohara requests his help for a summer job with her at her family home. He accepts but what he doesn’t know is there is more to the job than he thinks and it involves Natsuki’s family. Not only that, but it seems that a change is brewing in the world of OZ and it may not be good.

The Good

The art and animation are one of the main highlights of the film, featuring not just one art style but two seeing as it features a whole digital world and characters. The plot itself also takes a new twist to the concept of reality and the digital world clashing with one another by creating a realistic scenario that makes a semblance of sense on how the concept were to take place and how it would affect the people and create a conflict for the story.

The characters are also a delight to watch, especially with how many are running around and introduced, there are many different characters to get to know more than the main characters. Another good point for the film is the music that depicts different characters and different scenes when they occur.

The Bad

One of the less than stellar points that can be noted on the film would be on how even though the story is meant to be a family story, there is a lot of focus that went more into the action and the drama of the plot rather than the interactions and moments between the family. Though it is not to say that you cannot feel the sense of a familial theme throughout the film, but it would have been nicer if there were personal interactions in the film rather than the show of specialties that different members and them relating to Kenji.

Then there is also the build-up between Kenji and Natsuki, while there were one or two sweet moments between the two, once again it seemed as if there wasn’t much interaction seen between them and made a rather wobbly path towards the ending scene of the two.

Conclusion

A film with overall very good art and story factors, “Summer Wars” brings the idea of reality and technology clashing together and creating an engaging story that will have the viewer hooked. The characters are all enjoyable in their own way and in the time of the film there was well done development that was able to slip in. While the main protagonist doesn’t take center stage, he does still play a vital enough point and brings in an outsider’s point of view.

Overall this is a very well done film with a good theme of family with engaging characters and pretty art, animation and music. Yes it could have done better in the development of relations and interactivity amongst the characters.But truly, this is heartwarming and exciting tale that should be on your top list of must watch films.

Rating: 8.5/10