Toy Story 3 may be the heavy odds-on-favorite for the upcoming Oscar’s Best Animated Film category, but there’ll always be place for the little guys aka Japanese anime to make the noms more robust. In actually, Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars is actually pretty big in its’ own right, having won Japan Best Animated film award it probably had some crazy, domestic box office run, but in the U.S. it’s perhaps lucky to receive a one week qualifying [12.10] run via Gkids – the folks who distributed The Secret of Kells.
Gist: Kenji is a teenage math prodigy recruited by his secret crush Natsuki for the ultimate summer job – passing himself off as Natsuki’s 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, handling everything from online shopping and traffic control to national defense and nuclear launch codes.
Worth Noting: International Cinephile Society’s Cédric Succivalli told us to look out for this since mid-Summer. It’s been to major festival stops including Berlin, Annecy (the top film festival for animated films), Montreal’s Fantasia and Sitges.
Do We Care?: Look at how Summer Wars is being labeled. I’m in. A “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 Takashi Murakami, Oz is a hallucinatory pixel parade of cool avatar designs, kung fu jackrabbits, toothy bears, and a bursting rainbow of colors.”
