From the archive: "Wolf Children"

Though his films have received frequent - if often delayed - UK distribution, the animator Mamoru Hosoda has been somewhat overshadowed by the pre-eminence of Hayao Miyazaki at Studio Ghibli. Both are masters; if there is any significant variance between the two, it may be that Miyazaki's recent work has tended towards the zip and colour and heightened, busy design one sees in certain Western animations - there's a reason Ghibli's films were adopted and redubbed by Team Disney - where Hosoda's is broadly traditionalist, more closely resembling what you'd expect any Japanese animation to look like, with few if any computer-assisted whistles and bells. There are parallels with the live-action cinema of Ozu and latterly Hirokazu Kore-eda: Hosoda often broaches fantastical concepts - time-travel in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, a rise of the machines in Summer Wars - but within them, he chooses to dig into his characters' physical space and tap some emotional core. His 2012 film Wolf Children passes through Twilight territory, but it's framed in a more affecting manner: recounted in flashback as a memory of childhood, and as a daughter's tribute to a mother who displays uncommon reserves of fortitude and self-sufficiency.

Heroine Yuki (voiced by Haru Kuroki and Momoka Ôno in the original, and Jad Saxton and Lara Woodhull in the English dub) begins by telling us of the romance that blossomed between her mother Hana (Aoi Miyazaki/Colleen Clinkenbeard), back when she was a gauche young student in the big city, and the brooding loner she spies one afternoon at the back of the lecture hall. There's a reason her crush doesn't run with the rest of the pack, and it doesn't seem nearly so strange as it might have done pre-Stephenie Meyer: he has something of the wolf in his DNA. The offspring these two will eventually conceive - being Yuki and her brother Ame (Yukito Nishii and Amon Kabe/Micah Solusod and Alison Viktorin) - are, like a YouTuber's idea of the Greatest Mash-Up Ever, part-baby, part-dog, switching between states with a very canine shake of the head; not surprisingly, they're also the cutest animated creations this side of Miyazaki's Ponyo. Yet when dad disappears from the picture, Hana is obliged to raise the pair herself, out in the wilds - or what passes for the wilds of contemporary Japan - and far from the eyes of humans who might demand to know why these youngsters have occasional cause to sprout fur and snouts.

The movie unfolds over something like twenty-five years, and Hosoda makes his presence most felt in the shaded evocation of time passing: several sequences present us, often in montage form, with a narratively and emotionally satisfying digest of, say, nine months of childbearing, or an afternoon spent tilling the fields during which the digger learns on the job, or the kids' gradual progress from one school year to the next. The technique allows us to better see these characters' divergent personalities (as well as their physical forms) developing and evolving: the indefatigable Yuki, evidently her mother's daughter, and the more hesitant Ame, who comes out of his kennel belatedly, and with much snarling and gnashing of teeth. (Ain't that just the way with teenage boys?) What Hosoda appears to be getting at is how we adapt to our immediate environment - and an acknowledgement of how, if we're lucky, we get someone capable of nudging or nuzzling us in the right direction. Though it's necessary to bring this observation project to completion, Wolf Children feels a touch long for standard half-term audiences, but it's deeply moving and eloquent indeed on the sacrifices parents will make for their children, and what children gift their parents in return. If you can get through the closing moments without floods of tears and a desperate urge to call or otherwise commune with the folks who first brought you into this world, well, you're a stronger - and possibly colder-blooded - pup than I.

(October 2013)

Wolf Children returns to selected cinemas from Sunday.