Tag: Natsuna

The Door into Summer (夏への扉 ―キミのいる未来へ―, Takahiro Miki, 2021)

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Takahiro Miki has made something of a name for himself with a particular brand of bittersweet youthful romance often featuring a fantastical element such in Girl in the Sunny Place, or My Tomorrow, Your Yesterday. Adapted from a novel by Robert A. Heinlein, The Door Into Summer (夏への扉 ―キミのいる未来へ―, Natsu e no Tobira: Kimi on iru Mirai e) is in many ways more of the same, repurposing a sci-fi-inflected, slightly uncomfortable love story as an inspirational tale of never giving up and learning to overcome personal trauma in order to seek true happiness. 

In 1995, 27-year-old Soichiro (Kento Yamazaki) has experienced a lot of loss in his life. His mother passed away soon after he was born, followed by his father when he was 17. He was then taken in by a family friend and became a big brother to then 7-year-old Riko (Kaya Kiyohara), but his adoptive parents then died in a plane crash. While Riko went to live with her uncle Kazuto, Soichiro became a robotics prodigy with an internalised sense of despair that prevents him making lasting connections, believing that his fate is always to lose everything he loves. His prophecy is in a sense fulfilled when he’s duped into signing away some of his shares in the robotics company founded by his adoptive father by an unscrupulous colleague. Filled with despair, he decides to enter a cryostasis programme for 30 years intending to transfer his remaining stocks to Riko, in part avoiding the inappropriate crush she has on him and hoping to escape from reality along with his best friend/cat Pete to start again in another time when the programme promises his investments will have matured leaving him with a good quality of life. Before he can do that, however, an attempt to confront his wrongdoers backfires when he’s placed into their proprietary cryosleep programme to ensure he’s out of the way for the next three decades. 

To that extent, you’d have to wonder why they’d bother rather than just getting rid of him for good. In any case, when he wakes up he realises that the shady company that housed him, Mannix, went bust years ago leaving him with no savings and also no cat because his enemy didn’t give much thought to poor Pete. In the future, however, he gets a fancy new rogue robot companion, also called PETE, who supports him as he tries to adjust to the digital world his inventions helped create before realising that he must have at some point time travelled back to 1995 to put things “right” (to a certain extent) so that could happen and starting in on that. This accidental paradox is never really addressed, Soichiro travelling to the past because he knows he already has, but not giving himself very much time to complete the magic plasma battery that powers the future while remaining in hiding until ready to disrupt his tormentors’ dastardly plan, rescue his beloved cat Pete, save Riko, and return to the future to make sure that nothing else changes in the new 2025. 

It is indeed Pete that inspires the film’s title in his revulsion of winter weather, always insisting on checking all the internal doorways in the hope that one magically leads to summer which is a roundabout metaphor for film’s secondary message in the insistence on perseverance, never giving up or losing hope in a brighter future even it seems impossible. Nevertheless, it can’t be denied that there’s something slightly uncomfortable in the relationship between 27-year-old Soichiro and his 17-year-old adoptive sister Riko even as he repeatedly reminds her she’s still a child and should live her life with people her own age, especially given the implications of the romantic resolution which attempts to smooth over this awkwardness by placing them on a more equal footing if somewhat artificially. In the end, however, the most important tool for saving the future turns out to be companionship and unconditional support of the kind that Pete offered the orphaned Soichiro, a quality he later programs in to his over-curious robot “son”, PETE. Miki doesn’t do much with the hard sci-fi trappings of the original novel, but does in his best tradition craft an innocent romance as the hero learns to look for his eternal summer in the present rather than the past while overcoming his internalised despair in his cursed fate to embrace love and happiness. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Fullmetal Alchemist (鋼の錬金術師, Fumihiko Sori, 2017)

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Fullmetal Alchemist posterEvery so often a film comes along which makes you question everything you thought you knew. Fullmetal Alchemist (鋼の錬金術師, Hagane no Renkinjutsushi) is just such as film but less for the philosophical questions fans of the source manga may have been expecting, than for the frankly incomprehensible fact that it exists at all. Produced not by a major studio but by Square Enix – best known as a video game studio but also the publisher of manga magazine Monthly Shonen Gangan in which the series was originally serialised, and effects studio Oxybot Inc., Fullmetal Alchemist is not the big budget extravaganza a franchise of this size might be expected to generate but a cut price blockbuster attempting to pack a much loved, long running saga into just over two hours.

For the uninitiated, the movie begins with the little Elric Brothers – Ed and Al, who live in the countryside with their doting mother while their father is away. When their mother is struck down by a sudden illness and dies, the boys raid their dad’s Alchemy library for clues as to how to bring her back. There is, however, a taboo surrounding human transmutation and when the brothers cast their spell they pay a heavy price – Al loses his entire body though Ed manages to save his soul and bind it to a suit of armour by sacrificing his own right arm.

Many years later, Ed (Ryosuke Yamada) and Al (Atomu Mizuishi) are still looking for the mythical “Philosopher’s Stone” which they believe will allow them to cast another spell and get their fleshy bodies fully restored. This takes them to a small town where they encounter a dodgy priest and their old commander, Captain Roy Mustang (Dean Fujioka), who wants to bring them back into the State Alchemist fold. The priest’s stone turns out to be a fake though his connections to the film’s shady antagonists are all too real, and the brothers are soon faced with another dilemma in their quest to restore all they’ve lost.

Sori shifts away from the frozen Northern European atmosphere of the manga for something sunnier and less austere, shooting in Italy’s Volterra with its narrow medieval streets and iconic Tuscan red roofs. He is, however, working on a budget and it shows as his cast are costumed at cosplay level with awkward blond wigs attempting to recreate the manga’s European aesthetics. Al, rendered entirely (and expensively) in CGI, is deliberately kept off screen while the quality of the effects often leaves much to be desired.

Al’s frequent absence is a major problem seeing as the series’ major theme is brotherhood and Ed’s tremendous sense of guilt over his brother’s condition coupled with his recklessness in his need to put things right is only explained in a piece of bald exposition following a fight between the pair after Al’s mind has been corrupted by a mad scientist who implied that he may not really be “real” after all. While Al’s false memory paranoia may be among the more interesting issues the film attempts to raise, it’s quickly pushed into the background, eclipsed by the ongoing conspiracy narrative which places the Elric Brothers in a difficult position regarding their need to get their body parts back. 

A symptom of the attempt to condense such a much loved and well known manga into a two hour movie, there is rather a lot of plot going on and numerous side characters on hand to enact it. Though fans of the original manga may be pleased to see their favourite characters have made it into the movie, they maybe less pleased about how one note they often are or the various ways their personalities have needed to shift in order to fit into the new narrative arcs the film employs. Aside from the young and pretty cast, Fullmetal Alchemist also finds room for a host of veteran talent from the ubiquitous Jun Kunimura in a small role to Yo Oizumi turning villainous and Fumiyo Kohinata at his most Machiavellian.

Extremely silly, poorly put together and burdened with some very unfortunate wigs, the Fullmetal Alchemist live action adaptation is as much of a misfire as it’s possible to be but viewers hoping for a continuation to the tale would do well to stay tuned for a post-credits sting strongly hinting at a part two.

Streaming worldwide on Netflix.

Original trailer (English subtitles)