Budding genius Aoyama is only in the 4th grade, but already lives his life like a scientist. When
penguins start appearing in his sleepy suburb hundreds of miles from the sea, Aoyama vows to solve the
mystery. When he finds the source of the penguins is a woman from his dentist’s office, they team up
for an unforgettable summer adventure!
(Source: Eleven Arts)
Penguin Highway is an anime film about a boy who is mature for his age but still has some things to learn as a growing boy. He is a genius kid who finds great interest in researching new and bizarre phenomena. The film is structured quite well and uses a lot of metaphors through the animation and storytelling to represent the coming-of-age of his character. This film does have a bloated run-time of about two hours and it compromised some of my enjoyment. The dialogue is poorly written and attempts at humour in the film don't quite cut it. I do appreciate the representation of the mystery behind the penguins and the phenomena as a metaphor to discovery, exploration, and learning. This film is good to analyse as it presents metaphors in an effective way to tell a story. The animation is decent for the most part. There are moments of extremely fast motion and travel that are depicted in this film which ends up being poorly animated. The animation in these select few scenes felt lazy and sloppily animated. The animation still deserves some praise. The soundtrack is quite good. I liked the transition from the introduction to the opening theme. The songs used throughout this film fit the scenes' moods and added a sense of joy. I love the ending theme as the credits roll after a satisfying ending. The characters were written and developed well in this anime film. The sense of the boy's determination and excitement of further developing his research is portrayed well. Some of the characters' actions felt a little forced but there was one scene where there was a conversation with the boy and his sister which tied up to the ending and connected all the dots. This film doesn't fully explain itself until the very end but it is satisfying to see the films ending scene nonetheless. To be honest, there were moments that I didn't enjoy watching but I did enjoy the ending quite a bit. The lead up to the ending wasn't enjoyable and this film takes its time to fully explain itself. The humour in this film along with a lot of the dialogue didn't feel like it quite fit in the film which impacted my overall enjoyment of this film. I'm not sure if I would recommend this anime to anyone but I do have to say that it's an anime film that has a lot of metaphors and imagery that can be analysed and interpreted differently to discover a completely different and beautiful meaning behind its message of growing up, the reality behind maturity, and overall life events that occur when maturing and growing up. You might like this anime film if you like interesting coming-of-age tales.
~~~All of my reviews contain __spoilers __for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.~~~ ------ img880(https://i.imgur.com/Wq79MqT.png) It is a daunting task indeed to try to set up a proper lead-in for any kind of writeup about *Penguin Highway*. Marking Studio Colorido’s first foray into the world beyond the domestic market in Japan. The film is, consequently, immensely important for the anime industry. It’s a little weird to be saying that about a studio who are mostly known in the west not for their bevy of short films, but for [a McDonald’s recruitment commercial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTrC86mmPaw), but it’s the truth. Yet at the same time, talking about it in those terms undersells the film itself. Said film being the kind of top-notch magical realist youth drama that is just plain good enough to bolster one’s faith in the entire genre, up there with *Summer Wars* and the seminal *Your Name*. So what then **is** *Penguin Highway*? Well, as much as it’s about any central thematic point or plotline, it’s a backdrop for a 2-hour downpour of juxtaposed, surreal images that evoke the highs and lows of the summers of youth. Cola bottles that transmogrify into the titular penguins, a silver moon lurking in the forest that strikes all who see it ill, that same cursed wood being demarcated with a “no entry” sign. There’s the all-important Sea Orb (more on that in a bit), chess pieces turning into bats, playing cards floating down a river, Lewis Carroll’s *Jabberwock*, towering thunderheads and typhoons. *Penguin Highway* is great at twisting and rolling up scores of these splintered memories and crushing them down into a pure liquid of summer surreality. In this way, it has something faintly in common with Fennesz’ seminal folktronica album *Endless Summer*. img880(https://i.imgur.com/A8QiH5C.jpg) This is not to imply that *Penguin Highway* lacks a plot, though. Our central character is Aoyama, a precocious boy genius. He’s a wise-beyond-his-years type, the kind that almost every nerdy child *imagines* they are. He keeps notebooks full of experiments and ‘research’, is stoic in the face of adversity, and is happily counting down the days until he becomes an adult. Joining Aoyama as the secondary lead is a woman who works at the dental clinic he visits, who also happens to be his chess tutor. The woman is identified as simply “Onee-san” in the original, and as “The Dentist Office Lady” in the English subtitles. She is quite the enigma, and proves to be the film’s real central character. She’s also Aoyama’s crush, and the film thankfully does a pretty good job of keeping this on the “cute” side instead of dipping into anything unpleasant. Also along for the ride are the nervy Uchida, Aoyama’s friend, Hanamoto, a similarly-smart girl and Aoyama’s primary chess rival, and Suzuki, the class bully. img880(https://i.imgur.com/Fiuiliw.png) *(Aoyama (left) and Hanamoto (right). Suzuki is on the far left, just cut off by the scene boundary.)* There are of course, also, penguins. img880(https://i.imgur.com/sVAe60g.png) To say that there are penguins in a film called *Penguin Highway* seems obvious, but these are no ordinary penguins. We learn pretty quickly into the film that Aoyama’s crush Onee-San is actually the one making them. Out of random, everyday objects though most notably, as briefly aforementioned, soda cans. Solving the mystery of how she's able to do this--as even she doesn't know--is what drives the first half of the film's plot, but it's not until the second half that the thematics really kick into high gear. The film’s central theme is a broad, simple one. The kind of thing that this sort of movie works best with. “All good things must come to an end” is a maxim so ingrained in the human cultural experience that it’s more of a cliche than anything. Yet, it is precisely this idea that *Penguin Highway* wrings for emotional impact. img880(https://i.imgur.com/35hnxPu.png) Aoyama, Uchida, and Hamamoto discover something strange in a vast clearing in the middle of the forest. It’s an orb, floating in the air, and made of pure water. Hanamoto dubs it *Umi*--The Sea--and the trio spend their summer alternately playing near and studying the Sea Orb. img880(https://i.imgur.com/C8pxcbf.png) The montage of the three playing together is probably the emotionally brightest moment in the entire film, and to bring back that mention of *Endless Summer* from earlier, this is where it most expertly weaves together fractious summer memories into a refined whole. Almost everyone has experienced *something like* the trio’s summer near the Sea Orb. I must imagine, involving far fewer spherical anomalies, but the sentiment remains. img880(https://i.imgur.com/5BnWncV.png) It’s every mystery of childhood rolled into one, and scaled up a thousandfold. The three are having the time of their lives, and Aoyama even imagines that he’ll be awarded a Nobel Prize for their work studying the Sea Orb, fantasizing about “Onee-San” visiting his acceptance ceremony in a white dress. It, of course, does not last. Suzuki and his lackeys eventually trail the trio, and discover the Sea Orb too. They menace the kids, but are broken up by Onee-San, whose army of penguins prove to react strangely to the orb. Aoyama, fascinated by the reaction, wants Onee-San to join the three of them in researching it. Hamamoto, flustered by Aoyama’s obvious crush on Onee-San, and unable to reconcile it with her *own* obvious crush on Aoyama, refuses. The two fight, and the youthful summer comes to a sudden, crashing halt. Here again is a stab at universality. We’ve all fought with our friends as kids--often over immensely silly things in hindsight--and that feeling of endless days coming to a sudden, blindsiding halt, is all too familiar. img880(https://i.imgur.com/cLjiixm.png) Things get worse. During subsequent meetups with Onee-San, it becomes obvious that the same “penguin energy” that keeps her penguins around is also sustaining her. She stops eating, and if she moves too far from the Sea Orb she becomes ill, tying back to an early scene where a penguin that gets too far from town reverts into the soda can it was made from. Worse, the jabberwocks that have been troubling her nightmares start appearing in reality, putting the entire town on edge as scientists from the nearby university (where Momotama’s father works) search for the creatures. img880(https://i.imgur.com/8jQteRO.png) The Sea Orb starts expanding, threatening to engulf the whole town, and sparking an evacuation. It eventually becomes clear that the only way to stop the thing is to destroy it. Something that will kill the penguins. And Onee-San. The generality of *loss* is a hard theme to tackle. No two people grieve the same way. No two losses are exactly equivalent. People enter our lives and leave them in a plurality of ways. The reason that *Penguin Highway*’s scaling-down of *all* loss into Aoyama’s loss of his first love, Onee-San, is that no matter who you’ve lost, or how, the *sudden-ness* is what is universal. One day someone is there, the next they are not. No matter the actual timeframes, there is a distinct *before* and *after*, a time when, like the endless summer, it seemed like the relationship--whatever it was--would go on forever, and a time after, when it becomes devastatingly clear that it won’t. Yet, it goes without saying that, well, nothing lasts forever. img880(https://i.imgur.com/vjunsSE.png) They do destroy the Sea Orb, in what has to be among the most beautifully-animated runs of the decade. The entire final 30 minutes of the film is simply *gorgeous*, and if anything blunts the heartache of Onee-San’s death, it’s this. Colorido have a reputation as being a premier studio who do innovative, expertly-executed work. If anything needed to further cement that reputation, let it be this. The inside of the Sea Orb, which turns out to be a sort-of black hole, is wonderfully imaginative. It resembles a sort of long-after-the-apocalypse flooded earth, with random bits of manmade scenery floating both in the air and under the water, in the infinite sea. img880(https://i.imgur.com/QrHe1rd.png) img880(https://i.imgur.com/nBdDIep.png) This is more or less the end of *Penguin Highway*. After they leave the Sea Orb, and the penguins finish hunting down the miniature water globes that constitute its remains, Aoyama and we, the audience, say goodbye to Onee-San. The last time the two spend together is them rushing to the cafe` that they'd meet at for chess lessons, along a literal yellow brick road. img880(https://i.imgur.com/iPEgrpH.jpg) Aoyama drinks bitter tea as the penguins outside fade one by one. Onee-San leaves, and vanishes. The film’s credits are scored to a song built around the word “goodbye” as a central lyric. Is *Penguin Highway* a perfect film? No, but it’s a good argument that more anime films need to make their way west. It’s an expertly-done take on an age-old theme. Making something so broad and so simple seem fresh and newly timeless is no mean feat. At the very least, it will hopefully raise the profiles of all involved, from Studio Colorido itself (who have been building a quietly impressive portfolio for the past decade, despite escaping notice of most American otaku), Director Hiroyasu Ishida, script-writer Makoto Ueda, to the many specific animators involved. If *Penguin Highway* is a sign of what’s to come in the 2020s, either from Colorido specifically or from the medium in general, it’s a portent we should all be happy to heed. A lighthouse on the coast. --------
Coming from the studio who also made A Whisker Away and produced by Wit studio who made animes like Attack on Titan, Penguin Highway is an anime I haven’t heard much about and I don’t why. Following a wonderful story with very interesting characters, Penguin Highway is a film I thoroughly enjoyed for a multitude of reasons, so I hope this encourages some of you to watch it. Penguin Highway follows the story of Aoyama (titty connoisseur) on his quest to research the odd phenomenon that is happening in his suburban town. The appearance of penguins in the center field. As he dives deeper into this mystery many more surface causing him and the viewers to question what is really going on. ~~~~~~img720(https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/penguin-highway.jpg) First of all, I love the animation. Like I said before coming from Wit studio this film was bound to have high quality animation, which it does. The fluidity of all the movements in the film really help to capture the mysterious atmosphere of the film. The scenes when they enter the ocean and their surroundings are warped was one of my favorites. The movement of the ocean and the penguins mesh so well with the interactions of the characters and the environment around them. img720(https://otakubrit.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/1tgfywhkzf2twdds-ud2lqa.png) Speaking of characters, they were also spectacular. With the mysteriousness of Onee-san to the stoic speech of Aoyama each character with their quirks really help build the story. No two characters are the same in this film, they all have their own method of approaching things as seen throughout the film allowing them all to bring something to the table. The way they interact with each other really helped express their emotions and thoughts about certain subjects in a way which was much more enjoyable than being told. img720(https://thereelbits.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/penguin-highway002.jpg) The story is also just fantastic. With the help from the characters to give it more livelihood it makes the film a wonderful experience. I love how the film always presents you with mysteries in the eyes of Aoyama but never really gives you all the answers until the end. As you follow the characters through this wondrous journey you never know what lies ahead, with continual new discoveries the story is piled on top of itself even further in a positive way. img730(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/835300400567418903/893965372921896960/unknown.png) Lastly, the music throughout the film was also extremely good. In every suspenseful, eye opening, or influential moment there was a soundtrack building on it. As someone who needs music behind a film to really enjoy it this film was just great at doing so. Love the film and I can’t consciously think of any negatives, but I can’t whole heartedly give this an 100 unfortunately, though that doesn’t mean I didn't enjoy it though. Really spectacular film overall in my eyes, it's a 92 in my books.
**Overview:** Lil boi with young grill in a soon to be intimate relationship? I think so, flags set and posted, he aint hit puberty yet and she knows it. Means they safeguarded from needing to spend on the rubber… hopefully… lol Entire premise is having the boi Aoyama solve a mystery that surrounds his dentist lehdeh. Only using the term mystery may not sound appropriate or vague, but iah it is a perfect way of describing it. There are mysteries that he is wanting to solve and so does experiments throughout the film to gather and gain information regarding them. Aoyama is a 4th grader by looks and age but mentally around late high school college. There is another student in his class that, somehow is on par with mental level where first shot of her she be learning and researching into the theory of relativity, but again they are only in 4th grade lol. It’s a fun contrast to most other films that attempt a younger cast. Throughout the time the experiments are being conducted the cast doesn’t grow much which is for the best, it keeps in the small amount to people to tell the story through. In the Aoyamas class there is the generic bully… but this generic bully is one that is shown to be getting wisdom teeth pulled, at the ripe age of 10ish, like damn school must have been hard on him or something. Aoyama realizing this of course trolled a bit. The name of the film is a bit strange but is directly linked and named early on. Penguins are prominent and shown to have their own twist that adds to the enjoyment. **Visuals/Music:** Visuals are simply gorgeous. From the dew on the grass to the skyscapes they crafted. Everything has a high fidelity to detail. Movements and animation keep up from the smaller effects to the larger and more complex movements of some of the stuff shown. Won’t get too much into detail as it’ll speak for itself. It is up there with some of the best and highly recommend watching a direct stream of bd or purchasing it to watch as regular streams will compress and tarnish the quality that is there. As for the OST’s, I mean they do their job with silence used appropriately and playing certain tracks to enhance immersion which is exactly what they are there to do. No complaints to them but at the same time nothing grand or special about them, the visuals heavily overshadow and compensate. **Final Thoughts:** Surprisingly this film was one that I went in with some low expectations of not knowing what to expect. Pleasantly was surprised that by the end I was quite immersed and engaged with the film. Has its comedy placed appropriately and smooth as it should be in everyday convos with others. It felt natural. Penguins as per the name of the film are shown throughout and what can be said about them is that they stay true to being one of, if not the best animal. Especially for how they are shown lol. They fly, swim walk act and well are things of unimaginable origin :D I do recommend the film to those wanting an enjoyable movie to watch and pass the time with a more wholesome type message that gets across [?] /shrug its nice and enjoyable lol. ```Overall Ratings - Rec: N/A Raw: N/A```
~~~Penguin Highway is an incredible movie which blew my expectations higher than they already were. The aspect that made me want to watch this movie so much, the penguins, is what creatively amounts to the story to make what it is ___ #__Summary__ The story put forward is on a boy by the name of Aoyama who investigates into why there are penguins in his village through the help of a few friends and a Lady he meets at the dentist who he frequently communes with. Aoyama and his friends soon discover a huge bubble which they soon name 'the Ocean' that floats in an open plain encircled by a forest. This bubble seems to have a connection to the penguins as they investigate further and the Ocean overtime begins to grow in size. Towards the end of the movie we see that the bubble is a threat to the village and in order to do something, Aoyama and the Lady enter, only to be welcomed by an empty blue sky and sea with some sort of village coated in white. The ending involves the Ocean bubble having been burst by the Lady and the twist that Lady is someone from Aoyamas imagination. The plot puts a lot of focus on the coming of age as Aoyama, this kid, wants to grow up and this story effectively shows the effort needed to overcome trials and learn what it's like to be a grown up. img(https://lostinanime.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Penguin-Highway-01.jpg) ___ #__Characters__ Aoyama the 10 year old genius has a set focus on growth by learning things an adult which seperates him and others his age due to them not understanding him. Its as soon as the penguins are seen that we see how serious he is in this manner of formality. Onee-san/Lady is the woman who Aoyama meets at the dentist who goes on to be his chess tutor but thats minor when we progress through the story. Onee-san is truly a very mysterious character with her power of creation at certain times of the day in correlation with how she feels and is clear that she is the main reason that these events are taking place, the penguins, the Ocean and even monsters called Jabberwocks. Having a character like this sets the pace for the movie and just like Aoyama we want to find out how she can do this and why she can do this. img(https://image.myanimelist.net/ui/5LYzTBVoS196gvYvw3zjwItJwQUPkxRwG1LA1sG2PM0) Other characters such as Ushida and Hamamoto assist Aoyama in the investigation of the penguins and the Ocean, Aoyamas father is supportive for Aoyamas growth and investigations and his mother is supportive for his growth health wise. ___ #__Animation__ img(https://assets1.ignimgs.com/2019/04/11/penguinhighway-blogroll-1555003987865_160w.jpg?width=1280) The animation is this film is outstanding and so beautiful. The studio that made Penguin Highway was Studio Colorido, co-founded by director Ishida and former Studio Ghibli animator Yojiro Arai and the animation Yojiro Arai provides from the setting to the characters and the scenes full of colour and action its all done so incredibly well. img(https://theasiancinemacritic.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/ph003377.png) ___ #__Music__ Utada Hikaru does it again, Good Night is perfect for a movie like Penguin Highway as it says 'Mystery solving never ends' a stability that there is always something to find out and even though Aoyama found the correlation between Onee-san, the penguins and the Ocean he doesn't know who she is, trying to solve the mystery behind her that he sensed all the way back near the start of the movie. And the repetition of goodbye that is used indicates his acceptance in the fact that it's over and she is gone hinting his growth as an individual. If you haven't heard Good Night by Utada Hikaru its worth the listen. youtube(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bETHxoSfd-U&ab_channel=%E7%B5%B6%E4%B8%96%E5%A5%87%E8%B7%A1) ___ In the end, my opinion on this film is how well it was executed through different means from its plot, characters, animation and music, all of it stands out to me making me love this movie so much. I hold it close because of its coming of age moral and how we all aspire to grow up like Aoyama does and we face the same moments of trial through our adolesence. This is all I need to give it a 10/10 ___ ~~~