The movie that got away from this year’s New York Asian Film Festival will be playing August 28 and 29th at the IFC Center as part of the NY Children’s Film Festival. Here’s what I wrote about its director, Mamoru Hosoda for the brainiac lit magazine, World Literature Today:
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“Then came Mamoru Hosoda’s 2006 version of this shopworn story. The original director of Hayao Miyazaki’s film, HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE (2004), Hosoda was fired from that project by Miyazaki himself and THE GIRL WHO LEAPT THROUGH TIME (2006) was his attempt to put his career back together. Hosoda didn’t end the movie with the lead character weeping and mind-wiped. Instead, the time traveler tells her that he’ll be in the future, waiting for her to arrive. Suddenly, the future is something to be embraced, to be rushed towards. The movie became a huge hit, beating out Miyazaki’s stodgy wallow in the pre-industrial past, TALES FROM EARTHSEA (2006), at the box office.
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In 2009, Hosoda secured his status as the man who drove a stake through Miyazaki’s grumpy old heart with SUMMER WARS, the most internet-friendly movie since Shunji Iwai’s ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU CHOU. An animated epic, it tells the tale of a young nerdling pretending to be the boyfriend of a schoolmate on her summer trip to her aging grandmother’s house. When an online social networking community known as Oz gets attacked by a piece of sentient malware that threatens to deliver a denial of service attack to the entire world, her massive extended family unites to restore peace to cyberspace. Hosoda goes out of his way to make the point that the internet, TV and cell phones are all part of a technological continuum that started with letters and books and whose goal is to form networks, to build communities and to erase the distance between individuals. The hero of Hosoda’s film isn’t the main character, but the network of people around him, his friends, his family, and even fellow account holders he’s never met.”
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It’s one of the best animated films to come along in ages, and a perfect movie to watch in these hazy, lazy dog days of summer, full of hot afternoons, humming servers and young love, with production design inspired by Superflat pioneer Takashi Murakami.
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Tickets and showtimes – it’s only screening twice so get on down there!
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