The hyper-real environments have a lot more personality than any of the generic characters who inhabit them - Taku is the insecure protagonist, Yutaka is the steely and mature classmate, and Rikaku is the erratic girl who turns their lives upside down with the wild indifference of a typhoon - but director Tomomi Mochizuki ekes out real signs of life from this overly familiar plot. “Ocean Waves” spreads its paper-thin story across a stodgy 72 minutes, but there’s a warmth to it that prevents the film from ever feeling as two-dimensional as it appears. READ MORE: “Ocean Waves” Sweepstakes: Enter To Win The Studio Ghibli Prize Pack Nothing much really happens, but the film uses its framing device well, and it isn’t afraid to be governed by the irrational impulses of teenage logic. And so the stage is set for a classic love triangle, told in flashback, governed by the emotional stupidity of adolescence, and paced with the unevenness of memory. Alas, Taku’s best friend, Yutaka, met her first. Her name is Rikaku, and Taku met her when he was growing up in the beachside city of Kōchi. She’s swallowed by the crowd almost as soon he sees her, the girl blinking in and out of sight so fast that our dumbstruck hero can’t tell if he’s actually crossed paths with his teenage crush, or if he’s just been a victim of his own wishful thinking. Nostalgic even in its own time, this sweet little story begins with a young man named Taku standing on a Tokyo train platform and glimpsing a familiar face across the tracks. In both scale and subject, it cleaves closer to the delicate wistfulness of a Haruki Murakami novel - one of his earlier, more earthbound books - than it does the enchanted wistfulness of “My Neighbor Totoro” or the crushing melodrama of “Grave of the Fireflies.” Although it was broadcast before Ghibli had fully solidified its standing as the Disney of the East, a breezy slice-of-life story already seemed like an anomaly for the animation giant.
The first Ghibli film that wasn’t directed by either Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata, “Ocean Waves” is glaringly absent the former’s flair for fantasy or the latter’s gift for minimalist heartbreak. Since then, the sentimental high school drama has existed just outside the Ghibli legend, more of a curiosity than part of the canon, unseen to all but the studio’s most dedicated completists.
In spite of those simple aspirations, the project came in late and over budget, eventually airing on local television in 1993 and failing to make much of a splash.
The most modest and least celebrated of the films produced by Japan’s peerless Studio Ghibli, “Ocean Waves” was conceived as an opportunity for the company’s younger talent to make something on the cheap.
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