nobahn's Anime

• 35:00 is the boy imagining all of this?
• sibling rivalry: gotta love it.....
• The character designs strongly resemble The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Summer Wars
• It's charming, there's no denying that; but how much of that was his imagination and how much was real?
• It's true that Mirai (from the future) is a part of the plot, but she's only one part of the plot ─ the title is somewhat misleading.

[...] However, I think that you've done the film a bit of a disservice by entirely ignoring its main character — the house itself.

For all four-year-olds, the physical space they inhabit is the shape and boundary of their universe, defining their experience of their family and their family's world. Hosoda had the house in the film designed by an architect from scratch in order to make it the fruit of Kun's father's labors; it's important to note that "home" is the contribution Dad made to Kun's upbringing, although he had to sacrifice his time with his son to make it.

Having been constructed by the generation before Kun's, the house becomes the temporal nexus connecting him to the generations of the future and the past. The house stands for the family itself, the eternal story in which each individual life is its own chapter—a chapter that tells its own standalone tale that is nevertheless entirely incomprehensible without the larger context of the family story it serializes. The climactic fall through the family's full history, with all of its horrors and joys and amazing connections, its acknowledgement of the devastating power of death and the even more incredible life-force of the ongoing family that can overcome it, brings me to tears every time I watch it. (My own grandfather died when my father was a teenager, and I have often felt the mysterious, intimate connection to a man I've never met who is nevertheless present in all of my father's actions, and grieved for the loss of someone I never knew; that aspect of family is the real heart of Mirai's action.)

So yeah, having written all that up, I guess that for all I agree with this article's take on the failures and foibles of Kun and his parents, I really disagree with its conclusion about the film's worthiness. Viewed as being "about" family history from the perspective of a very small child, I think it's a unique and positively mira(i)culous work.

Part I: "Kanini & Kanino"
The character designs have a Hiyao Miyazaki feel to them. There isn't any dialogue to speak of. Very much an art house feel; therefore rating at 10/11
Part II: "Life Ain't Gonna Lose"
Had me smiling; you need to be an adult to appreciate this one. 11/11
Part III: "Invisible"
A different artistic sensibility. It has a hopeful ending. 11/11

ep.10 takes me back to my own childhood. 11/11