Mirai

What a joy this movie is.  Like the best animated family films, Mirai mixes truth and honesty with flights of fantasy that will appeal to both children and adults.  This is a movie that is filled with wonder, but at the same time, it is achingly realistic as it looks at the agonies of both young childhood and parenthood.  The movie is about the bond of family, and learning your place within it, but it mixes this with a playful sense of humor, a lot of visual wonder, and more emotion than any other animated release this year.

According to an interview that played after the movie with the film's writer-director, Mamoru Hosoda, the story was inspired by a dream his young son had once.  The child had recently become a big brother to a baby girl, and one morning, the boy told Hosoda that he had a dream where he met and spoke with a teenage version of his baby sister.  The filmmaker took a hold of this simple idea, mixed it with a few other autobiographical moments of his own family history and memories of childhood, and has created a film that mixes complex themes and ideas with family entertainment.  This, combined with the film's richly detailed and very human character designs, is what makes the film so poignant.  It's also a marvel to look at the film's largely hand-drawn backgrounds and settings.  In the same interview, Hosoda also talks about how hand-drawn art is becoming lost in most recent animated films.  Mirai is a testament not just to hist gifts as a storyteller, but also to the beauty of hand-drawn animation, and why it must survive.

The story is told through the eyes of Kun (English voice dub provided by Jaden Waldman), a four-year-old boy whose life revolves around his toy trains, and the attention and love that his parents always give him.  That attention becomes threatened when Mom (Rebecca Hall) and Dad (John Cho) come home from the hospital one day with a new baby sister named Mirai, which is Japanese for "future".  Jealousy over the new arrival instantly builds within Kun, and he almost immediately starts acting out around the house in order to get the attention he so desperately craves.  He begins to resent Mirai's very presence in the house, and this sometimes results in acts of physical aggression, like when he hits the baby on the head with one of his treasured toy trains.  His parents, meanwhile, are trying to keep their own lives in check, dealing with keeping their emotions in check, being working parents, and just trying to keep a small sense of order in the home.

Kun's sole source of escape from the chaos building within his home is his own backyard, and it's here that flights of fantasy take over, as Kun is visited by a variety of guides who will teach him the importance of family, as well as Kun's place in that family.  He encounters the family dog, Yukko, who in the boy's fantasy can take the form of a human man who remembers how jealous he was when baby Kun came home, and he himself was no longer the "favorite" of the parents.  Kun even gets to travel to different points in time in order to meet his mother when she was his age, or shares an experience with a younger version of his great-grandfather (Daniel Dae Kim), who teaches the boy how to conquer his fear when it comes to riding a bike.  But most importantly, he meets a teenage version of Mirai (Victoria Grace), who is much older and wiser than her toddler "big brother", and helps him understand the bond that they will one day share with each other.

The movie is wise not to try to rationalize or explain these fantasies.  We are to assume that they are in the child's imagination, and leave it at that.  These fantasies do give the film a somewhat fragmented tone, but it never becomes bothersome, and they are all connected by one big idea of family, and finding your place within it.  It also adds depth to the characters, as we get to see a younger version of Kun's mother, who loved cats and often got in trouble, and father, who had to conquer a lot of the same childhood fears and anxieties that Kun is currently going through.  This method of fantasy time travel storytelling is a brilliant way to convey the message that parents and children are not all that different, and that sometimes as adults, we lose the sense of fear and wonder that we once held when we were young.  As for Kun, he learns that adults are just as prone to suffering as he is, and that he must learn patience and responsibility for being a big brother.

Mirai is a film that is all at once human and fantastic.  The movie spends enough time in both the real world and the world of imagination that we are wrapped in by both sides of the story equally.  Just as emotionally involving as the story are the images, which have been lovingly crafted by Hosoda and his team.  There is not a single scene here that feels thrown together, or flat.  Each scene has been painstakingly crafted, from the backyard where many of Kun's fantastic adventures and encounters begin, to a modern day train station that becomes a surreal and cold nightmare during the film's climax.  The film's mix of human emotion, imagination and artistic beauty blends together to create that rare kind of family film that you truly want to treasure while you are watching it.

This is hands-down the best animated film to be released in theaters in 2018, and sadly, many will pass it up, as the film is only being released as a limited "Special Event" that played in select theaters for just three days only.  If you are a fan of animation, you owe it to yourself to track this down when it's released at home.  It's the kind of sweet, funny, heartfelt and at times tear-jerking movie that simply cannot be ignored.

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