|
|
||||||||||
| Overall | Art | Animation | Character Design | Music | Series Story | Episode Story | Reviewer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Buy | 9 | 9 | 9 | 6 | 8 |
 Ggultra2764
|
[series:3750#1552] | |
|
The most recent film directed by Mamoru Hosoda, Mirai is aimed more for family audiences in its focus on 4-year old Kun and his family. With his mother recently giving birth to his younger sister Mirai, Kun becomes jealous of the attention that she receives from his family and undergoes some new experiences growing up as he travels through time and interacts with an older version of Mirai coming from the future. If you've seen your fair share of Hosoda films, the themes found throughout Mirai are likely to be familiar to you in its focus on family bonds and time travel. Here, the film pushes a moral on appreciating little moments with family onto Kun as he can't accept the changes that his family is undergoing due to Mirai's presence in their lives. For an animated film, Mirai is rather believable in depicting the lives of Kun's family as Kun behaves like any 4-year old of his age constantly yearning for attention from his parents and throwing tantrums whenever he can't get his way, while Kun's parents try raising him and Mirai as best they can yet can find themselves overwhelmed at points with handling the responsibilities of parenthood. The moral of the film gets pushed onto Kun through its time travel gimmick as anytime he faces some sort of problem interacting with his family, he gets whisked to the past or future to interact with a family member from said eras to learn to appreciate little moments with his family and learn why it isn't always such a good idea to try getting your way. The focus on its moral is engaging to see with how Kun responds to interacting with younger and older versions of his family members when witnessing how they went through a similar experience he undergoes in the present, though it does usually feel a bit too preachy with trying to push it. Beyond the heavy moral pushing, there are a couple other elements of Mirai that could make or break your reception to the film. A major one would be Kun's very character. While he behaves believably for a child his age, he isn't the easiest character to develop a connection to due to how selfish and attention-craving he can come off when dealing with Mirai's presence in his family's life. I've heard of some feeling frustrated with his tantrums and selfishness at points throughout the film. Perhaps because I could relate with Kun's family from personally being an uncle of two toddlers, I didn't mind as much seeing Kun being attention-craving and wanting to always get his way with his family since toddlers behave exactly as he would. But because Kun is the main focus of the film, I can see where some may not be as positively receptive to his character as a result of his negative behavior at points. The other element that I'm not as forgiving towards though would be how underutilized Mirai's future self was. While promoting of Mirai would give one the impression that the future version of the titular character would have some sort of major role to play in it, she actually functions more as a secondary character of sorts throughout the film and only appears at some points to reprimand or aid Kun in trying to accomplish a task that he's to learn a lesson from. Otherwise, Kun usually time travels on his own to the past or future when finding himself having to learn a lesson of some sort. This issue had me questioning whether or not there was even any point to having the future Mirai within the movie due to not having as large a role as the marketing would have you assume as her role would have pretty much been interchangeable with any past or future incarnation of Kun's family members with how limiting her role was. Issues and nitpicking aside though, Mirai is yet another solid film from Mamoru Hosoda whose themes will be familiar territory to fans of the director's past works. The film could even prove to have accessibility to family audiences who can connect with the challenges of raising children, especially those around Kun's age. I would at least recommend folks check it out at least once as it is at least a considerable improvement over Hosoda's previous film, The Boy and the Beast, in this reviewer's eyes. Last updated Tuesday, September 17 2019. Created Tuesday, September 17 2019. | ||||||||
