2010's Catch-Up: Wolf Children (2/9/2020)

Sometimes, every once in a while, you see a film that is so utterly enchanting and moving that it sweeps you off of your feet entirely, and no amount of flaws and imperfections can change how special it is. Wolf Children may just be one of those movies for me, as I watched it last night and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It isn’t a perfect movie, but it’s captivating beyond measure, a masterwork of imaginative visual storytelling that imbues its material with a delicately human touch, exploring the life of an abnormal family led by a single mother as she tries to do right by her children.

Wolf Children is an anime, but unlike so many anime that I’ve seen, it doesn’t rely on gratuitous exposition to get its ideas across. While it has dialogue, it also fully takes advantage of the fact that this is a medium that allows you to create every aspect of its visuals from the ground up. Director Mamoru Hosoda here proves himself a visionary that understands the nature of his medium, and crafts beautiful, unforgettable images that are as powerful as they are serene and subtle, from the sorrows and joys on his character’s expressions to the beauties of the natural world around them. Hosoda utilizes fascinating cinematic techniques that are only possible in the realm of animation, creating tracking shots that pass through time and space and breathtaking camera motions that defy physics utterly.

All of this is in service to an emotional and moving story about family. Hana is a college student who falls in love with a man and leaves to raise a family with him. But, after only a couple of years, her husband dies in a hunting accident, and she’s left alone to raise her one and two year old children without him. The catch, of course, being that her husband was a shapeshifter who could turn into a wolf, and her children are the same way.

This fantastical premise is executed wonderfully, turning Wolf Children into an example of fantasy at its best – not only does it allow us to glimpse into a different world that’s fundamentally different from our own, and see what it might look like if things that were impossible became possible, but it also uses it to allow us to reflect on our own lives, and see it from a different angle. For all the weirdness of Hana’s situation, they’re really just the same kind of children we always see, with the same wants and needs and the same ways of growing up.

I was pulled so deeply into this film’s world and characters that even now I’m not sure I’ve returned. I feel like I watched these children grow up, and got to see and admire the people they turned into – and feel the joy and heartache of their mother every step of the way. The qualities of Wolf Children lie not in its high concept premise, but in its beautiful portrayal of day to day life as a parent, turning it into an exquisite ode to the ups and downs of motherhood and the sacrifices that our parents made every day for us. The shape shifting human-wolf hybrid part is just a bonus.

There are things about Wolf Children I think are flawed. The pacing is a little off throughout the film’s final half (nowhere near enough to make it bad, but enough so that it’s noticeable), and there’s a sense that things just sort of… end without a truly satisfying conclusion. But upon reflection, I think that a lot of that is intentional. These children have grown to take on lives of their own, lives that have nothing to do with their mother, whose eyes we watch them through. They have their own lives to live, and all the problems and joys that come with it. What we’re left with is an experience that reminds us that while our own childhoods felt long and endless, to those who raised us it was over in the blink of an eye, and we’re left to wonder where all the time went. But, even in memory, these moments mean something more powerful than we could ever imagine, and one is left with the sense that, like Hana, we wouldn’t do anything different given the same circumstances as her.

2010s Catch-Up Scorecard: https://letterboxd.com/owlren/list/2010s-catch-up-scorecard/