For the most parts throughout this film, I thought it also resembled Yoji Yamada's Kabei: Our Mother, in the sense that this film takes on story proportions centered around a mother's unconditional love for her children, and the continuous strive to make ends meet and bring up her children to the best of her ability, inculcating a value system into her young ones.
And what a fantastic reservoir of imagination he's tapping from as well, either telling stories with relevance to a digital age, or as in this case, a fairy tale like allure that is deceptively simple, yet concealing a very strong ode to motherhood. And don't forget that story remains king.ĭirector Mamoru Hosoda continues on his roll with a brand of animated films that are extremely well received, because not only are they drawn to perfection in anime style, but also his films touches the emotional core on humanity, and this will inevitably move you with his style and delivery of such strong stories, whether written by someone else, as a film adaptation of novels such as The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, or like in Summer Wars and Wolf Children, stem from his own imagination. There's a lack of charm with the very clinical approach to animated films, especially with loads of images created digitally, and now for the 3D format, and this charm is always ever present in the traditional art form for the big screen. If you'd ever need to know why 2D animation is still relevant, or why the slew of 3D animated films can't seem to dent and push the former out of fashion, then perhaps Wolf Children encapsulates all the reasons why this is so. Reviewed by DICK STEEL 10 / 10 A Nutshell Review: Wolf Children Overall, a beautiful film that is almost as good as the best of Studio Ghibli. The voice work is beautifully delivered too and fit the characters and their personalities very well. The characters are adorable but not in a sickly way while also engaging and distinct in personality, they are flawed but also easy to identify with. Wolf Children does have a good music score, no, a great music score, gentle and ethereal mostly but also with some rhythmically driven parts too, matching what's going on nuance for nuance. I always look out for good music in a film, as a very keen musician and as someone studying classical singing. The script is pretty much the same, it doesn't ever sound childish nor does it sound over-complicated or preachy(considering the themes tackled these were and are very easy traps), none of it is enough to completely go over children's heads neither is any of it dumbed-down-sounding to adults.
Not only this, but it is very emotionally powerful as well, plenty of scenes are cute but a lot of it is either charming or heart-wrenching without making it too dark.
It fills the running time almost perfectly and uses some very mature and relatable themes dealing with them in a way that's sensitive and beyond its years while also making it accessible for a wider audience(a quite difficult thing to do and Wolf Children does this better than most animated films). The story may sound simple and twee reading the plot-line but is actually none of those things. The colours are both atmospheric and beautifully gentle, never bold or in your face but intimate-looking without being too twee-looking, while the backgrounds are exquisitely detailed and the characters move expressively. The animation is absolutely fantastic, always have liked the anime style and Wolf Children is one of the best recent examples. The best assets were the animation and the way the story is handled. That does sound like a bold statement to make, but, while some of the first part of the film is rather rushed and the ending is inconclusive and literally begging for a few minutes longer, Wolf Children is as good a film as that. Reviewed by TheLittleSongbird 9 / 10 Almost as good as the best of Studio Ghibli