Ican't even tell you how excited I was to see this movie subbed last week. It was the best thing to happen during my Thanksgiving weekend. I couldn't wait to watch this even if I had to deal with a crappy hard/soft sub where the English subs had to go over hardsubbed Korean subs making it rather difficult to see a good junk of the anime at times. So honestly if you're not gaga over Mamoru Hosoda films and want to watch them no matter what I'd highly suggest waiting a bit until a good release is available or even a legit licensed release because you know this will be licensed.
If you've been living under a rock and don't know what Summer Wars is or who Mamoru Hosoda is than let me fill you in a little bit Mamoru Hosoda is the genius behind the great animated tail of The Girl who Leapt Through Time and a couple shorts that are adverts for Louis Vuitton (he also did some stuff for Digimon and other stuff but his best work are on those three other things) and Summer Wars is Hosoda's Sophmore project that simply goes above and beyond by smashing some of his previous anime styles from his other projects together to make one of the strangest twists on the digital Information infrastructure turning it into a complete world with in it's self and at the same time telling one of best family stories about coming together to face a great challenge and to over come all odds to survive.
The story revolves around the summer vacation of the main boy who goes with his lady friend to her family reunion for her grandma's 90th(?) birthday party. He finds out that the reason his friend needed him to go with her to the family party is that he is to pretend to be her boyfriend. That goes pretty well until he gets a math problem on his cell phone to solve. Solving it crashes the Virtual Reality system known as OZ. Getting blamed for the crash of OZ the boy soon finds himself the subject of scrutiny from the family and the truth comes out.
In the confusion of the OZ crash Grandma takes control of the situation calls up everyone she knows and is able to help keep things going and is able to help the real world return back to normal. Sadly the grandma dies because there is a glitch in the system and her doctor who is monitoring her vitals on OZ doesn't get an alarm that notifies him of her heart conditions. Thankfully it turns out that the boy wasn't responsible for the crash at all and he is able to rally the men of the family to fight back against the AI system that has taken over OZ and a battle for OZ and the family takes place. With the final battle coming down to a wager for a million avatars in a single hand of hanafuda they are able to finally defeat the AI Love Machine but not before Love Machine sends a Satellite hurtling towards the family estate.
The boy comes to the rescue and is able to divert the falling satellite at the last minute and all is good the CIA ends up taking the blame for releasing Love Machine onto OZ and The boy gets a lovely peck on the Check from his friend.
The wait for this movie was so worth it it is absolutely on my must buy when the DVD hits US shores and has jumped to the top of my all time favorite movies not just anime movies but all movies. It's a wild fun emotional roller coaster good time.
You can check out a trailer for the movie here:
