Ookami Kodomo no Ame to Yuki

Hana, a hard-working college student, falls in love with a mysterious man who attends one of her classes though he is not an actual student. As it turns out, he is not truly human either. On a full moon night, he transforms, revealing that he is the last werewolf alive. Despite this, Hana's love remains strong, and the two ultimately decide to start a family.

Hana gives birth to two healthy children—Ame, born during rainfall, and Yuki, born during snowfall—both possessing the ability to turn into wolves, a trait inherited from their father. All too soon, however, the sudden death of her lover devastates Hana's life, leaving her to raise a peculiar family completely on her own. The stress of raising her wild-natured children in a densely populated city, all while keeping their identity a secret, culminates in a decision to move to the countryside, where she hopes Ame and Yuki can live a life free from the judgments of society. Wolf Children is the heartwarming story about the challenges of being a single mother in an unforgiving modern world.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Hana Main

Miyazaki, Aoi Japanese

Ame Main

Nishii, Yukito Japanese

Yuki Main

Kuroki, Haru Japanese

Ookami Main

Osawa, Takao Japanese

Fujii, Souhei Supporting

Hiraoka, Takuma Japanese

Nirasaki Supporting

Sugawara, Bunta Japanese

Shino Supporting

Kobayashi, Rino Japanese

Horita Supporting

Aso, Kumiko Japanese

Keno Supporting

Kamishiraishi, Mone Japanese

Hosokawa Supporting

Nakamura, Tadashi Japanese

Cook, Justin Producer

Saitou, Yuuichirou Producer

Inoue, Shinichiro Producer

Hosoda, Mamoru Director, Theme Song Lyrics, Original Creator, Screenplay

Reviews

Oct 22, 2013

tehnominator

Recommended

Ookami Kodomo no Ame to Yuki translates to "Wolf Children Ame and Yuki". What the film's title promises is accurate, but this is secondary to what the film is actually about. This is a movie entirely about the enduring and triumphant nature of maternal love.

Teenage Hana is a hardworking girl putting herself through college. During a class, her eyes fall on a man who enthusiastically and diligently takes notes, but he has no textbooks and he disappears before roll is taken. Intrigued, she searches him out and learns that he sits through classes but doesn't attend the school. From what we see, he works ... with a moving company, delivering goods to houses. He comes to university and bums through classes to learn. Hana works at a laundromat to make ends meet, and meets him when her day is over. We never learn of this man's name, but he becomes Hana's world, and she, his. Then their worlds are joined then broadened with the births of their children.

To call this film a movie about "werewolves" is doing it a mighty injustice. To call it a spirited, charming and heart-rending look about family is more accurate. And while it is always about the "ookami no kodomo", it is carried by Hana's life. Hana does what she can to keep her children safe and alive. She removes them from the urbanised world and carries them deep into a rural village where they are free to develop and understand the other half of them.

The film can be divided into three clear arcs. The first finds Hana in love, developing a relationship. The second follows Hana's struggles to raise her young children who have special needs. The final one sees her settled while her children attempt to find their own places in the world. A recurring theme throughout each arc is that there is a reason to always keep smiling.

Ookami Kodomo is a film of change and self-discovery. Yuki begins the film feral and wild, easily embracing her lupine half while Ame, tearful and timid, is afraid of what it means to be part-wolf. As the years pass, Hana's resolve remains unwavering, but her children grow apart from her as children naturally do. With this growth, they also change. The film changes focus from Hana as the children grow older, giving us their insight and feelings about who they are. Yuki's desire to belong allows her to channel charisma into socialising with peers. Ame's introversion makes him steely and independent. Yuki wants to embrace her humanity while Ame wants to explore the animal. Ame and Yuki yearn for something more, just as their mother knows they would but is afraid to acknowledge.

The story carefully and gently handles the fantasy so that it never overwhelms the film. There are no transformation hijinks or forced comedy or drama. The film treats the wolf children naturally. They seamlessly transform into their wolf-forms and out again. Some of the greatest scenes animated in the movie are these transformations as they move in and out of their dual identities.

The animation for the most part is fluid, with beautiful art painting a lovely countryside and the wilderness. Sometimes the film suffers from poorly chosen CGI effects, repeated animation and disproportionate character models, but this does not take away from the movie's overall beauty. Hana and the children's country home is clearly inspired by the 1988 classic My Neighbour Totoro, even down to Yuki's exuberant exploration of the broken down shed and the wild grass growing everywhere. Adding to the atmosphere of the film is a well-thought out score which knows precisely what type of music fits a mood. Sometimes, especially in the beginning and ending of the film, it can be a little heavy-handed with its emotional outbursts, but largely, it works and it makes itself invaluable to the film's impact. The voice-acting for the movie is one of its strongest aspects. Having child actors to play Yuki and Ame's characters in their toddler stages was a wise choice, as their earnest delivery of their lines makes the characters more genuine and loveable.

Ookami Kodomo's characters are the major reason that any viewer will become easily involved. Hana is one of the most inspirational characters ever to be given life through animation. Her love for her family is apparent. If anything, I'm pretty sure some of this film's audience is going to feel a pang of affection for their own mothers. She dutifully cares for them in ways that are admirable and it is her unbreakable spirit and positive disposition that makes her noteworthy. She is a strong woman and an even stronger mother. The mysterious man who she loves doesn't have the chance to be developed but it is this shroud around him that works to his character's benefit. We care for him through Hana's affections; in one particularly jarring scene, we understand what he means to her and this breaks our heart more than he himself ever would.

Yuki and Ame carry the film in places their mother cannot. While her hopes and fears for them are palpable, it is their experience of hope and of fear that makes these feelings more acute. Yuki's voice takes us through the entire film with its steady narration, and her character grows from precocious and brave child to a young girl who unfortunately knows what it means to be afraid. Ame's behaviour becomes a bit frustrating in the end of the film, but to understand him in the context of an animal, it makes perfect sense. He is a wolf.

The rest of the cast is made up of extremely likeable characters, including the old man who looks after Hana when she moves to the village and Souhei, a boy who crosses paths with Yuki. Even non-speaking, non-human characters like the caged wolf whose pain Ame senses and the wild fox whose freedom Ame respects are indispensable.

While the film's imperfections are honestly very few, they add up enough to have it stop just short of being a masterpiece. With some tighter editing of the story, cleaner and consistent art and animation, more precise handling of the characters, and a more memorable soundtrack, it easily would have been a masterwork of anime. As it is, it is still essential viewing for anyone interested in a movie that looks at growing up and raising a family. It is a mature, insightful and often painful reflection of how deeply we feel about those we love and inevitably have to let go of.

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Nov 13, 2012

5camp

Mixed Feelings

The story starts with a rather plain looking college girl and her romantic adventures with this dashingly attractive young man. It turns out that he’s a wolf-man, but the lady doesn’t care because golly, he really is quite a catch. Besides, wolves are cool, so it could be worse. He could be an uncool animal like a sea-cucumber man. They have kids together but raising them in the big city is a bit of a pain, especially since they keep turning into wolves when they get annoyed. So they move to the countryside and start a new life there. It is one half about the ... trials and wonders of raising children and providing them with the environment in which they can thrive, and one half about gosh darn isn’t the countryside and nature wonderful. Its closest comparison would be Totoro, what with the family with two kids moving to the countryside away from the smelly city.

The mother in Wolf Children is really quite an extraordinary character in how determined and admirable her attitude towards life is. The trials she goes through in order to raise her children the best she can is the main focus of the movie. The kids do lead a fairly happy-go-lucky life under her, ditching off school to wander around the forest, but it comes under the main theme of providing an environment in which your children can pursue any goal they wish. It all has a very strong focus on family values, and it comes across as all being rather hopeful and inspiring. In fact, maybe a bit too much…

Here is where I reveal that I am a horrible human being, because I found the aggressively maudlin tone overbearing. Particularly the opening 15-20 minutes of the movie with the relationship between the mother and the wolf dude. It laid on the sap way too thick. It reminds of those movies that are made entirely to win Oscars, with their overly sentimental tone. The way these movies try to draw emotion become almost robotic in their predictable nature. Wolf Children doesn’t have a single twist that isn’t even remotely surprising. That obviously doesn’t preclude it from being good, but it is a nice way of demonstrating how much it plays to this same factory-churned heart-tugging attempts.

There are parts to this movie I do genuinely like. The interaction between the two kids when they’re still young is charming as hell, particularly in how they formed opposite personalities in the way siblings do. The older child runs around and lot and is very charismatic, while the younger brother is quiet and withdrawn. It’s rather like myself and my younger sister, where videos of us would be her sitting around reading books patiently while I run around in the background screaming about Sonic the Hedgehog. Wolf Children perfectly captured that boundless energy and curiosity that children have.

But the other parts that I might otherwise have liked are fed through this maudlin machine and flip around to be too sentimental. The struggle the mother has to go through to get a garden working is really overdone, or more specifically the part where it says how wonderful the people of the countryside are. Not a message I’m opposed to by any means, but it comes off as way too overblown emotionally. The final part in the movie with what the younger brother eventually decides suffers from the same problem. I won’t spoil, but this is a really huge part of the movie that marks a massive emotional decision on his part and his mother’s, which they still somehow manage to overstate. I would like the movie to let me experience these emotions myself, not to have it smashing me over the head with a saucepan yelling “ISN’T THIS TRAGIC? LOOK AT HOW EMOTIONAL THIS IS! CRY DAMNIT!”

I wouldn’t say it’s a bad movie. There was never a stage when I wanted to leave the cinema and visit a trendy coffee shop instead. But the way the movie smashed repeatedly about how emotional everything was paradoxically left me feeling even more indifferent towards the film.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Feb 25, 2016

Paraturtle

Not Recommended

[Spoiler Warning]

Story:
Stories that span a long time (i.e. more than 5 years) have the opportunity to express a change in the characters and in the world around them. It's something that makes great films great. Forrest Gump is a great example of this use. Wolf Children is not. What this film does is give us short anecdotes of Hana as she experiences what it's like to not only be a single mother but a single mother raising werewolf children. You'd think this means the film would have many interesting events that take place; you'd be wrong.

From the get go, the film feels like one long ... and arduous flashback. The narration makes this clear, but the pacing implies that it's not going to change anytime soon. That said, the pacing is this weird mix of flashback and actual narrative (an empty narrative full of fluff and good feelings with little dimension.) It goes on for the longest time, and we experience it for about an hour and a half. It's only then that we reach an interesting arc of character as the children are now old enough to think and be people.

I understand that the majority of the film is spent on how Hana cares for her children, but a lot of this is mini story arcs that have a problem that's solved in less than 10 minutes. This sort of narrative reaches a point where the second I see an issue arise, I instantly know it will be solved within a moments notice. With no surprises, I waited for a conflict that set itself apart from the previous ones, and that's where we reach the last 30-40 minutes.

This is when I felt more engaged. It's what I'd argue to be the real complicating incident. Yuki, Hana's daughter, ends up getting angry at a classmate and scratches his ear, nearly deafening him. Due to the previous conditioning I'd experienced (problem, then solution moments later) I was expecting this to be resolved very swiftly, so I was glad to notice that it became a primary event into her 'becoming of age.' ((This is not a spoiler because, in a way, it's the best 'complicating incident' this story has to offer))

Hana's son, Ame, goes through a 'becoming of age' conflict as well, and while I'm glad that the film is beginning to pick up, it's two different character arcs being jammed into the last third that could have been emphasized throughout the film. It too was a conflict I was expecting to find solved moments later, but at this point, I knew better.


Audio and Soundtrack:
Audio is fine. Nothing spectacular.

Soundtrack becomes boring and there was 1 song in particular that could have been titled "brain-rend." That said, it's this sort of soundtrack that disappoints me the most. Not because it's classical and primarily piano, but because every song sounds similar and is devoid of character theme. Not only that, the songs feel as though they were an after-thought. The films pacing paired with the music do not meld together.

The soundtrack in itself is one of two things:
1- The film was animated prior to the OST
2 - The songs were written prior to the storyboarding.

If they were in perfect sync during production, then they failed horribly to put them together convincingly.


Animation:
It's beautiful, and that's the problem. Beauty erodes over time, and when the film shows countless landscapes that are hand-drawn with extreme care, it becomes stale. Outside of the setting, the characters move flawlessly and it feels fresh. That said, there are a few repeat scenes. This may be used for comedic effect, but to me, I've always considered this very lazy in animation. Other than that (and it's only in 3 or so scenes) there really aren't any complaints here. The animation here is top notch, and I really enjoyed it, despite the backgrounds growing unbelievably stale later on.


Final Thoughts:
I have the same complaints with this film as I did with Haibane Renmei. Slow pacing with swift resolutions throughout, and an interesting ending arc that should have been elongated over the duration of it's long running time. Interestingly enough, both of these animated projects are relatively highly rated and both I've found to be a strenuous venture.

I wonder if I'm the error...

Pfff, nahh.

Just for reference:
A 4/10, in my book, is a rating I reserve for works that are just below the sufficient mark. They've shown that they can properly do some things but fail so much in others that all it would have taken is some more work to fix the kinks. It's also a grade I reserve for works that I feel didn't jell with me personally, but others have gravitated towards. It's an acceptance that I think it's bad, but it's not 3- bad. I don't feel like I should need to explain this, but someone spammed me a long and arduous message about how I didn't love my mother. Please don't send me a message about how I don't love my mother. If you do I'll show it to my friends and we'll make fun of you. We always need a good laugh.

If you want to discuss points of this work in a civil manner, feel free to send me a PM. While I didn't enjoy this work, I love talking about stories, no matter what kind.

((If you liked this review, friend me for new reviews on other works, both manga and anime!))

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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