Reviews

The movie starts off quite unprepossessing at a soporific pace, with a completely ordinary and somewhat pitiful protagonist. She works hard, but is lonely and a bit nerdy. She meets a 'bad boy', and like the plot is on rails, they fall for each other and she predictably gets pregnant, with the pregnancy clichés of vomiting and eating stuff while the 'husband' worries about her. Also, he reveals his wolf form, not that it makes any apparent difference to him or Hana. It's all done completely without drama or interest, and 20 minutes in I begin to regret starting it and wondering if I should skip forward. Fortunately, not long after the second kid is born, he gets himself killed in an accident while chasing birds in his wolf form. While you might think the movie's heart begins to beat here, that's not the case, and his death is as dull as the foregoing. Hana drops out of college permanently and discovers that temperamental kids who can transform into wolves are a serious problem to rear in the city, where she fears exposure any moment and the gossip of other women. (Here I begin to wonder if we're supposed to be seeing this story as perhaps a commentary or metaphor for something, like biracial kids, where the Japanese mother might want to cover up any foreignness of appearance or foreign language capability to avoid the bullying and ostracism that might happen if it becomes known.) Logically, she decides to pack up for the country side.

Interestingly, since _Wolf Children_ is realist in style and set in the very recent past (feels like the '90s, roughly), we get to see a rural Japan we don't usually see in your standard nostalgic movie like Ghibli: we see a rural Japan which has depopulated, been abandoned by young people, rents collapsed to zero even for what are practically mansions, a countryside which has only some old people and their dependents who engage in comically-inefficient agriculture which can only survive due to trade barriers and substantial government subsidies (which we notice, whether or not we want to, by noticing how well-maintained the roads are even on a remote mountain where no one is, how buses travel even with only one or two children or adults aboard, and how a government official personally escorts Hana around while looking for a house).

Here the story really begins as Hana fixes up the mansion, builds ties with her neighbors, learns how to farm by hand (again note the inefficiency), and Ame and Yuki start becoming people. Since it reminds us so much of _My Neighbor Totoro_, we keep expecting some sort of supernatural entity to appear - this is their father's homeland from before he moved to Tokyo, surely a pack of wolves or tanuki or something will show up soon - but instead, they just keep growing up on screen, with some small but meaningful conflicts: Ame refuses to go to school, Yuki hurts a boy who keeps harassing her, a record storm puts them in danger.

And gradually it dawns on one that Ame and Yuki aren't really the main characters but that Hana was the main character all along: this isn't a story about being a half-human monster struggling to reconcile one's parts, or about a war between humans and the supernatural, or a war between humans and the environment. This is a movie about the sacrifices Hana made to become a mother and start a family, and the challenges she braved to find a place for her children to grow up, and the pain of watching their struggles. At the end, when Hana rushes out into the torrential rain to look for Ame, our initial impulse - to mock her foolishness and failure to understand that she is in far more danger from the storm than Ame, that he has spent infinitely more time on the mountain than Hana and knows what he is doing - is immediately tempered by the understanding that *this* is part of what it means to be a mother: the desire to help and protect, no matter how little, and no matter how little the child reciprocates. (A quick exercise: in the last third of the movie, does either child ever express any love or gratitude? Ame in particular comes off as a cold-hearted bastard.) In the final moments, as Ame vanishes into the mountains, we understand Hana when she asks/begs aloud "I still haven't done a single thing for you! I still haven't..."

Animation: mostly mediocre and closer to one's TV expectations than movie-quality. Characters are rendered in as abstractly and little detailed a fashion as possible. Movements are not generally not that fluid, and while some of the backgrounds are pretty nice (especially after the move to the northern countryside), they don't rise to the routine expectations of a Miyazaki movie or a Shinkai production or the more atmospheric series like _Mushishi_. The exceptions are a handful of wolf-sequences: the romp in the snow is fantastic and moving, and Ame following his fox master up the mountain is also good.

Music: Takagi Masakatsu's score is mostly unobtrusive and quiet, matching the general tempo and mood of the film and its setting. That said, I must single out the ending theme "オヨステ・アイナ" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcRa7TRhJgE) for conveying the overarching theme of motherhood very well through its lyrics & sound for anyone who didn't get what the story was about, and "おかあさんの唄" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cstiuUA-7q8) for just being a great instrumental/classical piece.