Re: Join the posthumous honor goal club

Yes, I know: Why didn’t Tron: Legacy do this? For what it’s worth, Mamoru Hosada’s Summer Wars only passably exploits its excellent premise, a successful digital update of War Games. Noisy and often brainless when it should be brainy, it’s a poor man’s imitation of animator Satoshi Kon, whose Paprika serves as some, but not enough, visual inspiration.

I really should have known: it’s only the latest award-winning release from Madhouse, the Japanese animation studio responsible for The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (also by Hosoda) and all of Satoshi Kon’s work up until his death...

...What Summer Wars restores to the superflat aesthetic, missing in much of Murakami’s art, is that quintessential personability present in Natsuki’s family of Web 2.0 participants. In Kon’s Paprika, we saw the digital space becoming a cacophony of meaningless artifacts, but Hosoda’s Summer Wars optimistically shows us a digitization that maintains its links to the past...