The opening part of Summer Wars acts as a cutscene in a game before the action starts and your thrown in headfirst into the narrative. It really shows how important world building and creating an atmosphere can be so important to an animation film and at the start of the journey you go on with the characters. You want to become enriched in the world they live in to feel like you can join them on the journey they go on. In the opening credits of this film, the editing and design elegantly show us the rich landscapes that follow Koiso on his journey towards the home of his crush, Natsuki. My favourite anime films are where the environment around them is just as important to the film as the narrative. Take for example Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki, 1997) that uses nature as somewhat its own character in the film, along with the recent release of The Boy and the Heron (Miyazaki, 2023) where the exploring of the outside world leads to the main plot point of the film.
This film starts by exploring this well and uses the outside to the advantage. Then for twenty minutes in until the end of the film, it is all pretty much confined to the one house in which he has travelled to. The main plot line of the film is about cyberspace in which communication in their society relies upon its use, and therefore this becomes the ‘outside’ of the film where the characters travel into the cyberspace. This unconventional way to approach the story didn’t really connect as your either in this fast paced alternate world where the story isn’t really easy to follow, then your put back into the house environment which is mainly just family squabbles that has some funny moments but doesn’t ever add anything new.
By the end of the film, the storyline became focused on the virtual world that included a two hour timer where they had to do something before it reached zero (I pretty much lost the plot at this point). The timer just became a visual clue to me for how long was left of the film where the less time that became on the clock, the more relieved I started to feel. The films biggest praise was that I never found myself getting too bored. Having an anime that was about technology, and more importantly set in the current day rather than the past, did feel like something different. But throughout I kept wanting it just to escape the confines that it placed itself in and just explore. It had potential and showed early on what it could achieve, yet it tried to be too relevant to the modern age and become about family drama that coincidentally included a cyberspace storyline.