Summer Wars: Leeds International Film Festival

One of the highlights of this year's Leeds International Film Festival included screenings of visually spectacular anime films. Forgotten classic Angels Egg, Rene Laloux's Gandahar, Ponyo and Summer Wars (pictured above) were just a few of the fantastic films on offer.

Summer Wars directed by Japanese animator Mamoru Hosoda had its UK premiere at Leeds International Film Festival and did not disappoint. Hodasa is perhaps best known for his critically acclaimed 2006 hit The Girl Who Lept Through Time, an emotionally charged animated science fiction drama about a girl who finds out she can time-leap in to the past in order to re-shape the future. Summer Wars is set in an alternate 2010 in which people log in to the networking world of OZ, a place to socialise, do business , gamble, where the government store weapons secrets, and almost anything else imaginable. People log in to this world using 'Avatars' characters customised to personal specifications.

The story focuses upon Kenji, a shy student maths genius who works part-time in the summer on site maintenance for the OZ networking site. He is asked by Natsuki, a girl he has long admired to work for her in the countryside over the summer. He soon realises his job is to act as Natsuki's partner to please her 90-year-old Grandma, to whom she wants to display maturity and stability. Just as Kenji is getting in to the swing of life in the countryside he receives a mysterious code sent to his phone. Kenji cracks the code which turns out to be an OZ security code, this unleashes a mega A.I virus called Love Machine (Below).

The Love Machine begins to enslave all Avatars on the OZ programme, and uses the technology of OZ to wreak havoc upon the real world. During all this chaos Natsuki's grandma dies in an emotional scene, but the family pull together to defeat the Love Machine virus and its attempt to fire a missile at the family home. Natsuki's Avatar challenges the Love Machine virus to a game of cards in OZ which Natsuki wins, and it is left to her cousin Katzuma (the OZ battle champion) to deliver the final blow to the virus with her ultra cool rabbit Avatar 'King' Katzuma (pictured below).

The film ticks every box possible for quality of animation, something expected from a director with the promise of Hosoda. The world of OZ is a sea of impressive colour, and fantastically drawn Avatars of varying types and shapes. The film may be slightly far fetched in the sense that a story of this magnitude centres around one Japanese family who have the ability to save the world, but this is a minor gripe in what is a utterly visually engaging film. I suppose there is little in the way of a deeper reading of the film other than a critique on how people rely on technology, and the horrible consequences that could occur if this technology was taken or misused .

By Karl Benecke