I recently watched the Mirai flick. The movie was screening at the local film society. I particularly remember my wife complaining about some awful anime she watched on the Netflix which had to do with girls and ghosts. She appeared rather underwhelmed. So I went ahead and took her to watch a real nice anime, thanks to my friend who is very good in watching anime or rather he knows all these things.
Mirai is about a young boy, Kun, who lives with his two NPR parents in Japan, he’s barely an hour into the film. A passive aggressive architect is the father while the ‘working’ mother is the corporate type who just cannot ‘lean in’. In due time, along comes the second child- a sister named Mirai. Kun is at a loss and full of wrath. Scream a lot. Scream to the point of no more scream. Then when there’s no scream, there’s a wail.
About a half hour in, the imaginative anime bits take over. First comes a great fantasy sequence where Kun meets the petąsabr politician and Lawrence. The boy hurries to welcome back the family dog. Then a teenage girl mirai, nudges her. No thanks to Kun who has taken to daydreaming about every ten minutes, and getting teleported to some ancient time or to some make belief land where he has his lessons.
As a young boy, he plays around freely with his mother and as he grows up he interacts with his great grandfather. He later gets immersed in a horror filled shift where he loses his sight and finds himself surrounded in a Tokyo train full of apparitions and hateful robots. Kun and the teenage Mirai tumble endlessly through some strange temporal nexus and Kun realizes that he is part of a much greater whole, and only family matters in such things.
Two relatively recent American cartoon features came to my mind while watching this movie. Like Inside Out in this case it employs elaborate made-up flights of fancy to allow a certain type of facets of growing up to be explained. Again, as in Inside Out, the family lives inside a bubble of privileged city life where baby’s concerns are priority. However, in contrast with Inside Out, this movie just has not an ounce of comedy nor the fun voiceover work of its celebrity cast. And where there was Bing Bong, of course, there is none. It is also a little bit of a perspective one of another Pixar movie Coco where being within a family is the center of all beings, probably the only center to exist, in the universe. However, there are no way any spectacular hits, nor any hits with a remarkable plot. Young upwardly mobile professional parents have one child, then have another one, and life goes on as usual.
Seventy-five percent of this movie’s dialogue consists of Kun shrieking stuff like “WHAT?” or “MOOOOOOOM!” There was a young child in the house at that time and therefore I thought whines and horned in self-adoration would be an abstract ghost. Mirai should come with a trigger warning if one has ever been in the confines of a house with a little child. This movie won’t unnerve them. In front of me in the audience, of a screening room, was hjalmar – a young female couple all together in a thin blanket, in love, who themselves delighted over every one of Kun’s jiggles. They squealed when he fell off his cycle, gasped and applauded when he screamed out for his father. Stupid cows. I wonder how they would react to this movie in ten or fifteen years from now provided they will go through the baby-wringer. From a particular age onwards, little children in the movies no longer become too prepossessing.
Watch Mirai on Kimcartoon
