Summer Wars

I've waited eagerly for this movie and what a disaster it turned to be.

Now, don't get me wrong: it's not horrible in its wholeness. Actually, it's quite good at the beginning: lovable characters with a Miyazaki-like style of interaction between them, overall realistic setting, great art and animation. But everything ends up in ruins once the plot enters the scene. It’s simply illogical in relation to its own world that is just like our own.

So if you can cope with a lame plot, you can even enjoy the movies because, like I said earlier, it’s quite good in its other aspects. But for ... me it is a terrible disappointment.

Please don't flame me for rating this movie so low, because I know how much everyone worships it. The problem with it is that if you watch it after watching Digimon Bokura no War Game, you'll find a lot of similarities between the two, which kind of dampens the experience. After all, you've seen it all before. Why watch the same exact movie again? Because the character designs are amazing and the animation is beautiful, that's why! Unfortunately, that's all Summer Wars has going for it. It falls flat in the character department especially.

STORY- 2- To someone who hasn't watched Digimon, I guess the story ... would be pretty impressive. On the surface, it seems original- a virtual network called OZ runs almost everything in this world, but someone infects it with a virus called Love Machine, and it threatens the world's safety when it tries to eat everyone's virtual avatars and then nuke everyone in the real world. However, anyone who saw Digimon will notice it follows Bokura no War Game's plot EXACTLY! Virus threat attempts to fire nuclear missile and destroy world- heroes combat it online- all seems lost until people power up the heroes- main fighter "digivolves" into a super-ultra-mega-powerful being- defeats evil virus. I was really expecting more than that. It's a pity the man who wrote this copy-and-pasted the movie's plot like this. If you've seen a shit-ton of anime (especially Bokura no War Game, and I mean the REAL version, not the Digimon- the Movie version), don't expect anything too original here.

ART- 8- Here's the movie's best feature. The animation in the real world will look familiar to anyone who's watched Digimon (or 90's anime in general), but, once in OZ, it changes drastically and this is where all the creativity is. Some of the avatars are quite original, and the battle between King Kazma and Love Machine is pretty damn awesome and well animated. King Kazma himself was probably my favorite character design-wise. If you watch this movie, watch for the visuals, because they are truly beautiful.

SOUND- 5- I actually don't pay as much attention to sound as others do. Maybe it has something to do with my brain being more focused on visuals. I'm gonna give it a 5 solely because I don't want to rate it unfairly.

CHARACTER- 1- Characters? What characters?! We've got a shitload of characters, but none of them actually shine in this piece. Seriously, if you watch the original, non-puntastic version of Digimon and then Bokura no War Game, it's a far better experience as the characters (though they start out as stereotypes, so be warned) actually have development in the series and backstories that serve as reasons behind their actions. Therefore, they are easier to like. Summer Wars doesn't have such the luxury of a full-length animated series to back it up, but it still could have developed its characters better. I felt that by the end of the movie, the only thing that had changed was the relationship between the two leads. Everyone's one-dimensional personalities stayed exactly the same from beginning to end. To be fair, Bokura no War Game does this too (if you watch it as a stand-alone), but it at least has likeable characters.
...Sorry, I may have been a little harsh but I'm REALLY tough in this category, the sole reason being that I love characters so much and that I wish I could find some characters that aren't the same stock-stereotypes over and over.

ENJOYMENT- 3- I wish I could say that I'd rather watch cells reproduce than this movie, but the animation was too damn good for that.

OVERALL- 4
If you want to see Japanese animation at its best, watch this movie. If you are watching for plot and character (especially if you watched Digimon), stay away from this movie at all costs. You may like the plot if you haven't seen Digimon or too many other anime, however, so you might have a better time of it than a jaded anime fan like me. This is just my opinion.

RECOMMENDATION
If my Digi-dorking all over this review isn't enough proof, I'd recommend the original Season 1 Digimon (in Japanese, mind you, not the pun-laden dub) and Bokura no War Game together. Bokura no War Game falls a little flat on its own and is better enjoyed if you have knowledge of the series.

...Man, I made such a dork out of myself right now...Who cares? I had to say it.

Summer Wars
If you don't wanna read the review I'll get to the point here. I heard good things about Summer Wars from a lot of people. Watched it. It's awful. Also, spoilers.

The characters are boring, there is very little we learn about the MC besides he's a math genius, and the girl comes from a very proud family. The film wastes time introducing a large cast each giving a quirk to their personality and nothing more.

The "romance" if you wanna call it that, is literally nonexistent, until the end of the movie when Okudera decided it would be nice to include. Natsuki has been in ... love with her Uncle for years since she was very young (which is very nonchalantly discovered by her family members) but falls in love with the MC after four days, most of which they had little to no chemistry growth between the two besides her wanting someone to comfort her after her grandma died. (Maybe I should improve my math skills)

Everything is way to convenient to be interesting, I understand it's fiction, but this girl asked this math genius to come to her families house and pretend to be her fiance, where he gets a random email (from the hacking program) that cracks Oz security (what security?). This is also where he meets the grandson, who just so happens to be the fighting champ of Oz, King Kazma. The uncle our FMC is in love with, happened to create the program that's hacking the system. The rest of this family just so happen to be conveniently together at one location who's professions and hobbies loan them the most high tech equipment to combat this threat. Which makes them the only people who can stop it (not the Oz dev team or government or the millions of other people that use Oz), the useless math genius MC, the developer (who said the day before he has no way of stopping it), the fighting gamer (who's avatar require's a paragraph to throw punches) , and plot twist, the amazing angelic Natsuki and her incredible Koi-Koi skills she learned from her grandma. (wait... what?) Can't get more contrived than that.

The whole illegitimate love child and family quarrel drama is too vague to be any interests. I was debating even mentioning it here it was so pointless, so I'll stop.

The fighting was not very creative or exciting to say the least. The character emotions where way too over the top and exaggerated actions on part of the players were too laughable to make the "threat of the world" "fight for survival" feel legit at all. The idea of Oz and it's purpose to conveniently allow it's users to control every facet of life via an account including Traffic Lights, Nuclear Power Plants, Satellites, and potentially military equipment (which conveniently wasn't used) through the simple use of accounts that can be easily manipulated by one man's "program" is just too obvious that it shouldn't even exist. The animation was decent I guess, outside of CG anyway. And the soundtrack is completely forgettable.

What did I miss? Did I watch the right movie? Is there a different Summer Wars? Or maybe I have mistaken that people are talking about "Bokura no War Game".

Story 4/10

It started off pretty bumpy, almost like they couldn't decide how to get the ball rolling any other way except just having the girl tell him "you are coming with me to pretend to be my boyfriend" and the protagonist responding "okay". It just seemed a little unnatural but I mean that's anime for you, no big deal there. Beyond that there was a mishmash of events that individually made sense but altogether played out like a puzzle that was hot-glued together. Like for all the effort it took to get to the end, it wasn't very satisfying. Imagine you are told there is ... a magnificent orchestra coming to town and you go and its just one person playing a kazoo. Lots of excitement, lots of drama, lots of nothing by the end. Its very unrealistic even for a sci-fi(ish) anime but I guess that is entirely up to personal taste.

Art 7/10

No complaints here. It was very fluid and well done. The style itself was a little plain but I think that was more or less to contrast the chaos that was the virtual world. Character design was nice and there was nobody that stood out as being horrible looking or exceptional. Everything about the art was to my expectations and there is nothing wrong with meeting expectations.

Character 3/10

I liked the way the movie portrayed a family bond and the grandmother was definitely cut above the rest. It vaguely reminded me of Meet the Robinsons actually just because of how mix-and-match the family was and yet they all got along pretty well, even through struggles. However, they were still all kind of plain. It's kind of odd how the family itself is dry and realistic but the plot was not suited for them at all.

Overall 4/10

All sparkle but no shine. This was recommended to me as being one of the best anime movies of all time and I got something that wasn't very memorable and made almost no sense.I would recommend this to someone who really enjoyed The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (I liked it but I didn't LOVE it) or maybe 5 Centimeters per Second (I reeeeally didn't like this one) but they're both definitely similar in overall vibe.

ok so i watched summer wars because,...i cant think of why i watched this movie i just could not enjoy this movie to its full extent and know why?, the fucking Digimon movie! By the Digimon movie i mean the one that was released in America that really had like the first two Japanese released Digimon movies condensed into one. But the longer i watched this the more i thought of the god damn digimon movie and how much this seemed to be ripping it off. I dont know why, maybe because the art style was very similar or the fact that the heroes of ... the movie used digital companions to stop the threat of a nuclear fall out caused by a virus that was created/empowered by the protagonist and defeated at the last possible second, oh yeah and the protagonist that caused the viruses power is also a master computer hacker and still in middle school. Whatever the reason the main point is it was like watching the Digimon movie but with no feelings of nostalgia which makes it virtually worthless

tl;dr: Watch if you like good animation, the most unrealistic hacking, and a super cliche story.

Contains spoilers.

- Story (3/10)
Unrealistic premise, we learn from the beginning about the OZ system which is basically VRChat with customizable avatars, however we learn how it's an important part of our lives allowing us to even file our taxes there. It has the most "advance security in the World," but we all know what happens when a show boasts things like this. So to our surprise, the system gets hacked by an AI, and the way to beat it was to fight it like some MMO.

After the system gets ... hacked, naturally the people to resolve it would be some teenager who's on his laptop 24/7, and some high school kid who's good at math.

The ending was laughable because all it took in the end was some silly card game, which we never learn the rules too, and of course the AI loses. Of course the AI gets mad and decides to drop a nuke on the MC, which gets resolved with like 5 minutes left, wow!

- Art (8/10)
If you enjoyed Wolf Children, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, or any movie from Mamoru Hosoda, then you'll enjoy the art.

- Sound (7/10)
Nothing memorable here.

- Characters (5/10)
Despite introducing over 10 characters all in a family the only memorable ones was the MC who does nothing until the last 5 minutes, some edgy kid who's somehow a super hacker, the female MC who has an uncle complex, the uncle which for some reason everyone hates, and the grandma. The characters do the most stupid things such as shunning the uncle for developing the AI, even though it was the military who deployed it as an "experiment."

- Enjoyment (4/10)
I did not enjoy this movie at all, and should have dropped it half-way. Maybe you'll like it if you know nothing about computers.

- Overall (4/10)
Terrible movie, and easily forgettable. Maybe I'm dumb but there was suppose to be a theme of family and baseball or something.

Have you seen the Digimon movie? Then you've already seen this movie. I have no clue how other reviewers miss this in their high praises of this film. The whole plot from start to finish is an exact carbon copy of the Digimon Movie.

The whole time I was watching I just couldn't stop wondering how on earth they didn't get sued for plagiarism. I was really appalled. Especially after this film was so highly recommended too.

Here's the plot in a nutshell:
An internet virus in the form of a digital monster (digimon) takes over the internet (digimon the movie) and it's up to a ... select few teenagers (digidestined) to enter the digital realm (the digiworld) and use their own digital avitars (also digimon) to defeat it in combat (digimon battle). But when the not digimon digital monster hacks into government servers and takes control of the United States Nuclear Defense (just like on Digimon the movie), the stakes are raised. Can they save the world on time?

For reals. Everyone is giving it like 9/10. Watch the Digimon movie BEFORE you watch this. You'll see. It's plagiarism at its finest.

I really do not have much to say about this movie other than it was just pretty bad. I know that is not great constructive criticism, but I just really cant say anything about this heap of garbage. I sat there like a decomposing corpse for roughly 2 hours with a blank expression on my face no interested at all in what was going to play out next. I didn't care about any of the characters nor did I worry if anything bad was going to happen to them as I fully knew there would be no gruesome plot twists or murders in a kids ... movie.

This show is boring.

This is the most cliche show that I've ever seen. You can guess the ending halfway through. The plot is very bad. The OZ system was very chaotic and filled with bugs and bugs that just can't explain. In this show, nothing makes sense. The side character accomplished nothing. The relationship between Kenji and Natsuki is so badly designed it makes the romance in SAO season 1 looks slow.
Why the biggest server in the world can be hacked by some random teenager overnight?
Why would they design the "hacking program" to just destroy the world as its purpose?
Why would they link nuclear bomb ... to some server that can get hacked this easily?

There are so many questions in this show that no one can answer.
The only reason I am giving this show a 3 and not a 1 is that the animation and sound are very on point. Especially when it comes to fighting.

What is this anime?
It is about Facebook's new Metaverse they are trying to push out. Except in this world it has already happened and Facebook is called "OZ" instead. The whole world essentially runs on OZ. Then Oopsie Whoopsie! OZ has a virus! Many essential services get taken down and the MC is accidentally responsible for it all. We watch his journey as he defeats the virus and saves the world.

Did I enjoy it?
It sure is an odd film, with bright, abstract colors. And game (OZ) character designs that dare I say are unnecessarily creepy/unnerving. This film would work well if you needed something to ... watch on family night, especially if your kids are gamer-obsessed. (unless your kids get nightmares easily. like foreal the character designs are messed up.) The random bouts of comedy are what I enjoyed most about the film, and most were well executed. It was enjoyable when I watched it with friends, however I cannot see myself ever rewatching.