Sorry for late release! Still busy with schooling. Just a heads up blog posts may not happen this Wednesday or Saturday, however, do expect them all by Sunday!
Today we’re here to read and/or talk about a movie that I really do love – Wolf Children. Which is what it’s most commonly known as. For your hardcore people, the Japanese title is “Ookami Kodomo no Ame to Yuki”. This Movie is absolutely beautiful and the story it tells is one I really enjoy. Let us get right into the review!
Story – 10/10
Wolf Children starts us off by showing us the key main character, Hana, and how she fell in love with a wolfman she met during college. We then see her children being born, and how she raised them from birth until Yuki and Ame are 11 and 10 respectively.
We see Hana trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that her children are part wolf. How can she keep it a secret? How should she raise wolf children? What should she do when they’re sick? She can’t take them to a doctor because she’s scared that one of them may turn into a wolf during the diagnosis or even during regular checkups. It’s such an emotionally charged film that you can’t help but feel joy and sorrow at the same time Hana does. Not many films do that for me, and none have done it in such a way that Wolf Children did.
Art – 9/10
This is an amazing animated movie. From the characters to the backgrounds, everything is beautiful. There’s a lot of CG around, most noticeable is the fact that a lot of the background characters are CG. Unlike a lot of CG in anime, I didn’t feel like it took me out of the immersion. It was tastefully done, for the most part, and not terribly noticeable in some scenes.
The backgrounds, though, are absolutely gorgeous. The mountains, the snow, the streams, the skies, everything, looked fantastic. As I was watching the movie, sometimes I wished I could just pause it so I could take in all the backgrounds had to offer (alas, I could not, due to first watching this movie in a theatre).
Characters – 9/10
Here’s where the movie really shines. The movie has a decently sized cast with the main three characters; Hana, Yuki, and Ame getting the most attention. Hana is a single mother of three, and we see from her perspective what it’s like to be a single mother. I liked this since most of the time you see how they grow up from the child’s perspective.
Hana is, in a word, human. She tries hard, works hard, wants the best for her children and doesn’t succeed all the time. That’s natural. It’s hard to care for two children (let alone wolf children) and be able to study while working a job. It is fantastic how well Mamoru was able to show us her hardships, and how she always continued no matter how tough it was.
Now let us talk about the children, Ame and Yuki. We get to see them from the moment they’re first born, and we continue to watch them grow until Ame is 10, and Yuki is 11. Over the course of these years, we see them (much like real children) start out one way, and change slowly over a realistic amount of time.
We see how Yuki, as a small child, would always turn into a wolf and go run around the house whenever she wanted, but learned slowly, as a child would, when it wasn’t acceptable to do that since she had to keep the fact that she’s a wolf a secret.
Ame is a small, reserved child and he dislikes being a wolf since in all the picture books he reads the wolf is the bad guy and he just wants to live peacefully. He goes through some great character development over the course of the story, and Mamoru definitely knew what he was doing with the main cast in this film.
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2 responses to “Wolf Children | A movie for everyone.”
This one is still on my watch list but I regularly read very good things about it so I will have to make sure I get to it eventually. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on it.
I loved that movie <3