Mirai sees Hosoda continue to combine his twin interest in time-travel narrative and family relationships to produce a warm, clearly observed, slice-of-life, fantasy family drama that has the rare potential of being both appealing to kids and adults.
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Mirai is animation director Mamoru Hosoda’s latest film, a portrait of a young Japanese family as well as a coming-of-age film. Premiering at Cannes Film Festival this year, Mirai follows 4-year-old boy Kun, whose mother has just given birth to a daughter, his sister, Mirai. What follows is something anyone with a younger sibling is familiar with. With all his parents’ attention now focused on baby Mirai, Kun is consumed with jealousy. He tries various ways of attracting his parents’ attention, from wailing to even hitting Mirai with his toy train.
Manpower shortages at her company means that Kun’s mother has to return to work, leaving her husband, a freelance architect, to take care of the kids and house, which is a long, glass and wood modernist abode sandwiched between two bungalows. In the middle is a small garden, and in the middle of the garden is a tree (perhaps, a magical family tree), where Kun first meets a handsome prince from the 18th century, which turns out to be a anthropomorphic personification of Yukko, the family dog, and later, where he meets a teenage Mirai from the future. Kun also meets his late great-grandfather when the latter was a dashing young man and World War 2 veteran, who teaches him the lesson of perseverance. With each encounter, Kun learns a valuable life lesson. By the end of the film, he grows up a little and comes to accept his sister as a part of the family.
A predominantly plotless film, Mirai spends its time with its characters and devotes attention to small details of behaviour such as the way Kun sleeps on his front, with his butt protruding upwards, or the father’s clumsy attempts at childrearing and housekeeping. The level of attention to behavioral details and emotional resonance in Mirai, not coincidentally also the name of Hosoda’s own daughter, is clearly a work of autobiography, a work of someone whose memories of starting a new family is as fresh as cut grass.
While the canvas is not as epic as his previous works, Mirai sees Hosoda continue to combine his twin interest in time-travel narrative and family relationships to produce a warm, clearly observed, slice-of-life, fantasy family drama that has the rare potential of being both appealing to kids and adults.
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