exhibition report: The Creative Origins of Mamoru Hosoda
Last weekend, I went to the exhibition "The Creative Origins of Mamoru Hosoda" that's currently being held at Creative Museum Tokyo (until August 31st). The price was a bit high for my tastes at ¥2,500, but I was going with a friend and decided to not be too stingy. In the end, I'm glad that I did!
The timing for the exhibition was chosen based on the 20th anniversary of the movie The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, which came out in 2006. The exhibit is a retrospective on Hosoda's work as a director, in roughly chronological order.
- The Girl Who Leapt Through Time / Tokikake (2006)
- Summer Wars (2009)
- Wolf Children (2012)
- Later movies (The Boy and the Beast, Mirai, Belle, Scarlet)
The first three movies get the biggest floor space. For Tokikake, the entire storyboard is on display, alongside some drawings from animators and character designers, background art etc.
Summer Wars and Wolf Children also have single rooms dedicated to them, but are a little bit less "content-dense" (instead featuring big figures of important characters in the center of the spaces). The later movies only play a secondary role. After the Summer Wars room, there's also a section covering Hosoda's school and university days, and his time as a young animator / director before he made a name for himself with Tokikake in 2006.
All in all, we spent around three hours in the exhibition! There was so much to see, and overall it was very enjoyable, not too crowded, too (I expected it to be worse).
Unlike Ghibli movies, which I rewatch every now and then, it's been a very long time since I've last seen some of these Hosoda movies. I had to really dig deep into my memory to remember Tokikake's plot while reading the storyboard. But even though my memory has faded a bit, these movies are very nostalgic to me. Tokikake and Summer Wars came out right around the time when I first went to Japan - so they carry that air of youthful excitement that reminds me of my teens.
The biggest single element that I associate with Hosoda movies are his skies, specifically summer skies with towering cumulonimbus clouds. According to the explanation from the exhibition, they are employed as symbolic devices to represent the growth of the characters (smaller clouds gathering on top of each other and growing into the sky). That makes sense, but personally, I always saw them as more of a representation for the immenseness of the world we live in. Beneath such towering clouds, human lives seem small and insignificant, but not in the negative sense. Instead, they show richness - how much there is to experience and learn; more than any single one of us can every hope to grasp. In Tokikake, the main character goes back in time over and over to create a "perfect timeline" for herself, but in the end, she has to realise that youth (and life in general) is an endless continuum of the "present" that hold value precisely because you can't perfectly control, steer or hold onto everything.
There are quite a few Hosoda movies that I haven't seen yet, most importantly Wolf Children. Luckily, the exhibition is designed in a "spoiler-free" way. After the exhibition, it's now on top of my watch list. Even though I like Hosoda as a director, Belle and Scarlet don't seem very interesting though. Up to Mirai, Hosoda's movies had a good balance of 2D animation and 3D, but especially Scarlet just looks awful with its "2D anime skins pasted onto 3D everything" kind of look.
The only major disappointment was the shop. I was bracing to spend quite a bit, but honestly, most of the stuff they have is very bland. For some reason a lot of the products feature simplified, vector-art-escque versions of scenes from the movies - why do that when you have access to all that amazing background art? It could be a licensing thing. Anyway, I just got one small packet of Summer Wars Oz avatar stickers and that was it.
Overall, if you happen to be in Tokyo until August 31st and like Hosoda's movies, I'd definitely recommend it.