Rise of Momoru Hosoda's style

There are a lot of similarities between movies directed by Momoru Hosoda. Sometimes it’s just a familiar setting, and sometimes you can see a very similar way of telling a story, influencing the emotion of the audience and building up the climax. Today I’d like to discuss their structure and similarities between them in order to define what Hosoda's style is.

I enjoyed every Hosoda movie, except for Mirai. And personally I don’t like Summer Wars but I know that many people enjoyed that show and it is a critically acclaimed movie.

Keep in mind that from now on, there might be minor spoilers of all Hosoda movies, so I recommend you watch them before moving forward.

Similarities in Hosoda work:

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is Hosoda’s first movie (not including short movies and franchise movies - Digimon and One Piece). It’s probably the “safest” but one of the best movies created by Hosoda. I can’t really connect it to any other of his titles.

Then we got Summer Wars - the first movie where Hosoda is an original creator of the idea.

Wolf Children is standing in contradiction to Summer Wars when it comes to pacing and influencing emotion over time. In Summer Wars almost nothing happens in the first 20 minutes - we got very little to no story established. Instead there are a lot of characters that we don’t need to know and are simple one-dimensional puppets that we don’t care about. There are little ups when something is happening but overall, it very quickly goes back to the base level. It's a flatline EKG with simple reflexes of the dead body.

In comparison, Wolf Children have ups and downs in every moment of a story. The emotions are flowing through the viewer, both positive and negative which greatly increase their impact.

It is a story of a perfect mother, some may argue that it is way too perfect, but we’ll talk about this later.

Moving on to The Boy and the Beast, it stands in clear opposition to Wolf Children. Instead of a perfect mother, we got a foster father who is full of flaws. Also, we go back to the pacing and emotion axis presented in Summer Wars. However, Bakemono no Ko has less action spikes but they hit much harder and are more spectacular. After Satoko Okudera leaves the Hosoda team, it will become the trend of his movies to follow the path of Summer Wars and Bakemono no Ko with 2 or 3 big spikes and one long and huge climax at the end of the movie. It will also become a trend that story in-between those action-packed moments will be lacking and characters will be drastically underdeveloped.

Mirai no Mirai or Mirai of the Future is the worst Hosoda’s movie in my opinion. I find Mirai really annoying and boring as a movie. The annoyance part comes from the main character - a 4 year old child who is probably the biggest issue of this show.

Again - we have a few spikes and then the movie proceeds with a long and spectacular ending, tracking it back to Summer Wars and Bakemono no Ko. Main theme/subject is  again - child and parents relationship as in previous works of Hosoda. Also, it reminds me very much of A Christmas Carol because the main character travels to the past and future and everytime it changes him.

The 2021 movie - Belle is using almost exactly the same “social media, virtual reality system” that we can see in Summer Wars. I love the artistic style, 3D animation, music and opening sequence. But… It is the same pacing style again. Once again, the story is lacking in character development and real motivations. The virtual world is attacked by some kind of monster, this time by an actual person, not an AI virus as presented in Summer Wars. There is The Beast and Beauty theme here, even visible on posters. Not really fitting in my opinion, but we’ll discuss it later.

Through this chart, I wanted to establish that Hosoda’s movies are very similar, especially the ones without Satoko’s Onodora scripting skills. It is often very easy to review the next Hosoda movie, especially Belle, using his previous work as a reference point.

In the next part, we’re gonna discuss every movie individually. At this point, I seriously recommend you watch them before moving forward. Even though I am not going to spoil major events, discussing the structure of each title might introduce minor spoilers.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time:

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a loose adaptation of the 1967 novel with the same title. The movie is a great start of Hosoda’s movie career. It is the most “7 out of 10” movie and I mean it in a positive way. It’s a safe and good movie in every aspect. There is little room for expe
riments and a lot of perfectly implemented tropes and cliches.

For those of you that have not watched this movie - the whole premise is in the title. Average teenager discovers time travel and the whole movie plays around this power.

I’ve said that there are little experiments and the movie just implements existing tropes. And that’s true. It follows standard movie patterns, almost to the point of classical monomyth (by Joseph Campbell). Let’s go together through all events in this movie:

• Heroine lives peaceful life
• Mysterious event - founding hidden power
• Playing around with new power, presented in humoristic/friendly tone
• Problem with new power
• Trying fix these problems
• Rising of emotions, nearing the climax, preparing viewer
• Climax - but something went wrong
• Katharsis - main problem has been fixed, viewer can finally breathe a sigh of relief
• Slowly relieving emotions, solving all existing subplot
• THE END

What have I just described? Basically 90% of cinema. Is that wrong? Definitely not.

In comparison to the latest Hosoda movies, Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time) has really strong characters, it prepares a solid subplots and main subject, follows them through the entire movie and solves them. We can see real changes in characters, we experience both positive and negative emotions, we have a time to breathe and time to be excited with the
beauty of Hosoda’s work.

Every Hosoda movie is beautiful. Basically every new movie is getting better. I won’t be describing every single movie when it comes to visuals, but I may be pointing out strengths of particular titles.

When it comes to this movie, it is definitely less detailed than his other works. There are multiple scenes with simplified characters but when it really matters, the movie delivers high quality animations.

The thing that I will not talk about is voice acting - Hosoda is always casting either amateurs or live action actors with no prior anime experience. He often casts young actors to make sure that their age is relevant to characters. Basically the cast is really good in almost every single movie. It doesn’t change throughout his filmography, so I won’t be discussing voice acting from now on.

Summer Wars:

I cannot really pinpoint any similarities between Summer Wars and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and I don’t think I’ll be able to compare Hosoda's first movie to anything else he made.

Anyway - Summer Wars is no longer a book adaptation. From now on, Hosoda is going to write his original stories and in the next two movies, Satoko Okudera will help him with scripting.

Why do I think that Summer Wars is actually a bad or mediocre movie at best? It boils down to the problem that will be prevalent in many Hosoda’s movies from now on, but is the most visible in Summer Wars - pacing, no character development and no real differences in emotion axis.

The movie starts presenting a virtual world - “OZ” which serves as a kind of social media platform. Main character - Kenji is a math genius, working part-time as moderator of OZ. His female friend asks him to help her with “something” and he agrees without asking any questions.

It turns out, she wanted to present him as a boyfriend to please her grandmother. Basically we’re wasting 30 minutes of a movie to show one dimensional family members who don’t even matter. Next 10 minutes is framing the main character as a culprit of breaking OZ safe measurement. 20 minutes to arrest him and basically we wasted 1 hour in total, presenting nothing. There is no point in doing anything, no meaningful characters, nothing real plot in a sense. Yes, the virus is problematic, but only after an hour has passed, we realize how dangerous it really is. Only after the first hour, as a viewer I’m finally presented with real motivation for characters to do something and the plot is finally established.

 My main problem with this movie is the structure. First half is quite boring. As presented in the previous chapter of this video, it's a very flat graph with a few emotional spikes. First event occurs after 30 minutes - there is a first fight with a virus - which is a nice emotional spike, not too big and quickly falls flat. Protagonist is framed - but only for a moment and we’re back to flatline. Which continued until we got to battle preparation, a small fight and probably the only thing that saves Summer Wars in my eyes - the main fight and most iconic scene of playing Koi Koi. Final fight is the best element of this movie in terms of plot, building up emotions and visuals.After that, we’re just slowly moving to the end. 

I didn’t really care what happened for one hour because I didn’t know the stakes. I was bored because there was nothing to care about and I didn’t care about characters because they’re just background to the main plot and main characters.

Second half takes too long to prepare fights - we can see family members helping gather equipment and I didn’t find it either funny or emotional because I wasn’t connected to characters at any level - there are too many of them, they’re too simple and not established enough.

If you don’t care about plot as much as me, or if you’ve simply enjoyed Summer Wars - that’s fine. However, if you haven't watched Summer Wars or any of Hosoda's movies, I think Belle would be a much better choice. I would say it’s basically "Summer Wars 2.0" and it fixes many problems with this movie.

Wolf Children:

Wolf Children is definitely my favorite Hosoda movie. It’s interesting because we don’t have a typical monomyth structure and it is also not a narrative style typical for Hosoda. Instead, we’re presented with a few building blocks, representing different periods in character lives and it turns out really good.

As usual - quick introduction to the story: Hana is a university student, she got interested in an unusual man who doesn’t own a book and doesn’t return an attendance card. They get closer to each other, Ookami turns out to be half-wolf, half-man. Soon, they have two children who inherit their dad's nature. After having a second child, Ookami dies and Hana is left alone with children that she doesn’t know how to raise.

Four segments:

I would divide this movie into four main segments - introduction, parenting in the city, parenting in countryside and finally - children's school life and personality crisis.

First segment is just a well presented exposition - mood and the main subject of the movie is being quickly set. I won’t talk much about this part of the movie - it’s very good.
First stages of a relationship are proportionally longer, to show us the progress. Moments from moving on together to having children and beginning of parenting are shown without words. Hosoda gives us a beautiful soundtrack and tells the story only with images. This block or segment ends with Ookami’s death which sets the subject of the movie.

Next two segments are about mother. Hosoda is telling a story about how hard it is to raise children on your own, especially such unusual ones. We can see problems due to their wolf nature - not only the behavior, but also no social security or being registered as citizens.

Moving to the countryside changes a lot - Ame and Yuki finally have more space to grow up. Over time, we can see clear differences in children's personalities. We will go back to the children later. This segment focuses on a young mother’s experience - she has to care for a big mansion on her own, she’s growing her own vegetables and fails many times until neighbors help her. On top of that, she needs to protect children's secrets, look for a job and many more. This part, between 20 and 60 minutes, is a pedestal upon which stands the perfect mother created by Hosoda.

Last part, which is almost half a movie, is all about children. We can see Ame and Yuki going to school and how their characters change and soon their life paths are reversed. It is interesting to watch this transformation and I would argue that it is presented fairly well, even though I’ve seen many reviews suggesting that this point of the story didn’t make any sense.

Structure and pacing:

In Summer Wars, we’ve seen very flat emotion axis. Nothing happens for 20 minutes, we have few spikes in the next 40 minutes until a big and long fight finally starts.

The main advantage of this kind of pacing is that Hosoda can create spectacular and satisfying ending which in some way, save his movies.

Going back to Wolf Children. First 20 minutes are nothing alike. It’s the first block or segment that I’ve described and it’s packed with different events, emotions, beautiful sequences telling the life of characters without a word. In such a short time, we’re presented with a variety of emotions, sounds and images. We can feel this is real life, with all its ups and downs.

We’re diving into the valley after Ookami’s death with a few happy moments after that. It is hope amongst despair.

Moving to the countryside gives us a lot of hope but also adversities - old house, problem with crops, no money. It results in joys and sorrows which interweave and show the regular life of really unusual kids.

Moving to the second half - we can see the school life of Ame and Yuki who at this point, tasted both the positive and negative side of life. This part just keeps rising emotions, it nicely balances it out, keeps the correct pacing, but ultimately, we’re moving to climax. And it is probably the highest emotional climax that we ever get in a Hosoda movie. However, when we get to the peak… the movie just ends. There is a very short ending, but ultimately, the director leaves us with emotions that mother has felt at that moment.

I’m not saying that every movie needs katharsis. On one hand, I miss it because I want to be cleansed. But on the other hand - I really respect Hosoda's artistic choice, showing Hana’s and her children's future and forcing us - viewers to feel the same emotions and go through the same thoughts as Hana. We have to deal with them ourselves, we’re not going to be cleansed by anybody else.

Even though I really like to let go of negative emotions at the end of a movie or TV series, in the case of Wolf Children, leaving the viewer full of mixed emotions is definitely a great choice.

Summary:

I honestly think that it is Hosoda’s most unique movie in terms of telling a story, dealing with emotions and using pacing in a great way.

I still love The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, don’t get me wrong. I love both of those movies because they don’t fit Hosoda’s narrative style. I just happen to find the Wolf Children structure more interesting.

The Boy and The Beast:

Theme of The and The Beast stands in contrast to Hosoda’s previous movie. This time, he presents us with a story of a father full of flaws.

9 year old Ren recently lost his mother and has no contact with his father, so he’s going to be taken in by family members. He runs off, meets a mysterious fellow and follows after him. He found himself in a world full of animal-like creatures. Kumatetsu - the one that he ran after, takes him as his apprentice. From now on, the two of them will live and train together.

I like this movie. Time flies by quickly and I really enjoyed myself, which I think is a great improvement upon Summer Wars and is much better than Hosoda’s next movie - Mirai. But as I presented you on graph at the beginning, we’re back to the same formula again. I think it’s improved upon and we will also see effects on that in Belle, but let’s go back to “The Boy and the Beast”.

Three big battles pt 1:

In the movie, we’re presented with three big battles that will be the most interesting point of this title. So in about 20-30 minutes is the first one, then 75-85 minutes in and the last one is shown at 95-105 minutes. It will be important later, so remember that.

Story of flawed father:

Kumatetsu takes Ren in, but he has ulterior motives. To become “grandmaster” (which is something like king of the city… I think) he needs to have at least one disciple. So, he takes Ren in, the kid keeps doing chores and Kutatetsu turns out to be an awful teacher. Actually, both of them are stubborn, hard to deal with and they can’t communicate well with each other. Over time, these similarities will bring them closer.

The problem I have with their relationship is that they yell at each other, can’t really communicate outside training (and there is very little of that presented) but they still somehow depend on each other. Each of them has hole in their heart which is filled with other person. And don’t get me wrong, it's an important subject, but we don’t see them caring for each other, it looks a little like a toxic relationship. That’s one of my problems with Hosoda - he doesn't spend enough time on characters to really establish them.

Story of boy in beast world:

After 8 years, 17-years old Ren accidentally goes back to the human world and from now on he can travel back and forth. He meets a girl in the library and she helps me to educate himself and convince him to go to college. What I personally don’t like in this subplot is that Ren doesn’t care about the beast world. He spends half of his life in this world, but there is no doubt in his mind, he only has some regards to Kutatetsu as his foster parent, even though he can’t really show his affection. Which brings me back to the point that it is a little toxic relationship in which they lick each other's wounds.

And I don’t know what Hosoda's intention was. I guess that he meant it to be a story of a flawed parent who changes over time, but I can’t see it that way. Because he doesn’t give characters and relationships around them enough time.

Three big battles pt 2:

Let’s go back to pacing and three battles that I mentioned. Movie starts with beautiful visuals, music and is overall really interesting. Time really flies by quickly, and we have our first battle (20-30min). And it’s great until this point.

Then we get some world and characters exposition but basically Ren and Kumatetsu are stubborn and hard to deal with people. That’s the extent of their personality. And why is that? Because Hosoda decided that he will waste time on showing us the world without actually showing anything. So our little gang travels from city to city and meets other “grandmasters”. It doesn’t have any effect on plot or characters and isn’t interesting in comparison to previous events.

So we’re back to Kumatetsu’s house and training starts. It’s just a quick montage of Ren imitating Kumatetsu’s daily habits like a duck child. So, in order to not bore us to death, we get another fight.

75-85 minutes is an awesome fight, let’s take a quick breath. 95-105 minutes fighting again and 5 minute ending. That’s all.

Three big battles - summary:

I enjoyed The Boy and the beast, maybe except for the ending, but generally it's a good movie. Visuals are on point, I really like the use of particles, fight scenes and animation.
But everything between those battles that I mentioned is flawed in some way. Instead of character exposure, time is wasted on showing “grandmasters”. Relationship between student and master is never really shown due to timeskip. I feel like nothing really changes after establishing characters at the beginning.

But generally, I recommend this movie. It’s visually stunning, really fun to watch. The only problem is that when you start thinking about it, it’s really empty and doesn’t convey any message. But still fun to watch.

Mirai:

Mirai starts by presenting a normal young family with a 4-year old boy and newborn girl. Living together in their house with a small garden inside, having a dog and happy life, it looks like a standard family. I have nothing against slice of life or iyashikei anime. But the problem is that Mirai doesn’t convey any message and isn’t fun to watch. It presents you with the most typical, average, everyday life of a family with young children but in a very uninteresting way.

I would be fine with such an introduction, but it lasts 30 minutes, which is 1/3 of this movie. There is one funny/interesting scene in that time, but it doesn’t compensate for wasting that much time.

Anyway, let’s get to the core of Mirai. As I said previously, 4-year old Kun has been an only child, but recently he got a newborn sister - Mirai. He is jealous of her and we can see him being disappointed with her presence. Over time, we can see his annoyance rising, until the point he hits her with a toy and angers mother. Then nothing happens for a long time until he meets Mirai from the future in his garden. We get a scene when Kun and his sister from the future are trying to hide a little shrine because their father forgot about it. It’s just a superstition but if they don’t do that, Mirai may have problems finding a marriage partner.

It was a pretty funny scene, I really enjoyed that. There isn’t really moral to the story, nothing being pushed down our throat. Also very cute characters and an interesting idea of reversing roles for a moment - now the younger sister becomes the older sister by traveling from the future.

At this point, I thought that it would be a story about adventures with a teenage version of his sister. She was really a bright point of this movie and I think I enjoyed all the scenes with her.

What I absolutely hated and was bored to death is what comes next. We’re presented with another misbehavior of Kun. He doesn’t want to collect his toys, which is nothing unusual for a 4-year old. So he travels to the past to meet his mother who also doesn't like to collect toys. Somehow it was a life changing experience.

Same goes with him failing to ride a bike. He meets his great grandparent and… it again changes him.

Everything ends with a huge climax, which builds upon itself. Visuals are nice, but there is no substance for this type of climax. Quite similar to Summer Wars - nothing happened in the entire movie but for some reason, the director is trying to create something big out of it.

At this point I would say it’s typical Hosoda style. Just get 2 or 3 bumps of action going through the movie and finish it with a bang. Between those spikes, you add some slow paced exposition or changes in relationships between characters, but not too much. In the end, he always ended up with shallow and uninspiring characters. Well… not always, I mean Summer Wars and Bakemono no Ko.

I don’t know for whom this movie was created. It will be pretty boring for adults or teenagers, maybe if you have children it changes your perspective, but I’m not a parent. And I don’t think that it will be a life changing experience for children. They were probably already told multiple times to clean toys or to don’t give up when learning to do new stuff. 

I think that it would be beneficial to explore the subject of sibling jealousy for example instead of focusing mostly on Kun. Or maybe I just really liked the teenage version of Mirai because she was the only good thing in this movie.

To sum it up. It’s just the same type of pacing as The boy and the beast and a little similar to Summer Wars, once again exploring the theme of family. It reminds me of A Christmas Carol but it just doesn’t work. Kun adventures have really shallow morals and stories are not connected in any way. If you want to watch Hosoda's movie, please don’t watch this one.

Belle:

I really wanted to hate Belle after being disappointed with Mirai and I thought that after repeating the same type of narrative style and repeatedly exploring the theme of importance of family, Hosoda won’t be able to create anything good. I was so mistaken... Belle starts with a banger insert song, amazing visuals and is
captivating from the very beginning. 

Just go watch the official “Belle MV” on youtube and go straight to watch the movie instead of listening to me - really.

Belle is basically “Summer Wars 2.0” but much better. It starts with a very similar sequence, presenting a virtual world which can be used as a social media platform, the same way as Summer Wars. It is also attacked by a threat that the main character will have to deal with. In terms of pacing - classic Hosoda - 2 or 3 moderately sized spikes with a huge and spectacular ending. So, let’s start from the beginning.

Main heroine - Suzu - is a “countryside bumpkin”, a regular high school girl. But finally, after all those movies, Hosoda has given her a real backstory and personality. She loved music from a young age but after losing her mother, she wasn’t able to sing ever after. She gets interested in “U” - the virtual world where you can be someone else and hide behind a mask. Every character is generated randomly based on a person's biometrics. It turns out her character is beautiful and she can sing again while she’s inside the game. Due to her looks and voice, she quickly gains popularity.

30 minutes in, Belle (because that's the name she’s using in the virtual world) is performing a concert which is interrupted by “Beast”. This person supposedly disturbs the peace of this world and group of self-proclaimed moderators (I think?) tries to stop him. He’s covered in scars and has been in many fights inside the game, winning almost all of them.
I won’t be discussing whether this point about not being able to catch “Beast” makes sense. From a technological and business perspective it doesn’t because you have to have programmers and you need to store data, so you can easily delete or suspend somebody’s account if he violates ToS. Maybe it’s blockchain based or whatever, let’s just suspend our disbelief for a moment.

I didn’t really like this whole concept of The Beauty and the beast. Belle has no real reason to look for “Beast” or help him. And we’re back to the problem with Hosoda’s writing - there is no established reason for the characters' actions, but they still carry them out. So we just got a very mediocre copy of The Beauty and the Beast when it comes to this particular subplot.

Although I enjoyed the whole sequence about looking for “Beast” in the real world, suspecting celebrities, talking with people. It had a nice mystery vibe around itself.

And I think that’s all. We obviously get a very long and complex climax with multiple emotion spikes which is typical for Hosoda but there is nothing really about it that I want to talk about. Visuals and music are stunning, the conclusion of the story is good, I’m content with what we got.

To sum it up - Belle had a lot of potential. Summer Wars or The boy and the beast didn’t establish the character's personality, background and motivation in such details as Belle. Story is focused only on a single person, her transformation, her thoughts and it’s simply her adventure. Movie doesn’t waste much time with other characters and I really like that Hosoda focused only on the main character.

On the other hand, this potential gained in 30 minutes is being quickly lost by unlogical search for “Beast” which results in a kind of pointless story. The movie doesn’t have a clear subject or message related to “Beast” until the very end. However, it manages to convey a message about virtual worlds, virtual persona, dealing with traumas and so on, which is the only reason why I liked this movie from the plot perspective. But if you just want to listen to awesome music, watch beautiful animation and really nice 3D for anime standards, I would 100% recommend you watch Belle.

Summary:

Momoru Hosoda has produced really good movies in his career and over time you can clearly see the development of his style as a director. The slow beginning, 2 or 3 action-packed moments with calm exposition in-between and long, complex and varying in emotions climax. That's the style that Hosoda has presented already in 4 of his movies. I think that there are for sure ups and downs in his career, but Belle gave me hope that Hosoda still has something to show us. I’m really rooting for him and hope that in 2024 or whenever his new movie will air, we will get something even better and maybe someday, he’ll create an even more amazing movie than Wolf Children.

Meanwhile, thank you for watching (or watching) my essay.

If you haven’t watched any of Hosoda’s movies, I hope you’ll find something interesting for yourself. Personally, I would recommend watching all of them. If you don’t have enough time and you’re mostly interested in plot, I would recommend Wolf Children and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

If you want a beautiful, Disney-like movie, for a whole family, I think Belle would be a good choice or maybe The Boy and the beast if you want to go with a more action-packed one.