1/10/2024 0 Comments Studio ghibli ocean wavesRikako transfers to Taku’s high school midway through their junior year. The film is a series of vignettes, flashbacks, and snapshots of encounters with Rikako during their high school years, with Taku’s voiceover narration. She – the near glimpse across the tracks – is Rikako Muto, the girl who shook up his life in high school. He is Taku Morisaki, now studying in Tokyo, but originally from Kōchi. RELATED: 16 Strong Heroines of Studio Ghibli But just the near sight of her sets off a nostalgic narrative. The face and its person disappear before he can confirm the identity. The film opens with a young man standing on a train platform, gazing across the tracks, and suddenly seeing a face on another platform that looks familiar. Yes, Studio Ghibli made a film based around that well-used and much-abused teenage trope of the love triangle. A girl from Tokyo lands in this smaller pond, and her arrival sends lasting ripples through the local high school and its student body, especially two best friends, who both find themselves infatuated with the same girl. Here be just life and the ups and downs and ebbs and flows of being a teenager in the city of Kōchi on the island of Shikoku in Japan in the 1990s. Here be no dragons, no magic, no spirits, no fantastical realms, no grand apocalyptic narratives, no numinous encounters. The film is a social realistic snapshot of everyday life, full of its many mundane dramas. Reins were handed over to Tomomi Mochizuki, a young, up-and-coming animator, and the whole film/project was thought of as an avenue for the younger generation of animators at Studio Ghibli – apprentices to the masters – to do their own work. Ocean Waves was the first Studio Ghibli film not to be directed by one of the studio’s co-founders, namely Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata. It was only recently released on the international market in late 2016/early 2017, so it has been something of a Studio Ghibli “secret” for many years, unavailable to international viewers. Originally made as an animated TV movie, Ocean Waves first aired on the little screen in Japan over two decades ago and made no significant international waves, as many other of Studio Ghibli’s films have since done. Ocean Waves is something of a footnote in the canon of Studio Ghibli works.
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