Mamoru Hosoda
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What follows is a mentorship montage 180 degrees removed from “The Karate Kid” or any number of conventional kung-fu character reinventions: Kumatetsu proves to be a disastrous teacher, losing his temper at the slightest provocation, while Kyuta actually manages to outsmart his mentor, getting the better of the cranky old bear in a series of amusing scenes that compress eight years of rigorous training and personal evolution into a rowdy bonding experience.
Hosoda, who was briefly and ill-fatedly connected with Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli a decade ago before branching out with his own organization, delivers a raucously entertaining if slightly overlong romp which borrows liberally from existing sources — it's at heart a Harry Potter-flavored fusion of The Jungle Book and The Karate Kid — but has more than enough character and brio to stand foursquare on its own two hairy feet.
Satoshi Kon's "Paprika" was a trippy predecessor to "Inception" (at a fraction of the budget), and now Mamoru Hosoda's "Summer Wars" adds some needed color to the virtual-world theme in movies like "Tron."
While Studio Ghibli maestro Hayao Miyazaki shifts his attention to CG and short-form toons, Hosoda (who’d been attached to direct “Howl’s Moving Castle” at an early stage) nobly forges ahead with the labor-intensive art of hand-drawn animation, serving up an action-packed buddy movie that strategically combines several of Japanese fans’ favorite ingredients: conflicted teens, supernatural creatures and epic battles.
But towering over them is “ Princess Mononoke ”, a 1997 Japanese anime that was directed by Hayao Miyazaki whose swan song “The Wind Rises”, a biopic of the engineer responsible for the Zero fighter plane of WWII, was judged by NYFCO as best animated feature this year—the only choice that coincided with my own.
Instead, it’s a deeply introspective, lyrical, Studio Ghibli-like (certain countryside moments recall My Neighbor Totoro and Only Yesterday) tale of one mother’s struggle to raise two kids who really can behave like animals.
Tomm Moore's touching Song of the Sea is not anime, but it shares elements with some of the best anime films of recent years, particularly Mamoru Hosoda's Wolf Children.
I even like old classics of the genre like Tron and the anime film Summer Wars .
The Wind Rises (2013)
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
influenced The Boy and the Beast (2015), Wolf Children (2012)
Japanese productions have landed Best Animated Feature nominations in each of the last two years via Ghibli's pair The Wind Rises and The Tale of Princess Kaguya , and while The Boy and the Beast is a more conventional affair than either, it is also a more accessible and commercial prospect.
While this film is directed mostly at adults, I can strongly recommend “Wolf Children”, another Japanese anime that came out in 2013 and that can be enjoyed by 8 year olds as well as 68 year olds like me.