Directed by:
Tomomi MochizukiScreenplay:
Keiko NiwaCinematography:
Atsushi OkuiComposer:
Shigeru NagataCast:
Toshihiko Seki, Tomokazu Seki, 久川綾, Hikaru Midorikawa, Yuri Amano, Nobuo Tobita, Kae Araki, Reiko Suzuki, Kinryū Arimoto, Jun'ichi Kanemaru, Ai Satō (more)VOD (1)
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Tomomi Mochizuki directs this Japanese animated feature based on the novel by Saeko Himuro. The film follows Taku (voice of Nobuo Tobita), a young Japanese high school student whose life is turned upside down by the arrival from Tokyo of mysterious new girl Rikako (Yoko Sakamoto). Despite Rikako's insistence on keeping her distance from her new classmates, Tako finds himself falling for her as circumstances conspire to bring them together during a school trip to Hawaii. However, things soon become complicated when it emerges that Tako has a rival for Rikako's affections in the form of his close friend Yutaka (Toshihiko Seki). (StudioCanal UK)
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The problem with Ocean Waves (Umi ga kikoeru) is viewer expectations, which are primarily associated with the fact that it is a production from Studio Ghibli, but may also be based on what we have become accustomed to in the area of anime. This project is fundamentally and intentionally different from what we would expect in either case. Ocean Waves was initiated directly as a platform for young filmmakers from the studio’s ranks and as a departure from the projects of the then already old masters Miyazaki and Takahata. As a first attempt, it also had to be a deliberately inexpensive production that wouldn’t be released in cinemas, but on television as a one-hour special. Instead of Miyazaki’s fantastical worlds, this work of young filmmakers is supposed to be conceptually closer to Takahata’s simpler films. Unlike those, however, Ocean Waves lacks magical realism and the low-key celebration of the minor details of everyday life depicted with obsessive emphasis on perfectly capturing them in the form of animation. Ocean Waves is an adaptation of the book of the same name, which nostalgically turns to the time of adolescence and deals with a platonic triangle of two friends at a provincial high school and a newly arrived co-ed from Tokyo. In line with the book, however, the film’s depiction of the relationships is a radical departure from the typical affected hyper-stylisation and formulaic nature of mainstream anime. Instead of grand emotions, flashy chaos and condensed relationship clichés, Ocean Waves works with the motifs of shyness in expressing one’s feelings and the general insipidness of adolescence in the ordinariness of those feelings spread out over time. This is further enhanced by the fragile narrative, which presents all of the events not with an omniscient view, but from the perspective of one of the protagonists. The limitations of having a single perspective conditions the seemingly meaningless and undramatic peripeteias, the ambiguous clues and the uncertainties, which are usually not lacerating and intense, but merely authentically confusing. Ocean Waves is thus one of the simplest and unobtrusively fragile films about teen love, but because of that, viewers may find it to be rather inaccessible.
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