Summer Wars

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.