Summer Wars (movie)

The guardians of Oz, John and Yoko, allude to John Lennon and Yoko Ono. This is an interesting choice as John Lennon and Yoko Ono both helped to rally support for the legal defense of Oz magazine in its 1970 obscenity trial through the Elastic Oz Band's single "God Save Us"/"Do the Oz".

The first sentence in Kenji's original solution ("The magic words are squeamish ossifrage.") is a direct reference to one of the first RSA-encrypted ciphertexts to ever be broken. The ciphertext, first presented in Scientific American in 1977, was only cracked after six months of work using over 1,600 machines in 1993-1994.

The name of the rogue AI, Love Machine, is a pun. "Ai", in Japanese, means love.

"Love Machine" not only a pun on the term "AI", but is also the title of a Morning Musume song; hence one of the uncle's confused question referring to the group from Hello! Project.

The rogue AI Love Machine's altered appearance after consuming its first bystander user account, is based on the appearance of mainly two icons in Japanese pop culture: the fighter Dhalsim, from the Street Fighter video game (body), and that of the giant robot Great Mazinger (Tranzor Z in the US), by Go Nagai (head)

The design of OZ's central spindle axis is based on the art of Murakami Takashi's 'superflat' style, specifically the characters in the short anime "Superflat Monogram", made for fashion house Louis Vuitton, which incidentally also used Madhouse as their animation company. Director Hosoda Mamoru credits Murakami for inspiration only, however.

The car Wabisuke drives, is an FD ('92 - '02) -series Mazda RX-7.

At 1:03:34, when Kenji is apologizing for trying to convince the family to assist in protecting the world from Love Machine... a line is referenced from the Kurosawa Akira movie Seven Samurai, about the value of interbeing: 'to protect yourself, you must protect others.' This line in Kurosawa's film was said by the samurai leader Shimada Kambei (島田勘兵衛), played by Shimura Takashi.

At 1:04:10, the history of the Jinnouichi Clan is told, which is based on the real-life Tokugawa era Sanada Clan of Ueda, in Nagano Prefecture. The siege mentioned is the real-life Battle of Kami River, and it was indeed the second siege in 1600 which involved trapping Shougun Tokugawa Hidetada's troops inside the Ueda Castle compound, ending the engagement with the enemy retreating.

At 1:09:10, Kazuma and his grandfather are practicing the first movement of T'ai Chi Ch'uan (probably Yang style).

The space probe shown as the Arawashi, is actually the real Japanese JAXA probe Hayabusa, which in reality did plummet to earth (by design) on a mission to retrieve asteroid rocks (which it failed to do as directed). Director Hosoda Mamoru intentionally included the probe to show his support of the Japanese space program.

There are very prominent manufacturer/product logos in this anime movie, as opposed to the veiled or fabricated ones for most TV anime... among them: Datsun, Yamaha, Dell, Ito-En, CNN, Apple/iPhone, Mazda, Adidas, Sony, and Nintendo.

Summer Wars draws immense parallels with the original Digimon movie in story line and cinematography. Mamoru Hosoda directed the Bokura no War Game portion.