Fantastic Fest 2010

In 2009, Hosoda secured his status as the man who drove a stake through Miyazaki’s grumpy old heart with SUMMER WARS, the most Internet-friendly movie since Shunji Iwai’s ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU CHOU. An animated epic, it tells the tale of a young nerdling pretending to be the boyfriend of a schoolmate on her summer trip to her aging grandmother’s house. When an online social networking community known as Oz gets attacked by a piece of sentient malware that threatens to deliver a denial of service attack to the entire world, her massive extended family unites to restore peace to cyberspace.

Hosoda goes out of his way to make the point that the Internet, TV and cell phones are all part of a technological continuum that started with letters and books and whose goal is to form networks, to build communities and to erase the distance between individuals. The hero of Hosoda’s film isn’t the main character, but the network of people around him. It’s one of the best animated films to come along in ages. (Grady Hendrix, NYAFF)