Mirai – Mirai no Mirai (2018)

Directed by: Mamoru Hosoda | 105 minutes | animation, adventure

Kun, a four-year-old boy, can’t wait for his mother to get back from the hospital with his baby sister. After the miraculous moment when he finally sees his sister Mirai, the deception soon follows: the world no longer revolves around him alone. In fact, it seems that all the loving attention from his family is only for Mirai.

Mamoru Hosoda’s animated films are more often themed about family life, such as ‘Summer Wars’ (2009)’ about family ties and the risks of social media, and ‘Wolf Children’ (2012) about a werewolf mother’s care for her family. Such is the case with ‘Mirai’ (2018), a story told from the perspective of four-year-old Kun, whose entire environment consists of a house with a courtyard garden, a father, mother, grandmother and dog. At first glance, no typical anime vicissitudes with fantasy creatures and magical worlds, but experienced the ups and downs of parenthood from the perspective of a toddler.

This unremarkable start to the story is nevertheless captivating because Mamoru Hosoda patiently zooms in on the everyday and magnifies the details as a child looks at the world. The stylish architect houses of the family form a small universe in which we as viewers sniff around and crawl together with Kun, and whose rooms and furniture with all the domestic attributes soon feel familiar.

Mamoru Hosoda uses the childish narrative point of view to slowly bring more and more magical elements into the story. They always reveal themselves in the garden where Kun has a conversation with his dog in human form, and where he meets his sister Mirai as a teenager. Later, the garden unfolds as a passage to other worlds and he meets his mother as a young girl with whom he makes a mess of her parental home while playing. After a failed bicycle attempt, he also gets to know his grandfather as a tough young man with a war wound, and with whom he rides a motorcycle through the landscape of his grandfather’s childhood. An experience that gives him the courage to get back on his bike the next day and try again. These encounters teach Kun to look at his family and the world through different eyes and ultimately also his own changing role in it.

‘Mirai’ is visually pleasing to the eye and heartwarming, and towards the end an unadulterated virtuoso anime in which all the narrative registers are pulled open and the imagination is given plenty of room to tell a loving, small story in a big way.