Mirai (2018)

Mamoru Hosoda's Mirai concerns a four-year-old boy named Kun, his newborn sister, and the domestic upheaval that follows her arrival. The child sulks, screams, and storms into the garden, where the family tree opens into a corridor of time. He meets the dog as a man, his sister as a teenager, his mother as a girl, and a great-grandfather whose leg was ruined in the war. The animation is warm. The emotions are real. None of this arrives with an argument attached.

The film's only faint gesture toward contemporary social arrangement is the household itself. The mother is a corporate executive. The father works from home and handles the child care. This inversion of the usual domestic script is presented plainly and then quietly undermined, since the father is drawn as a hapless bumbler who cannot soothe his own son. The picture notices the arrangement and declines to celebrate it. Beyond that, the film carries no racial commentary, no environmental sermon, no economic grievance, no interest in identity as a subject. It is a story about a boy learning that other people existed before him. The cast is Japanese because the film is Japanese. Nothing is being announced.

The picture is also remarkably free of lecturing. It trusts a tantrum, a train ride, and a bicycle to do the work that a lesser film would assign to dialogue. Lessons about family and sibling love arrive through experience, not instruction. The result is a modest, well-made domestic fantasy, sincere and almost entirely uninterested in the cultural battles of its moment. That restraint is its own quiet virtue. A sommelier would call this a clean, uncomplicated vintage, and there is nothing wrong with a clean vintage. Some bottles simply refuse to argue with the diner, and this one pours quietly, expects no applause, and lets the evening proceed without a single raised voice from the table. It was nominated for an Academy Award, which proves only that the Academy can occasionally recognize a small thing done well. The film ends. The child grows up a little. No one is scolded for anything, and the garden closes behind him without a lesson attached to the gate.

It remains a gentle piece of work, and gentle work has its place in the cellar, even if the sommelier finds himself reaching for something with more tannin.