Worth: $12.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Nobuo Tobita, Toshihiko Seki, Yoko Sakamoto
Intro:
...more a curiosity than an attractive film in its own right...
Just before returning home for his high school reunion, 18 year-old Taku Morisaki (Nobuo Tobita) thinks he sees a former classmate – Rikako Muto (Yoko Sakamoto) – on a Tokyo train platform. While flying home, Taku reminisces on when Rikako transferred to his school and the complicated love triangle that ensued between them and Taku’s best friend Yutaka (Toshihiko Seki).
Ocean Waves is probably the least well-known and certainly the least seen of Studio Ghibli’s feature-length works. Unlike the studio’s other features it was produced for Japanese television. When it was made, Ocean Waves was intended to be a ‘breather’ project between theatrical features: it was the first Ghibli production not directed by Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata, and was intended to give the studio’s junior animators their own project with which to prove themselves. After running over schedule and over budget, it was seen internally as something of a failure. For viewers, it is an odd little addition to the Ghibli canon. It is by no means as accomplished a film as the company’s usual fare, but for the dedicated fans it is a pleasant enough extra to track down and sample. As far as I can work out, it is receiving its Australian theatrical debut this month as part of Madman’s Celebrate Studio Ghibli festival.
Ocean Waves is directed by Tomomi Mochizuki, who had previously directed two animated feature films based on the popular manga Kimagure Orange Road. This is no surprise; both that series and Ocean Waves present a very similar sort of high school soap opera. In fact stylistically the film hews much more closely to those television anime serials than in does to the rest of Ghibli’s work.
That in itself is not a criticism; Throw in many of Takahata’s works – The Tale of Princess Kaguya, My Neighbors the Yamadas, and so on – and Ghibli clearly spans a broad range of styles and subject matter. Given the constraints of its television budget Ocean Waves has solid production values, and its slightly sketchy, loose art style gives it an awful lot of warmth. It is a film that comes across as very comfortable with itself, and at 72 minutes in total it never risks outstaying its welcome.
The one major problem that hampers the film is its characters: they feel weirdly arbitrary and under-motivated. Rikako for one is a weirdly unlikeable person, who lies to her friends to borrow money from them and slaps them in the face when they say things she does not like. Characters mention that she is unhappy and troubled, but the film does not show precisely what is going on to make her that way. Similarly both Taku and Yutaka pine romantically for Rikako without her ever really justifying their affections or making their emotions seem anything more complex than teenage lust. In the end this hand-waved characterisation drags down the whole film.
It ultimately leaves Ocean Waves more as a curiosity than as an attractive film in its own right. It is the film that Studio Ghibli fans watch because they have already seen everything else. It gains a little bit of an exclusivity cache as a result; everybody has heard of My Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away, but only ‘true fans’ know about Ocean Waves. For the hardcore it’s certainly worth 72 minutes of their time. For anybody else Ghibli has many superior anime features available to watch.
