Mirai

The movie follows a 4-year old boy who is struggling to cope with the arrival of a little sister in the family until things turn magical. A mysterious garden in the backyard of the boy’s home becomes a gateway allowing the child to travel back in time and encounter his mother as a little girl and his great-grandfather as a young man. These fantasy-filled adventures allow the child to change his perspective and help him become the big brother he was meant to be.

"After such expansive fantasies as “Wolf Children” and “Summer Wars,” Japanese animation master Mamoru Hosoda delivers a story of such intimate, unpretentious simplicity, you’d hardly recognize it as coming from the ambitious visionary behind those films. And yet “Mirai” — which inventively depicts the way a young boy’s world is turned upside down by the arrival of a baby sister — could not have been made by anyone else. It’s the work of a true auteur (in what feels like his most personal film yet) presented as innocuous family entertainment.

Who but Hosoda could have imagined a scenario — every bit as enchanted as Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” though entirely original in its own right — in which four-year-old Kun comes to accept his initially unwelcome sister via a series of hallucinatory visitations from other members of his family: past (his war-hero grandfather and decades-younger mother), present (an anthropomorphic version of the pet dog), and future (Mirai, appearing as her later teenage self)? Real siblings don’t have it so easy, yet these magical interactions charmingly convey how bumpy it can be to make the adjustment from only child to older brother.

It’s the small real-world touches that make “Mirai” so charming, including a moment (possible only in animation) in which Kun’s face comically distorts as he throws a tantrum and a scene where the brother and sister team up to take down a shrine that the distracted dad has forgotten to put away, potentially jeopardizing her future happiness. It all adds up to a gentler and potentially younger-skewing film than Hosoda’s previous output, and yet, emotionally speaking, “Mirai” reaches deeper, aided by a lovely, featherweight score from Masakatsu Takagi, subtly reinforcing the gradual evolution of the boy’s attitude toward his kid sister."

Courtesy - Peter Debruge, Variety