I have a crusty old TV and a DVD player in my new flat! The TV doesn’t have great screen quality, and the audio is quite bad, but I really like it for its flaws. I’m a child of the 2000s so the crunchy audio combined with the physical act of putting a DVD in the player is so nostalgic. It reminds me of being all tucked up in my parents room (the only room with the DVD player in the house) on a Friday night, excited to stay past my bedtime watching Over The Hedge or The Simpsons Movie knowing there’s no school tomorrow. I struggle being away from home so I’ve bought myself a few DVDs to watch here to make this place more enticing. I think I’ll write reviews or something of the films I watch so I’ll track them here!
Anyway, Summer Wars was the first DVD I watched. I started it the first night and finished it the second (I don’t have the attention span necessary to watch a full film in one sitting). It wasn’t my first time watching it though. Years prior, all the way back sometime in primary school, my dad was watching it on the telly. I had never seen, or even heard the term, ‘anime’ before and I was intrigued by the concept of a cartoon that grown-ups could enjoy. To be fair, I had never seen my dad watch an anime before, nor have I ever seen him watch one since, but I thought the part of the film I caught looked fascinating. In year seven, I had started learning about anime and at some point I remembered the ‘cartoon’ my dad and I watched and realised it was an anime movie. Neither me nor my dad remembered the name of it, but after searching around for a while on the internet we realised it was called Summer Wars. The following Christmas my parents gifted me a DVD set that contained Summer Wars and another film called The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. I watched both of them, and I was so happy when I finished Summer Wars (this time from start to finish) because it was every bit as amazing as I remembered, and from that point on I’d decided it was my favourite film.
Then I lost the DVD. It was missing for so long that when I’d finally found it again (YEARS later), the streaming era had long since rendered the DVD player obsolete - with the poor thing having been stuffed away somewhere collecting dust. I’ve searched for Summer Wars online, but for whatever reason it’s hard to find somewhere to legally watch it - I’m scared of piracy websites because I don’t have an adblocker or a VPN or anything like that, and I don’t think any film, even one as spectacular as Summer Wars is worth a virus. So before last week, I hadn’t seen Summer Wars in years; and you know when you finish an amazing book (or game or show etc), and you put it down and think “Oh my god, that was the best book I’ve ever read! It’s my new favourite book!”? Well I have had many moments like that with all sorts of media, as everybody has, but never with a film. Summer Wars is the only film I’ve ever loved enough to consider it one of my favourite things. So my favourite film spot has never been updated, despite me not having seen it in years. I had started to feel like a phoney after a while. But suddenly my dad had found our old DVD player and our chunky old telly and they were mine! You know what that means - it’s Summer Wars o’clock! I had to buy a new copy with some of the money from my summer job, but it was worth it because I got to watch my favourite film and be re-blown away by it all over again! I’m very happy to say it’s still my favourite film. The card-game battle is unbelievably amazing, probably my favourite battle scene of any medium ever. And the characters are all so wonderful. They’re not just well-written, with the family dynamic perfectly portrayed and each individual character having a clear and distinctive personality and set of manners, but oh my god the character designers did such a fantastic job. All of the Oz (the movie’s virtual world) avatars are so creative and interesting to look at. You could pause any scene in the virtual world and spend a good while looking at all the little details the animators drew. You can tell everyone behind the project put a lot of time and care into the whole project. Oz isn’t the only setting in the film, and the other setting - an old family house in the Japanese countryside, is just as beautiful in an entirely different way.
I LOVE SUMMER WARS!!!!!!! Five rabbit avatars out of five ^-^.