One day, Kun’s mother brings home a new family member. For the four-year-old boy, joy quickly turns to
disappointment when the little sister replaces her brother as the center of attention. The boy can’t
bring himself to accept her as his sister. But things turn magical when, with a mysterious garden as
his gateway, the boy encounters his mother as a little girl and his great-grandfather as a young man,
and has a series of surprising adventures with his older sister from the future. These experiences
change how he sees the world and help him grow into the big brother he was meant to be.
(Source: GKIDS)
__First of all I want to apologize for the grammar.__ Mirai No Mirai presents a story of a typical Japanese family whit their culture and their busy lives with mothering and fatherhood, where the main character is Kun, a spoil child that feels jealous of her newborn sister, the lack of attention of his busy parents and his whims cause that he run away from home, stumbling upon a magical garden that serves as a time-traveling gateway where he encounters a series of adventures, learning news teachings. The fact that the tree to meters of his house allow him time-travel that seems great to me, I mean, there is no need to go far, the adventure is here before your eyes, also, Kun can meet with family members who by conventional methods he couldn't. ~!At the end of the story, to recap the past and the future and see his father's frustration at not being able to ride a bicycle, how his great grandfather overcame the pain of war and turned his disability into skill and the intrinsic love of his great grandparents, it really touches my heart.!~ ~~~__Story: 9/10 Characters: 7/10__~~~ Technically is beautiful. How progressively the faces of children turn red and when they cry and tears are well achieved. I like how the animators emphasize in the motions of Kun tripping of the bicycle and up and down stairs, because he still is a child and, it is notice the dedication. The film develops more in the house, then make close planes that do not disturb the view, and then create wonderful scenes in which the camera moves in a 2D environment in a three-dimensional way where we move from one place to another subtly inside the house . In the scene of the great grandfather ride a horse with Kun only is needed a couple of wheat plants for making a transition perfectly, changing the plane so you do not find it so abruptly, going from a rural scene with a horse to drive on a route with a motorcycle in a city, and the producers used and perfectly combined real images from a train station for developing part of the story, just great. ~~~__Art: 9/10__~~~ As for the Soundtrack honestly, I don't know much, but I may say that never lack the piano's sound so characteristic of the movie at all times. ~~~__Sound: 8/10 Enjoyment: 10/10__~~~ Finally can this anime win the Oscars? the truth, every year some anime movies is nominated of which no-one wins, if Kimi no Na Wa and Koe no Katachi could't, I see it very difficult, also, Mirai no Mirai competes with movies that already have sequels as The incredibles "2" and Wreck-It Ralph "2", playing with the feels of the their first movies, but if it wins I would not be surprised. __Maybe the main character bothers some and initiality the principal plot is childish, but the finale has a deep touch, I really recommend it. ~~~My score 8.6/10__~~~
Mamoru Hosoda's fifth animated feature, ___Mirai___, may seem a bit more small scale compared to his earlier movies such as ___The Girl Who Leapt Through Time___, ___Summer Wars___, and ___Wolf Children___, but it's no less mesmerizing. To anyone unfamiliar with these aforementioned films, I do recommend them highly -- they're all magnificent movies, almost the equivalent of Hayao Miyazaki's work. ___Mirai___ isn't quite that, but it's the next best thing. The film tells the story of a pampered little boy named Kun, used to his parents catering to him all the time. So much so that when he gets a new sister, Mirai (which means "future"), his parents start neglecting him, and of course, he gets jealous. He behaves like any kid in his situation would. He throws tantrums, he bawls, he says nasty things, and at one point, even throws one of his toy trains at his sister. "Your attitude stinks," says another character in the film, quite accurately. At the peak of every outburst he flees into the garden where a tree is growing, at which point the scene changes to a different location where he meets members of his family when they were younger -- including the pet dog(!), as well as, most mysterious of all, his new sister as a teenager. These close encounters send Kun on flashback journeys where he must learn to be more appreciative and caring and stop acting like a spoiled brat. (In a way, this is sort of like "A Christmas Carol" for 4 year olds, but not feeling "dumbed down" in the least.) Hosoda handles this story with just the right touch of tangibleness as well as his occasional trademark moments of surrealism. However badly Kun behaves, he remains a very relatable character throughout -- in fact this might be the most realistic portrayal of any such boy I've ever seen in any animated feature. And of course, the animation, as mentioned, is nothing short of gorgeous, complete with a mix of CGI and hand-painted backgrounds -- a rarity in animated films these days... even in Japan. (Hosoda laments how rare this style of background art is becoming and is quite vocal for its support, and rightly so.) MIRAI is also a surprisingly funny film -- one scene in which Kun and two new friends of his have to put away some dolls without Dad in the room suspecting in particular is hilarious. There's even a brief episode in which Kun tries to ride a bike for the first time -- without training wheels! The results go as well as you'd expect, resulting in yet another outburst as well as a visitation, after which he gets a second chance. There's even a frightening climax at a train station, although I dare not reveal more about it at the risk of spoiling the story. If you're a fan of Japanese animated features and Hosoda's work in general, ___Mirai___ should be a great one to check out. It's accessible to children and adults, and easily superior to many other Western animated features released in 2018, notably the over-bloated ___Ralph Breaks The Internet___. It deserved its Oscar nomination. Adding to an already great movie is an even better dub provided by the folks at NYAV Post, with top notch directing by the always reliable Mike Sinterniklaas and script adaptation by the similarly talented Stephanie Sheh. This dub, like the similarly grand Disney-Gkids-Ghibli dubs, features a cast of noteworthy names such as John Cho, Rebecca Davis, and Daniel Day Kim. Surprisingly, too, Crispin Freeman -- yes, that Crispin Freeman(!) -- has a brief cameo, and it's always a pleasure to hear him. The real triumph of the dub is, as per usual in a NYAV Post, the casting of the kids. Young Jaden Waldman does an absolutely excellent job at rendering Kun, effectively conveying his mood swings and giving him a lot of appeal in spite of this character's sometimes unlikable personality. (Only issue is that he screams a bit too much, but on the other hand, it makes sense considering the circumstances.) I've always appreciated hearing children voice children -- as evidenced in my praise of the dub for "_Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water_", and it's a pleasure to see that there are dubs doing this practice today, ___Mirai___ being one of them. The lipsync is also spot on with well timed and written dialogue -- a difficult task for any scriptwriter, but it's done well here. ___Mirai___ marks yet another glorious achievement for Hosoda, all the more so because he bases it on a personal story. It's often been said that some of the more inspiring features sing best when the writers write from their own experiences. This is no exception. I look forward to seeing what this director does next.
_Mirai_ is truly precious and downright heart-melting, while rarely coming off as treacly or overly-saccharine thanks to the clear place of experience and insight showcased in the portrayal of family and siblings that Hosoda possesses. His understanding of the essence of family grows more profound with every film. The man has always been fascinated with the theme of family and how our bonds to our lineage form us into the people we are. _Mirai_ is perhaps the most resonant implementation of this theme the visionary director has yet conceived. Truly a beautiful, heartwarming and downright infectious and endlessly charming experience. The film doesn't follow a traditional plot structure and is possibly the director's most "arthouse" work yet, and this may not work for viewers less inclined to be fully absorbed by its child's eye view of the world, but the film perfectly captures that essence of a child's point of view. In less capable hands the main character Kun, as a young child, could have easily been unrelentingly obnoxious and insufferable, but in his grasp the character is often more endearing than not. And when he isn't, its purposeful. The entire family feels extremely real and grounded. Kun feels like a real 4 year old kid. The parents feel like real, well-meaning but exhausted people simply trying not to screw up raising these little gremlins. Their relationship together is often chaotic and just barely avoids tearing at the seams, but ultimately their intrinsic love for each other always brings them to reconciliation. Like many of his works, _Mirai_ is an ode to the bonds that tie multiple generations of family together. It wasn't structured like a traditional narrative, or even most other Hosoda films, working rather as an interconnected set of dreamlike vignettes tied together by the recurring theme of familial ties and Kun's arc of understanding them instead. But the 4 year old protagonist made the film's childlike perception of the world and the blurring between reality and imagination believable. The film isn't interested in exploring the sci-fi mumbo-jumbo implications of the time-travelling aspect and it's honestly probably better for it. It would unnecessarily convolute its simple message. Production-wise, this was possibly the director's best-looking work yet, with lots of interesting and diverse implementation of both traditional AND CG animation. Particularly, the use of CG for the house in the tracking shots to convey time passing through different sections of the massive structure was super cool and reminded me a lot of the extended take in _Wolf Children_ that continuously shifts between the classrooms to show the children growing progressively older and climbing grades, only much more ambitious in scale. The final act was possibly the most exciting portion of the film for me, filled with dark, twisted imagery in a vast, disturbing and purgatory-esque train station. The art and color choices on display here was absolutely entrancing, expertly blending the 2D and CG mediums together.The level of detail in the character-acting in general was truly impressive. They went above and beyond to make every character's movements in the world perfectly fit their personalities and age. This is simply one of the most effective cinematic expressions of a pure idea/theme I've ever seen, and the stunning visual and sound direction (particularly in the final act) can not be understated in its contributions to this. And regardless of one's opinions on the Oscars as a legitimately respectable awards ceremony, _Mirai_ was certainly more than deserving of its nomination for Best Animated Feature, as well as being the first to hold the distinction of being the first non-Ghibli/Miyazaki Japanese animated film to earn such an honor.
In the planning stage of _Mirai no Mirai_, significant consideration was put into the designing of the house in which the majority of the movie is set. In fact, director Mamoru Hosoda employed a real architect, Makoto Tanijiri, to design the Oota house. The house is a series of four levels, not quite stories as it were, connected by a series of steps on one side of the house. It's a peculiar layout, as noted in a throwaway comment made by the grandmother at the beginning, designed in-universe by the architect father. A sloped tracking shot near the beginning of the movie, similar to _Wolf Children_'s famed lateral tracking shot, moves between each level to show how they are attached. The first level is a den, mainly inhabited by the four-year-old son, Kun, and his train sets and toys. The next level up is a lawn-type outdoor area, followed by the kitchen and living area, then finally the bedrooms. Tanijiri planned the house so that a "child will be able to see the bottom room clearly from the garden, but an adult will only be able to see what's right in front of them." The effect? "The child's view will change as he grows up.” What seems like a small detail of the movie is in fact the most important, as it sets up the entire thematic structure. In contrast to Hosoda's previous grand cinematic declarations on family and life, underlying the superficial coming-of-age story of Mirai is a focused meditation on the architecture of time. Of course, true to his nature, Hosoda interprets time and space as relative to our family histories. For Hosoda, time does not move laterally, rather it flows back and forth through the levels of the family tree, just as the aforementioned tracking shot shifts repeatedly between the levels of the house. Each generation experiences time on their own distinct level, yet the time of their ancestors and descendants are always within reach. In _Mirai_, this platitudinous reading of time isn't a reading at all; it's the extraordinary reality of the movie. The expanse of the narrative finds Kun, in the garden of the house, drifting through time to meet anachronistic versions of family members he currently knows. The first instance of time-travelling antics (though not the first scene of garden fantasies) delivers Hosoda's vision the best. Kun, frustrated with his parents doting on the newly born Mirai, runs into the future, middle school-aged version of his sister, along with their anthropomorphic dog. The scene is filled with Marx Brothers-styled hijinks and light exploration into the logistics of _Mirai_'s time traveling. But the scientific implications are quickly abandoned because time travel isn't really the point. Kun goes on to meet the past versions of his parents, and then their parents, learning a lesson or two from each encounter, and these subsequent scenes are more mired in heart tugging magical realism than heart pounding sci-fi. Some may find the episodic structure to be off-putting, but given the design of the house, a matching series of seemingly contained yet faintly connected stories appears to be more than appropriate. The kicker is that pretty much the entirety of the movie, time traveling and all, takes place inside the Oota house, in the garden, in the present. And this seems to be Hosoda's insinuation: the past and the future are united in the present via the family tree, a statement he articulates in the wonderfully directed climax in which present-day Kun and future Mirai witness landmark events from their relatives' pasts, including a deeply touching famed race mentioned by the grandparents earlier in the movie. At certain points, _Mirai no Mirai_ offers glimpses of Hosoda at his compulsive, unrestrained worst. Pregnancy fetish and furry scenes can be checked off the "obligatory Hosoda-isms" checklist within the first act, and his penchant for exploring enclosed dimensions, seen in his earlier works, returns in full masturbatory force during the worst scene in the movie, the lead-up to the climax. Animated mostly in (decent) CGI, it's visually incongruous with the rest of the movie's style and thematically divorced as it has little to do with the nature of time or family. It's full of those (POV travelling?) shots he employed so daintily in _Wolf Children_, but instead of snowy knolls and forests, it's ugly, repetitive train tunnels. It also lingers for far too long, almost ruining the climax. But these pockmarks are minimal and eclipsed by moments of Hosoda at his most honed, absolute best.
Mirai is a baffling film to wrap your head around. It’s Mamoru Hosoda’s smallest-scale film so far, taking place entirely in a single location. Yet it’s also possibly his most ambitious in terms of the kind of story he’s trying to tell and how he goes about telling it. It’s his most technically accomplished film so far, with smoother character animation and more well-integrated background art than I’ve seen from him before. Yet it’s also his most amateurish film, making countless odd mistakes that an artist of his caliber should really know how to avoid. It’s a mess of contradictions, feeling at once polished and unfinished, big and small, too out-there and not out-there enough. And sadly, this confusion results in what’s probably his weakest film yet. I can see exactly how Mirai was intended to work and what message it’s trying to convey, but its overall messiness leaves it feeling crushingly mediocre. If I didn’t know Hosoda was behind it, I would swear this was a first-time director taking his first, uneven stab at feature filmmaking. But knowing that fact only makes the movie more frustrating: he should be better than this. The story centers around an unnamed family living in the suburbs, and when I say unnamed, I literally mean unnamed. The mother, father, and grandma are only ever referred to as Mother, Father and Grandma. There’s even a big moment in the climax that hinges on the protagonist- their four-year-old son, named merely Kun (as in, Name-kun, but just the “kun”)- not knowing his own parents’ names. At least Yuuko the dog has a name. As does Mirai, Kun’s little sister who’s just been born. At first, Kun is excited to have a new member of the family, but as the stress of raising two children wears on his imperfect parents and they spend more time caring for Mirai than they do for him, he starts acting out and throwing temper tantrums. And then he discovers something unusual: the tree in his house’s yard is magical. It can transform the yard into entirely different places, transporting him through space and time to chat with his family members. He meets Yuuko the Dog in humanoid form, a teenage Mirai who scolds him for being so rough with her as an infant, his mom as a child, and his great-grandpa who hurt his leg in the war. Through each of these encounters, he learns something more about his family, growing to understand them more fully and his own place among them. So we’ve got a classic example of Hosada-branded magical realism, with the real world influenced, though not really changed, by the intrusion of something inexplicable. But the movie’s biggest flaw is how weirdly surface-level its structure us. Mirai’s story follows a pattern to a fault: Kun gets mad at a member of his family, he says he hates them and goes into the garden to sulk, at which point the magic tree transforms the yard into someplace else and he has a little adventure with a past or future version of that family member, during which he comes to understand them better, and once he returns to the normal world, he no longer hates them and realizes how cool they really are. This exact series of events happens around five times, and that constitutes the entire damn plot of the movie. Kun doesn’t even really grow from the experiences until the end; he just gets past whatever was bugging him about that particular family member, there’s a fade to black, and he’s right back to being a brat about a different one the very next scene. It’s literally just five separate iterations on the exact same theme back to back, as if someone took a bunch of episodes from an formulaic, episodic TV show, stripped away the opening and ending credits, and put them together at random. This isn’t a movie, this is a compilation disk. To some extent, I understand what Hosoda’s going for here. The cyclical nature is almost certainly intentional, with repeated lines of key dialogue and establishing shots emphasizing the similarities between the fantasy sequences. And each fantasy-version family member Kun meets has some direct parallel to his current spat with their corresponding current-version family member, so Kun can see how he’s just like them in some way. It’s meant to be a big statement on the interconnected nature of family, how our past and future are intertwined and we carry certain aspects with us through the generations. But the conflicts are so basic, the messages are so trite, and the overall structure is so uninspired that it feels less like a meaningful cycle and more like Mirai’s just repeating itself. It’s not satisfying to watch, and it just feels like it’s belaboring the the point until the inevitable conclusion. Even if there are some delightful moments along the way- Kun trying to sneak Teen-Mirai and Human-Yuuko past his distracted dad was a very fun little sequence- the overall package is lacking in direction. On top of that, there’s a lot of stuff in this movie that’s just _weirdly_ handled. Like, at first the tree just transforms the yard itself without moving it anywhere, but then it’s transporting Kun back to the past, and the climax has it construct an entire symbolic alternate dimension that would feel more at home in a Satoshi Kon film. I’m not usually one to gripe about inconsistent magical rules, but then we do learn what the rules are supposed to be for this tree, and it doesn’t fit what we’ve actually seen it do at all. It just does whatever the plot needs it to do with no rhyme or reason. In addition, I know this is a story about a struggling family working through hard times and re-learning to love each other, but the way they interact in the early scenes feels bizarrely mean-spirited and untrue to life. The way the mom talks to her kids is _off_ in a way I can’t quite place; it doesn’t feel like how parents and kids communicate at all. Also, it feels like Teen-Mirai is supposed to be the biggest part of the fantasy stuff- the movie is named after her- but after her first appearance, she only shows up for a single other brief scene before coming in to play a big role in the climax. Her relationship with Kun _feels_ like it should be the emotional core, but the movie’s so scatterbrained that she’s barely given more focus than any of the other fantasy characters. These aren’t minor issues; these are huge structural and narrative flaws on aspects that are critical to Mirai’s entire operation. And I’m honestly baffled how poorly thought out the entire project feels. It’s like the second half of The Boy and the Beast if it were the whole movie instead, a bunch of clear thematic ideas floating in a muddy soup of unearned story beats and incomprehensible plot mechanics. It’s amateurish in a way that honestly kind of shocks me. Hosoda is a good filmmaker. He’s a good storyteller. He has no excuse for mistakes this blatant. The only part of this movie that feels fully thought out is the house itself. Which might seem like a weird backhanded compliment, but this house is genuinely really cool. It’s built like a giant staircase with each room serving as an entire step, tiered diagonally from each other. The playroom’s on the bottom, the yard is next up, then comes the dining room and so on. It’s such a striking location that I’ve never seen anything like, and the staging of scenes takes full advantage of the unique layout with how the characters move between rooms, up and down the tiers, what they can see from where. We never leave the house; even the fantasy sequences explicitly stem from the yard. This is a film set entirely inside a single closed location that somehow finds an entire world of possibility to explore within its confines. I can’t help but appreciate that for its sheer gumption. Sadly, it feels like all the imagination and attention to detail for this film went into the house, and none of it was spared for the story. There are still good moments within Mirai, delightful little character interactions and imaginative visuals aplenty, but there’s nothing satisfying tying them all together. It’s a first-draft film from an artist who really should be better than that. Hopefully, Hosoda’s next movie, the upcoming Belle, will see him return to form with the same magic that graced us with Wolf Children almost a decade ago. For now, though, my journey through Hosoda’s work must sadly end on a note of limp disappointment.
Mamoru Hosoda is fantastic at making large set pieces and theatrical visuals with a strong impact and sense of scale. Belle makes that very clear for one, as do sections of this, and his storyboard work for Utena. Similarly Hosoda is brilliant at capturing whimsy and more slice of life dramatics, once again extremely evident in this film, as well as particularly Wolf Children, earlier segments of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and so forth. The problem comes in the ability of his writing to fully merge his undeniable skill on both ends into a fully coherent story. Not to suggest both are needed for a work to be fantastic or a masterpiece, you can throw constant dramatics like Adolescence of Utena or envelop yourself in quite like Liz and The Blue Bird and create masterpieces. Additionally, Hosoda's own Wolf Children mostly lacked the theatrics, and was really good (I need to rewatch it, could easily love it more). However, Belle's slice of life snippets were drowned in its admittedly gorgeous world building and messy plotting, Boy and The Beast lots itself in its final plotting and villainous arc, and this film didn't lose itself like the others, yet didn't quite feel like it tied everything together in a neat bow either. If Hosoda can successfully merge both sides (or isolate one masterfully) with a fantastic script in the future, then we can definitely get a masterpiece in my opinion. Mirai came close in many ways. It had some great slice of life style parts with whimsy and impeccably paced direction, and some more impactful snippets most notably towards its finale. However, it's script didn't quite let it work for me. I could see a masterpiece in there not quite grasped. I thoroughly enjoyed the first 3/4 or more, with the charm of the dreamlike segments married with a comedic tone and more slice of life moments. I can understand the irritation over the kid, he is a bit annoying, but he is a kid, so I have patience. Additionally, I can see why people are annoyed that lessons are seemingly not learnt after each encounter and segment, but people overestimate people's ability to change. Often one occurrence is not enough to change someone completely, it will probably be additive, but it can take more than one lesson for a message to be learnt and fully taken in. I also think there is some great writing of the parents sprinkled in between all these moments, helping the pacing, which makes sense given Hosoda is a parent. As a matter of fact, it nicely ties in the mothers attitude as a child, and also presents one of the successes of the kid as a success for the dad too, before providing a snippet of added context in the finale. Importantly, as a good parent, the father prioritises it being a success of his child rather than himself. It then had a more dramatic, theatrical finale. While I think it worked in a vacuum and to a degree in relation to the work, and worked well from a pure audio-visual visceral level very well, it felt too rushed. I liked its point, about how little moments can be important, and about invisible connections between generational experiences, and I understand that it provides a scale shift and change in wider perspective that solidifies enough the earlier lessons of the kid for him to fully move forward as a better person. Yet it felt like it maybe needed to explain why his actions were wrong to him a bit better, so that it could feel a bit more genuine to me as a cause of change. Also as I said, it felt a tad too rushed. Nevertheless the adorable final scene made me cry a bit, ~!joining in his sister in an excited scream!~. As an additional note, the big 3D-feeling mouths with lots of teeth showing reminded me a bit of Totoro. Anyways. I really liked the message of the film, its direction, and things in isolation. Plus it did make me cry a little with the really lovely final ending scene. However, ultimately it just didn't feel quite coherent enough, like everything quite slotted together enough. I know that's a vague criticism. But I sadly can't think of a better way to describe it. The film just didn't feel like it quite clicked to me.