Ocean Waves (1993)

Ocean Waves arrived in 1993 as a television film, a Studio Ghibli experiment handed to the younger staff with instructions to work quickly and cheaply. They went over budget and over schedule, and the director reportedly developed an ulcer. The result is a small, humid story about a love triangle in Kōchi, a transfer student from Tokyo, a borrowed sixty thousand yen, and a great deal of unspoken feeling. It runs seventy-two minutes and contains no villains, no speeches, and no lessons.

Rikako Muto is the closest thing here to a thesis. She is academically gifted, athletic, arrogant, and willing to slap a classmate and be slapped in return. She drives the plot by sheer force of temperament. The film observes this without commentary, treating her volatility as weather instead of argument. A viewer hunting for a statement about girlhood will find only a girl, which is its own quiet achievement.

The inventory of modern social consciousness comes up empty across the board. The cast is Japanese because the story is Japanese. The romance is heterosexual. Nobody discusses the body, the climate, the economy, or the nervous system. Money appears once, as a loan, and is repaid. The sea in the title is a romantic motif, not an ecological one. The closing image of a train platform, where two people finally wait for each other, offers no thesis at all. The residue is a modest, melancholy piece of animation about three teenagers who mishandle each other and then grow up. It scores, by our accounting, near zero. It is also rather good, which is a separate ledger entirely.