Samâ wôzu

If you can imagine the easy going yet fascinating Hayao Miyazaki stories, with their kind heartedness and deep Japanese roots being mixed with Denou Coil, you will get Summer Wars. It has good animation, a really cute story and features a cyber battle between a Japanese family and a malicious A.I. inside something that can be seen as the future of Facebook.

What I found really nice in the film is that traditional family values are mixed with modern views of the world, a beautiful countryside scenery is mixed with the virtual cyber world of OZ. There are both moral values to be learned from the story as well as the excitement of a crisis and how giving your best can get one past it. I found brilliant the way the scenes of cyber battle were intertwined with scenes of Japanese baseball, birthday then dying rituals, the individual traits of all of the members of the family, all without losing anything, just adding more and more depth to each scene.

I highly recommend it for all anime fans and for people who might become so, after watching a masterpiece like Summer Wars.