Film Tag: Animation

Shinko spends her days running barefoot among the endless green wheat fields in her small country village, imagining she is playing 1,000 years ago when the area was the local capi­tal and home to a beautiful young princess kept hidden from society. Shinko gets a new partner for her games when she befriends Kiiko, a shy transfer student from Tokyo whose nice clothes and modern luxuries immediately set her apart from the other kids. Together, the two girls spend their afternoons daydreaming, building dams, chasing animals, and living an otherwise simple and idyllic life—until looming adolescent responsibility and harsh grown-up truths begin to encroach on their make-believe world of princesses and castles, and it becomes increasingly difficult to disentangle fantasy from re­ality. Director Sunao Katabuchi worked with Hayao Miyazaki as assistant director on Kiki’s Delivery Service, and the influences show, from Mai Mai‘s stunning animation and exalting focus on nature, to the film’s nostalgia for the endless days of summer, and the tender portrayal of a young girl at the transition between childhood and adult.

The creators of Ghost in the Shell mix exquisitely detailed 2D backgrounds with modern 3D character designs in a dazzling animated adventure that plays like Alice’s fall through the rabbit hole into a world of topsy-turvy, anime dream-logic. When Haruka misplaces a hand-mirror that was a keepsake from her mother, she stumbles upon a portal to the subter­ranean world of Oblivion Island, a place where strange masked creatures gather up all the childhood trinkets humans aban­don as they grow older and attend Dream Theaters where they can watch and feel the memories locked in these forgotten objects. The land is ruled by an evil overlord, The Baron, who craves the power created by the memories locked in Haruka’s cherished mirror—a power that will allow him to rise beyond his world of discards and take over the world of humans. Aided by Teo, a lowly junk collector, and Cotton, her old stuffed animal brought back to life, Haruka struggles to recapture the mirror from The Baron, and to rediscover the fleeting moments of childhood love and friendship that are among life’s most precious treasures.

NYICFF 2010 opens with the scintillating new feature from emerging anime star Mamoru Hosoda. Kenji is a teenage math prodigy recruited by his secret crush Natsuki for the ultimate summer job—passing himself off as her boyfriend for four days during her grandmother’s 90th birthday celebration. But when Kenji solves a 2,056 digit math riddle sent to his cell phone, he unwittingly breaches the security barricade protecting Oz, a globe-spanning virtual world where millions of people and governments interact through their avatars. Now a malicious AI program called the Love Machine is hijacking Oz accounts, growing expontentially more powerful and sowing chaos and destruction in its wake. This “intriguingly intelligent” cyberpunk sci-fi story is a visual tour-de-force, with the amazing world of Oz as the highlight. Like the internet as conceived by pop artist Haruki Murakami, Oz is an hallucinatory pixel parade of cool avatar designs, kung fu jackrabbits, toothy bears, and a bursting rainbow of colors.

From the director of the acclaimed Your Name. (NYICFF 2017). On the other side of the door, was time in its entirety…As the skies turn red and the earth trembles, Japan stands on the brink of disaster. But one determined teenager, Suzume, sets out on a mission to save her country. Able to see the supernatural forces that others can’t, it’s up to her to close the mysterious doors spreading chaos across the land. A perilous journey awaits as the fate of the country rests on her shoulders.

Kokoro has had enough of the buzzing bells, shouting teachers, noisy hallways, and mean classmates at her middle school when she decides to just stay home. Bored and trapped, she finds a portal in her bedroom mirror that whisks her away to an enormous castle, where she’s greeted by the mysterious and gruff Wolf Queen—a wolf in girls’ clothing or the other way around, she’s not sure. Along with six other smart but world-weary students, she must follow all of the Queen’s rules, including a strict curfew. They are all in search of a magic key, hidden somewhere in the castle, that will grant whoever finds it any wish they want. As they conspire over strategy and share their stories, bonding in a place that’s free of fear and judgment and learning when to make (and sometimes break) their own rules in the name of friendship. Maybe the adults will begin to understand that it’s the circumstances, and not the kids, that need to change in this meaningful anime adapted from Tsujimura Mizuki’s popular YA novel.