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MovieMeditation presents...
HIS FILM DIARY 2015
total movie count ........... current day count
284 .......................... 325

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August 21th

—— 2012 ——
WOLF CHILDREN
—— anime ——
EXTENDED REVIEW

REWATCH
What makes this movie work as wonderfully well as it does lies within the core of the creative storytelling aspect of the film. This feature film fantasy is all about the human happenings and daily doings rather than animal activities and dull day dreams...

When shaving away all the outer layers, ‘Wolf Children’ is essentially a story about a single mother who struggles to raise two small children on her own. The animal aspect is only there to support the ordinary, while the added element of fantasy creates a magical and moving ambiance to the story, which ultimately makes it surpass the ordinary and transform into something extraordinary. The fantasy approach is extremely grounded in its execution, while its place in the story never feels forced or even far fetched. It is all about simple human emotions and subtle life lessons, which is something we can all connect to and learn from. When we see the mother in complete frustration all the while fighting to find out how she is to raise her children with these odd abnormal abilities, I personally don’t see someone raising a “fantasy freakshow”. I see is a single mother with two children, who may or may not suffer from mental or physical disorders, since you can actually draw two possible parallels to this film. It could be about a single mother who struggles to raise two children on her own, who suffers from some sort of disorder, which could be paralleled to a genuine sickness; or it could simply be a single mother struggling to raise two children, who are pretty much normal in every way, but merely unique and different from other children. In the end, all I really care about is how I connect to the story and its characters – and ‘Wolf Children’ had me hooked from the very start.

The story is definitely what howls directly to the heart, but when it comes to technical achievements ‘Wolf Children’ can almost raise the hairs on the entire body. When creating compact and complicating emotions, it does demand a lot heart to understand how to do that, but to visualize it in return demands a lot of brain power. Director, Mamoru Hosoda, takes a gothic tale of werewolves and haunting curses and transforms the basics of such story into something that is closer to a substantiated fairytale. When visualizing the fantasy elements, the approach he takes is minimalistic and surprisingly convincing. We are only a few minutes into the movie when the wolf aspect is revealed to us, but Hosoda leaves the full moons and fatal challenges behind, replacing it with a simple and elegant touch of class. The movie never dwells in the dark and drastic signature elements to the myths and legends, but leaves those things behind in favor of a more realistic and subtle approach. This makes it a lot easier for the audience to adapt and be affected by said story, because it feels believable and extremely real. The same goes for the scenes where the mother realizes her children are sick and needs to be taken to a doctor. We sympathize with her and understand her inner struggle between concealing or revealing the secret about her children’s true identity; what decision is ultimately the right one to benefit the future of her children.

This is also why she chooses to move away from the city and out into the open lands of the Japanese countryside. But even this life demands a lot from her – actually even more than before – since she is away from all of which made her life a little easier beforehand. Now she must grow her own produce and learn to live a greener life with the help books, brain and the Japanese Clint Eastwood (known for the movie ‘Gran Tokyo’… Okay, just kidding, I’m sorry). I also love the aspect of how the two children grows up with different mindsets and understandings of life, which makes for an obvious but extremely effective contrast. Both children have a hard time adapting to the real world filled with regular human behavior, but one seems to surrender to the human world all the while the other is an obvious outsider who sees more of himself in wolves and the wonders of nature. This leads to one of the movies best visualized scenes, where the audience time travel seamlessly through scenes with a gap of one year, in which we see how the two children are doing as they go through their school classes. It is a simple yet remarkably impressive visual concept, which can tell the audience years of problems from different point of view in only a matter of minutes.

‘Wolf Children’ is a stunning blend of modern and traditional Japanese animation, with beautifully hand-painted backgrounds combined with a classic character design that really makes this movie move its claws all the way out of the screen. The story is down to earth in its approach, while the animation and sheer magic of said story makes you fly above the ground among moon and stars. It is truly a technically impressive film, especially with the moments of missing dialogue, where scenes in a time lapse are set to suitable compositions and silent majestic moments, which ultimately enforces the compassion for these characters even more. As I said earlier, the movie can be interpreted in many different ways but whether one or the other, you can’t put down the fact that ‘Wolf Children’ is a tacit tale full of human heart and who we are, while also working as a tactically told tale of tails and tender periods in life – whether man or mammal – this is a magical, mystical and marvelous achievement in animation as well as the entirety of cinema itself.






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