The fantasy of the Japanese family in Hosoda Mamoru’s Mirai (2018)
In a world of globalised animation, anime’s influence is ever expanding, ranging from adult Netflix animations like Castlevania (Warren Ellis, 2017-) to a wide variety of western children’s TV shows from Teen Titans (Glen Murakami and Sam Register, 2003-2006) to She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (Noelle Stevenson, 2018-2020). The global taste for anime’s wide-ranging aesthetic markers; from glittering magical girl transformations to cities ravaged by gigantic mecha, may support the notion that Japanese animation is favoured for its ‘statelessness’ and rejection of Japan’s specific cultural markers (Napier 2001: 25), creating a paradox where anime is prized for both its uniqueness as a Japanese product and the relative international settings it portrays.
Fig. 1 - Mirai (Hosoda Mamoru, 2018).
In the case of the work of Hosoda Mamoru, however, the focus is re-centred explicitly on the Japanese family and contemporary cultural issues they face. Issues that Hosoda explores through the way he uses fantasy to chart characters’ personal and familial strife, forming a central part of his latest directorial effort; Mirai/Mirai no Mirai (2018) (Fig. 1). The film presents the story of a four-year-old boy who must face the new challenges of being a big brother when his baby sister comes home, doing so via a liminal space in his garden where time and space warp. By considering how the elements of fantasy within Mirai are established in service of reinforcing a modern formulation of the Japanese family, I will identify a vein of conservatism in Hosoda’s work that aligns with the Japanese government’s own response to the perceived dissolution of the family sphere. In particular, I explore the way fantasy can overcome geographical and cultural barriers to imagine new worlds of communication and bonding.
Hosoda’s use of fantasy to reinforce the cultural structures that appear within his ‘real’ worlds is not a new narrative technique for anime. As Rayna Denison notes when writing on Hosoda’s previous film Summer Wars/Samā Wōzu (2009), “Japanese animation’s links to nationalism developed hand-in-hand with developments in animation form” (2018: 123), starting as war propaganda and developing into more subtle expressions of patriotism. However, in both Mirai and Summer Wars, national propaganda serves to repair different cultural ruptures than simply post-war insecurity. These fractures in identity are born of a modern fear, that of Japan’s changing population. As of 2019, Japan’s birthrate is at 1.4 with 92% of its population living in urban areas. This shrinking and ageing population has dominated the political conversation in Japan over the last twenty or so years. It is inevitable that anime too would come to reflect this anxiety over the issue of the dissolution of traditional family spheres. In online communities, awareness of this fact takes on a mocking edge, using the image of Shinzo Abe, the current Japanese Prime Minister (2009-), and superimposing it over screenshots of anime with a focus on pregnancy and starting a family to highlight the absurdity of only trying to raise the birthrate to overcome national issues that have deeper roots. Even Aggretsuko (Rareko, 2018-), a Japanese Netflix series about the everyday issues of a female office worker who is also a death-metal singing racoon, came under fire for its focus on marriage for the titular character in the second season, after she resonated with a lot of working women within Japan and overseas in the first season. It is this national push-pull of reinforcing conservative cultural spheres and rejecting regressive ideals of the family that influences Hosoda’s work. As Hosoda himself admits “I don’t come up with a story first, I think about what has been changing in the world […] in particular, I think of recent problems that families and children are facing in society” (Hosoda in Schroter 2016). The fantasy of Hosoda’s work then serves a specific purpose, that of encouraging wide-ranging family ties. At the same time, Hosoda avoids the political implications that anime which focuses on the pre-marriage and pre-family sphere tend to garner. Instead of making a case for the people making these choices, Hosoda frames Mirai around the child dealing with the consequences of choices already made.
Hosoda notes that regarding the inspiration for Mirai “I didn’t realise the satisfaction, the happiness I would get from spending time with my children. Then I started thinking, ‘How can I convey this happiness into a movie?’” (Hosoda in Giardina 2018). In that sense, the vignette style of the film – which marks various points that the child protagonist, Ota Kun, comes into conflict with his new identity as a big brother – crystallises moments of family life by giving them the illusion of memories one recalls with fondness even if full of the usual conflicts. This idea is reinforced by the opening credits, which detail snapshots of life before and after Kun is born, juxtaposed with what will become his sister Ota Mirai’s ‘after’ throughout the film. This framing also establishes a precedent for Kun’s own ventures into the future and past, with lessons he learns within his own world reflected within the fantasy. A world that is at once fantastical but reflective of the ‘real’ fits what Susan Napier calls the matsuri mode. Although, for Napier, anime in general “with its rapid shifts of narrative pace and its constantly transforming imagery … is superbly positioned to illustrate the atmosphere of change” (2001: 12), it is matsuri anime – loosely translated as festival anime – that has characters go through a changed or mirrored world to reach a further understanding about themselves, similar to the western mode of the carnivalesque.
The function of the matsuri mode within Mirai, then, becomes a way to grapple with contemporary issues of the family. The Ota family lives in Yokohama, a city on the outskirts of Tokyo, while it is suggested within the film that Kun’s grandparents live rurally, at least a bullet train journey away. This is a realistic interpretation of the modern Japanese family given the population figures and increasing rural-urban divide. Thus, the fantasy within the film becomes about overcoming the geographical limitations of the family’s isolation; an isolation made literal in their home which is split over two levels, with Kun’s play room downstairs and the main house upstairs. The garden situated in between then functions as a liminal space within the home, centred by a tree that comes to symbolically, then literally, represent a family tree. It is this space where all of the fantastical elements of Mirai occur, serving as the connective tissue of both the home and the family. This is further shown by the fact that Kun only begins to traverse these temporally displaced zones via the garden once he has to work through a new connection (in the form of his sister) by reconsidering his already established family sphere.
Fig. 2 - Photos serve as an important element to both foreshadow Kun’s fantastical journey and as a visual connection to the past.
Such is the case the first time Kun visits the past to meet his mother as child after they fought in the ‘real’ world. The space of the garden becomes a wide field that is at once part of the dry land and underwater, as fish swim by Kun and his sister in her older future form. Water, whether Kun’s tears, the fantasy space of the garden, or the rain in Kun’s mother’s childhood, becomes the connecting motif between all three of them. As the fish overwhelm Kun, the scene changes to his mother’s childhood. By folding the two disparate spaces into each other, Hosoda allows Kun’s insecurities about being replaced and not being as “cute” as his sister to be directly confronted with the fact that his mother’s demands to clean up are based on her own strict childhood. In return, the fact that Kun and the child version of his mother make a mess in her home – notably a large rural house compared to Kun’s slight urban home – reforms isolated childhood memories Kun only sees in photos into immersive experiences of family unity (Fig. 2). Although both worlds are mundane in appearance, the matsuri mode can be found in the removal of what Denison identifies as the hierarchical ie system. For Denison, the ie system – a form of family based in emperor-worship – is present in Summer Wars through the structure of the main family, but is at the same time undermined by the family’s matriarchal – rather than patriarchal – head (2018). Mirai takes this a step further by rendering time and age a defunct concept in a family sphere. Kun’s younger sister takes up the role of educating him, his mother plays games with him, even his dog becomes human. While in favour of a return to more traditional family spheres, Hosoda understands some elements will inevitably change and uses the matsuri mode to illustrate that.
Fig. 3 - Disruptions in the established animation style inspire a sense of unease and serve to disconnect Kun from his environment.
While any point Kun enters another time or space would count as part of this journey of change, these displacements are not always obviously in the matsuri mode from their animation style. It is only near the end, when the overarching theme of the importance of family comes to the forefront, that the fantasy world in Kun interacts with takes on more of the matsuri aesthetic. After a tantrum over the wrong trousers, Kun finds himself at a rural train station with who we later realise is the older version of himself. This older Kun asks “Which is more important? Your trousers? Or happy memories?”, setting in motion the solution to the conflict of individual selfishness versus family unity. By making use of “the visual flexibility of animation, with its intense palette of colours and ability to transform figures, shapes, and even space itself” (Napier 2001: 13), Hosoda injects a new animation style into the film which had up until then mostly employed a traditional cel shaded 2D style common to modern anime. Kun travels on to Tokyo Station, a chaotic and technologically advanced space, indicated by the abundance of train maps and the staff whose robotic appearance and stilted paper aesthetic marks them apart. The adults Kun also tries to talk to have a style more cartoonish than Mirai’s previously established style, highlighting Kun’s isolation in the urban sprawl that the station represents (Fig. 3). When the robotic employee asks “You’ve lost yourself?”, this line draws not just on Kun’s anxiety as a lost child, but a broader notion of losing your identity within the urban sphere – even as an adult, feeding into a more general cultural isolation. Only by claiming himself as Mirai’s big brother is Kun able to reinstate his sense of self. The nightmarish fantasy of the station serves to reinforce a narrative where family is an essential element to both personal and national identity. As Kun’s parents note at the end of the film; “look how we turned out,” “we owe it to our kids.”
While Hosoda’s intention in uplifting the family as a source of unconditional happiness is not solely one of cynical nationalism and regressive ideology. To talk about the family is to talk about the nation, and it is no coincidence Hosoda’s work has evolved alongside a conservative government that has ignored its people’s changing views. For all the mockery levelled at Abe’s single-minded focus on an increasing birthrate, the most effective forms of nationalism are the kinds that do not state themselves as such. Mirai illustrates this in the way it gives ordinary family ties a fantastical edge, while skirting the issues – from poverty, to lack of childcare, to insecure jobs – that make such a vision of family unity a difficult one.
**Article published: July 24, 2020**
References
Denison, Rayna. 2018. “Anime’s Cultural Nationalism: The Politics of Representing Japan in Summer Wars (Mamoru Hosoda, 2009),” Mutual Images Journal 5: 123-142.
Giardina, Carolyn. 2018. “'Mirai': Time-Traveling 4-Year-Old Copes With Arrival of Baby Sister in Animated Film,” The Hollywood Reporter (November 28, 2018), available at: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/time-traveling-4-year-old-copes-arrival-baby-sister-mirai-1163392.
Biography
Issy recently completed a MA in Film Studies at King's College London, with a dissertation on working class British motherhood on screen. In undergrad, Issy wrote for Mapping Contemporary Cinema at http://www.mcc.sllf.qmul.ac.uk, including an editorial on Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014). She has a forthcoming chapter in Culture: Raise ‘Low’, Rethink ‘High’: An Exploration of the Academic Potential of So-called ‘Low’ Culture on how identity is constructed within fanfiction. You can follow her on twitter at @robotissy.