I’m a bit of a technology enthusiast so I’ve come to love most of the Anime’s that have a more futuristic setting. This movie was just right for me. The animation and music quality was just fine. The story progression and pacing felt great and was very entertaining. The character development was interesting. I will say that a lot of movie drama is built by characters just behaving dumbly. For example, [spoiler]When Kenji (and the others) respond to a random spam email with a decrypted key to break into Oz. [/spoiler] In addition, there was certainly some drama that just didn’t have the right intensity. I wasn’t a huge fan of the way they did the connection between Oz and the real world as it was stuck between virtual reality and just playing a video game. I also thought the virtual world of Oz animating could’ve been better quality, but that’s just an opinion with my predefined notion of what a virtual world might look like. It was a wonderful story with many intricate details and a little bit of love.

This was an absolute delight. Loved the animation style, the story was fun, and the family is sweet.

Kenji, a lowly high school math nerd, swallows his heart when he’s offered a summer job by a beautiful classmate. It doesn’t pay well, but... would you mind accompanying me to a reunion on my vast ancestral estate? The unspoken catch is that he’ll also be expected to play fiancé for her huge, overbearing extended family. That deception doesn’t last very long, but the big, noisy household doesn’t have much time to grouch over it. While they’ve been sharing meals, spending quality time and sussing out imposters, greater society has seen its strings snipped by a malevolent, self-sufficient artificial intelligence. And Kenji might be tangentially involved. _Summer Wars_ splits its time evenly across those two fronts: the digital world, where a handful of teens try to thwart global chaos by challenging a bot to mini-games, and the physical one, where the stakes are more emotional. The story kicks and weaves, trying its best to buck convention by trimming plot points and suddenly changing direction, but it’s still overly convenient and predictable. The online world of OZ, an all-encompassing social media strawman that houses the online action, is rudimentary and unrealistic. Its influence is broad enough that a service outage has major planetary repercussions, but three key players in its existential crisis all happen to be in the same house when the shit really hits the fan. One of those, a renowned cyber-fighter, freely transitions from zen-like kempo training on the lawn to frantic keyboard smashing in the den. I don’t see how either translates to success in fighting games. That kind of hand wavy e-fantasy abounds in the OZ scenes; impractical nonsense that’s borderline insulting to anyone who’s ever visited a VR chat (which is, basically, all this place amounts to). Feels like it was written by someone who doesn’t fully understand the boundaries of technology, which is odd because director Mamoru Hosoda actually got his start working on _Digimon_ movies. I was hoping for more from Hosoda, whose efforts I enjoyed in 2015’s _The Boy and the Beast_, and from Madhouse, who handles the production duties. This is an unusually restrained effort from the famed visual team, especially for those scenes set in the electronic realm. The no-limits environment of OZ gives them ample opportunity to cut loose and really go for broke, but the results are only marginally better than a Wii avatar. They go streamlined and gestural for the analog scenes, and while those fare much better, they also fall short of the studio’s usual high standard. Call it a disappointing work, through and through.

I loved this so much. It felt like going back to your grandmother's (Nani) home. So many people, daughters, sons, their spouses, their daughters and sons. Multiple generations under the same roof. I seriously think so many masterpieces fail due to the emptiness and the sheer lack of character and world development. Here the creator developed a whole family but also a whole virtual world. Amazing work. Underrated masterpiece. Nothing was overdone. Didn't try to convert it into a fantasy game kind of anime. Made me cry multiple times. Made me root for the characters.