Anime On the Big Screen: “Children of the Sea”

Venue: Dendy Cinemas, Level 2, North Quarter, Canberra Centre, 148 Bunda Street, Canberra City, ACT
Date: Sunday 22 December 2019
Distributor: Madman Entertainment
Format: Digital Projection, Japanese dialogue with English subtitles
Length: 111 minutes
Production Date: 2019
Currently on Home Video in English (as of writing): No

A couple of weeks on from my last outing in the cinema and another anime film from Madman is here. Admittedly I delayed going to see this film because in the previous week I really felt I wasn’t in the mood for it. The weather hasn't been all that great for venturing outside anyway. Over the last couple of weeks, Canberra has been blanketed in smoke from fires east of the city. The amount of smoke as waxed and waned, but it seems that it will stick around for few more weeks unfortunately. After some really horrible smoky and hot days, today the temperature sunk to less than 24°C and the smoke had dissipated. Despite being a few days before Christmas, Canberra Centre wasn’t as crowded as I expected. The Kingpin bowling/party centre had finally opened the day before. It wasn’t that crowed from what I could see and it looks like an overblown gaming centre to be honest.

In cinemas only a week after “Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll”, this film is obviously the film Madman are banking on out of the two. As I said in my previous review, Madman has actually printed up posters for the film and in this cinema, it was placed in a very prominent position. If a limited release film stays in cinemas for week or so, it seems Dendy changes the screening times; now one session at 10am and a second around 6pm. I opted for the earlier one. The screening also took place in the newer part of the cinemas, which feels divorced from the main section. 15 people showed up for this screening including three families. One family and a person who came by themselves left cinema before the film finished. Maybe with good reason as I’ll explain;

Junior high school student Ruka Azumi lives in small seaside town where fishing seems to be the main industry. It’s summer holidays but she continues to go to school in order to practice with the handball sports club she is a member of. Ruka is extremely happy that she will get to do this every day and is looking forward to the holidays. However, on the first day of practice, Ruka is deliberately tripped by a teammate who accuses her of being too enthusiastic. Later during the match, Ruka purposely elbows her in the nose, almost breaking it. Both her teammates and the supervising teacher are of course unhappy with her. The teacher reprimands her and says if she’s not going to apologise, she shouldn’t bother coming back to training.

Pissed off and annoyed at the situation and herself, Ruka is at a complete loss as what to do for the rest of the summer. Ruka can’t really go home as her mother expects her to be training. The fact her mother is also a drunk and hard to get along with doesn't help. She hides away from the rest of her team members and frequents places where no one goes. Ruka eventually decides to go to the aquarium. When she was small, she had a strange experience where a giant whale, she refers to as the ghost, appeared in the main tank. Her father Masaaki works there and she hopes she can help him in his work over summer. While lurking around the entrance, one of the staff members recognises Ruka, gives her a visitor’s pass and leads her to the entrance to the pumps behind the main tanks of the aquarium where her father is currently working.

While searching for her father, she spots something lurking about in the shadows, then inside a wetsuit, before jumping into a small tank. Surprisingly it turns out not to be a sealion, but a mysterious boy her age who calls himself Umi. Ruka’s father explains that Umi and another boy named Sora were discovered in the wild and were apparently raised by a herd of dugongs (no, I am not making this up). Umi has become acclimatised to the ocean so much, that he can’t go long periods without his skin being wet. Still bummed out by what happened at the handball club the previous day, Ruka returns to school, but lurks about so no one can see her. Hiding in a classroom, she hears a noise and believes she has been caught by the teacher, when in fact it is Umi who has been searching for her. The pair of them escape the school and head for the ocean.

There he explains to her that he wants to show her the Will-o'-the-wisp that will appear that night. Two lights speed over the town and across the ocean. Ruka is very excited by this phenomenon, but can’t seem to get any sense out of Umi as to what she just saw. In another meeting with Umi, he heads into the ocean and Ruka meets Sora who is sitting on the shoreline. Sora is far paler than Umi and seems much less friendly. However, the pair of them become close, mainly due to Umi’s influence and the trio begin to have adventures together. Ruka soon develops a connection to what is happening in the sea. She can feel something is going on, like she has a form of ESP or psychic connection with it. It soon becomes clear to everyone that something odd is happening in the ocean. A large number of deep-sea creatures are washed up on the shoreline. Several of the local marine biologists have also been investigating Umi and Sora as well as the two meteorites that were seen crashing into the ocean. All are linked and it is clear something big is about to happen.

This film is based on a five volume manga series of the same name (though the literal title is “Marine Mammal Children”), written and illustrated by Daisuke Igarashi who also wrote the screenplay for the film. This adaptation was animated by Studio 4°C, a studio with a relatively low output (but generally high-quality animation), whose previous films have included “Tekkonkinkreet”, “Mind Game” and the “Berserk: The Golden Age Arc” trilogy. The director was Ayumu Watanabe who is best known as the director of “Space Brothers” TV series and follow up film and the more recent “Doraemon” movies. The score was composed by none other than Joe Hisaishi, who is best known to anime fans for his soundtrack work on many of Studio Ghibli’s films.

I might as well start off discussing the best parts of the film first. The animation is quite spectacular. One of the most impressive sequences involves Ruka running from the school and into the town’s streets in one continuous take. The backgrounds are of course CG (though look completely hand drawn), something that Studio 4°C are masters of. I have read some comments from fans and even in some film reviews that the animation is scrappy. This is utter nonsense. What people mean by this is that they don’t like the character designs, which are for the most part quite atypical of most modern character design. While the story may at first glance may look like a typical summer teen film in a stereotypical setting, this film is anything but. Apart from the mystical aspects of the film I’ll talk about later, the movie is clearly about outsiders, in particular Ruka who doesn’t seem to fit into her small community at all.

While the interactions and adventures between Ruka, Umi and Sora are fun and quite entertaining, it soon becomes quite clear that we are being primed for a reveal of the developing mysteries out in the ocean. Something is obviously wrong out there; there’s news bulletins stating whales are entering the Hudson River in New York, a large amount of sea life is congregating just off the coast and even the captive sea creatures at the aquarium take notice, with all of them looking simultaneously towards a single point somewhere out in the ocean. Couple this with the previously mentioned deep sea creatures being washed ashore and the scenes of local marine biologists and other sequences of scientists which seem to be linked to the military or some unnamed government organisation. There are also several mentions of a “festival” as well and other events and phenomena vaguely hinted at. But little of the material presented to the audience is of a scientific kind. Towards the midpoint of the film, Ruka meets a local marine biologist; a young long-haired man named Anglade. Despite being a scientist, none of what he says to Ruka is very scientific at all; it’s all rather philosophical and spiritual instead.

Later in the film Ruka meets another local marine biologist, an elderly lady only known as Dede. She is somehow even vaguer than Anglade. A third marine biologist connected to the aquarium called Jim, is at least seen to be collecting data on Umi and Sora, and the phenomena occurring in the ocean. But none of the dialogue from these characters really seems to advance the plot one iota or gives any real explanations as to what is happening on screen. Just before the mid-way point, the dialogue from these characters in particular becomes incredibly ponderous. Pretty much all of it leads nowhere and the film is filled with tantalising clues to the mysteries, but they all ultimately lead to dead ends.

At the mid-way point of the film, the plot veers quite sharply from what is a somewhat normal movie about a young teenage girl enjoying her summer break with two mysterious boys from the sea, into an incredibly abstract and quite bizarre visual representation of what seems to be the rebirth of the universe. I think. I’m still not quite too sure. I’ve read comparisons with this section of the film to the birth of the universe sequence from Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life”, which is a reasonable comparison. Leading up to this part of the film, it is clear that Ruka is the catalyst to what happens at this point (Ruka has been swallowed by a large creature prior to this sequence). However, the meaning behind all of this seems rather muddled. Is it the literal rebirth of the universe? Has all aquatic life been reborn? Has Ruka been given a vision in order to save the creatures of the ocean from human destruction?

Considering nothing seems to have really changed at all after this sequence, it just seems even more befuddling and odd. I began to wonder if Ruka imagined the whole thing, but that doesn’t account for the marine biologists’ odd behaviour. Why are there scenes in that sequence of the government scientists discovering what seems to be a number of abandoned boats in the middle of the ocean, with one having thousands of dollars’ worth of banknotes scattered inside? What hell does it all mean? Even leading up to that sequence, none of the actions they take, nor the dialogue contributes at all to an explanation for what is happening. For example, Jim deletes data relating to Umi and Sora suggesting that it will help the boys with what will happen next. However, it has already been explained that the data collected on both indicates they are normal human boys.

From what I can gather, the manga contains a fair bit of important background info about the world and characters, that is oddly not divulged in the movie. Unexplained in the film (except for a couple lines of dialogue from Dede towards the end), Umi and Sora aren’t the only “Children of the Sea”. Apparently, there have been several other “messengers of the sea” in the past. You would assume that the discovery of two boys raised by dugongs would be an extremely important scientific one, so why are they being held at some old rundown aquarium in a small Japanese fishing town? Despite the numerous scenes they have in the film, there is no real link with the mysterious government scientists to any of the other characters in the film. They feel really divorced from the film as such. As I previously mentioned, the original mangaka wrote the screenplay. I know it must be difficult to condense a five volume manga into less than two hours of film, but so much material has been cut the movie feels deliberately vague and incredibly hard to decipher.

Though I was really annoyed by the film upon first viewing it, over the last few days I have begun to really think about the imagery and what the movie means, if anything. The setting of a typical rundown and rusted Japanese fishing village, with its obligatory aquarium which many coastal towns have in Japan, is really well done and looks true to life. Some the story setups, especially the fact two boys were raised by dugongs, seem really silly and laughable, as does a bunch of scientists who speak about the phenomena in the ocean in vague and spiritual language. I understand that mangaka Daisuke Igarashi has publicly stated he wants the audience to make up their own minds about what happens in the story, but I would have preferred if there was a more realistic and scientific basis to it. I also felt there were far too many red herrings in the film.

While the animation is fantastic and the relationships between Ruka, Umi and Sora are well written, the vagueness and abstract manner of the second half of the film coupled with a lack of clear answers and seemingly a sense of nothing has changed at the end of the film kind of irked me. As you can tell by how much I have written about this film, I have thought about it a lot over the last few days. So much so, that I think I’ll need to see it again before I can give it any sort of score out of ten. Note there is an extended post credits sequence at the end of the film, so don’t leave the cinema before the credits finish scrolling.