Mamoru Hosoda, a man I’ve talked about several times on both
this blog and my YouTube channel as being my favourite Japanese director, but I’ve
never really had a chance to talk about my favourite of his films, that being:
Wolf Children. So let’s discuss it. Wolf Children is a 2012 Japanese animated film
directed by Mamoru Hosoda and follows the story of a young woman named Hana who
falls in love with a werewolf and has two children with him, Ame & Yuki but
ends up having to raise them alone and as you can imagine, raising two children
who can transform into wolves at will on your own with little knowledge on how werewolves
work can be incredibly difficult.
I’ve said before that the reason why I love Hosoda’s work is
because he always knows where to put focus. While not everything in his films
are as developed as they could be, that’s usually because Hosoda will identify
the most important element and give all of the attention to that, whether it be
a plot point, a character or a theme or even the animation. And usually he is
spot on with his pick and is what ends up making his films work so well, in
this case, the focus is on Hana and the struggles she faces with trying to
raise these two kids. Raising two kids on your own is tough enough, having to
do it while also keeping their identities a secret because they’re also wolves
is near impossible. For example, what if the children are sick or injured? She can’t
take them to a doctor or else they’ll be taken away and experimented on, but
even if they found someone they can trust, how do you treat someone who is half
wolf? So this leads to her moving out to the countryside and learning all of
these skills so she can safely raise them on her own, having to go through all
of this effort, all this failure, all this pain and not once ever complaining about it. I mean she
of course has her breakdowns, who wouldn’t. But she never shows weakness in
front of her kids, she never lets it show how much stress she is constantly
going through because her entire motivation is making sure her kids grow up
healthy and happy, and by god if I don’t respect the hell out of this character
for everything she has to go through in this film. This is one of the best
mother characters written in a film because of how much she goes through while
dealing with it in a realistic way and giving her absolute all for these
children. Out of all of Hosoda’s films, Hana is my favourite character because
of how complex, well developed and hard-working she is.
The children themselves also receive a fair amount of
development as well and are made interesting. At first the two are both
annoying, disobedient and fight like regular children would, which helps to make
them feel all the more realistic. Which is strange how much I’m using that word
in a film about children werewolves, but that is the truth, Hosoda did a brilliant
job at taking this fantastical concept and placing it in a realistic
environment with realistic characters, making the story more humbling and
therefore effective. But to go back to the kids, it is interesting how they
both start off in one place but end up completely opposite from where their
character arcs begin. Yuki being the elder child is the one who fully embraces
her animalistic side, she loves being a wolf so much that sometimes she’ll
accidentally turn into one without her even noticing. While Ame is the younger
sibling and is much more introverted and shies away from anything that makes
him different. As the film goes on and the two start school, in one of the best
uses of the lateral tracking shot I’ve ever seen, we see how these character’s
personalities completely shift where their comfort lies over several years.
Yuki being the extrovert becomes very active in school, makes plenty of friends
and enjoys her time in society, while Ame feels even more outcast than ever and
finds more comfort in time spent away from society. So these two characters
completely trade character arcs halfway through the film and it is done so
effortlessly and so naturalistic that I found myself saying “Well yeah of
course that’s where they would end up, how did you not see that coming?”. Which
if that isn’t expert writing, being able to have a very obvious character arc
yet have it be hidden in plain sight then I don’t know what is.
As for the animation, again this goes along with what I’ve
said prior, Hosoda is a man who knows which elements to emphasise, he’s also
someone that judging from his films tends to prefer motion of detail, which is
seemingly the opposite to what most anime fall back on, even the films. The
best example of this most people would point to is when Hana, Ame & Yuki
are running through the snow, and while that is beautiful and shows Hosoda’s
great use of colours to create comforting images and a beautiful environment. I
personally think its best scene near the ending, where Yuki is in the school
and Ame runs off into the forest. Now this could be because I find this to be a
pinnacle moment with a combination of writing, acting, music and animation all
come together to make something that could truly be called beautiful and I think
is one of the best scenes in all of anime.
Sadly the only negative drawback from Hosoda’s style of
filmmaking is that it means there isn’t that much to discuss so this post might
be a little shorter than the others. But even if all of his elements aren’t
great, the things that are…are truly outstanding.
-Danny
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