Movie Review: Mai Mai Miracle

By Angela Roberts

Mai Mai Miracle

Gorgeous and compelling, Sunao Katabuchi’s Mai Mai Miracle is a masterpiece worthy of being compared with the works of his mentor, Hayao Miyazaki. Katabuchi’s film offers an amazing glimpse into rural Japan in the 1950s and into the imaginations of children in a way that never disdains or makes saccharine this innocent perspective.

The film revolves around the extraordinary friendship between two young girls over one lazy summer. Shinko is a dreamer, forever inventing imaginary worlds and creatures. She lives with her grandfather, mother and little sister in a small house near lush fields and a crystal clear stream that feeds the village where she plays and goes to school. Kiiko is a delicate and shy upper-class girl who’s moved to the small town with her doctor father. Her upbringing has been entirely westernized and she is often left alone in her big western-style house while her father works. Shinko is immediately intrigued by this newcomer, and after an encounter between Kiiko and a snotty boy who breaks her coloured pencils, Shinko adopts Kiiko as her new best friend. The girls roam the countryside, letting their imaginations run free; they imagine up a beautiful lonely princess, Nagiko, who inhabited the land a thousand years before, and whose story becomes a sort of alternate world running through the film. But it is a dam-building operation that brings them together with a new group of friends, two of the snotty-nosed boys from their class and the stoically silent older boy Tetsuyoshi, quietly respected and always carrying his father’s wooden kendo sword. The friends find companionship and understanding as they play and pretend their way through the sweet days of summer. Nothing lasts forever though, and dark secrets and deep pains lie beneath the surface that can only be faced together as only young kids can. And finally, there is bittersweet separation as Shinko’s father returns to move the family away to another town. But left behind is a summer filled with dreams and the inner discoveries of growing up.

Katabuchi learned his craft working at Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli and the Ghibli influence is strong here. The drawing style, setting, music choices, and child characters are all evocative of the work of the master. But the film partakes of much less surrealism, confining its speculative elements to giving life to its youthful characters’ imagination. Even this becomes less strong an element as the plot delves deeper into the children’s inner lives. Instead, Katabuchi delivers a spell-binding character study grounded in a nostalgic reality. The characters are strong and intricately developed, and the plot, while slow in pacing, never disappoints. The settings and imagery are absolutely beautiful; incredible care and diligence were used in the creation of the most mundane things, fields of wheat, paper dolls, even goldfish. The film’s director excels at crafting moments of innocence and intimacy. The scene where the kids get drunk off the box of liquor chocolates was hilarious in a way that surely touched the childhood memories of everyone in the audience. You feel Shinko’s panic when she thinks she’s lost her little sister and her relief when she is brought home by the local police officer, Tetsuyoshi’s father. You feel the pain caused by the sadder and more serious events of the film; their teacher Miss Hiruzu’s sad love life, Tetsuyoshi’s father’s abuse and suicide. Even as an animation, the film creates an incredible intimacy with its audience.

Mai Mai Miracle also does something that I’ve never seen a Miyazaki movie do; it creates and doesn’t shy away from a balance of an idealized rural landscape and reality. Alongside the bucolic rural setting and characters is the real world; factories employ many of the people of the town, men must move around looking for work, often not home at all, people die, dreams of love are dashed, parents make a mess of their lives and the lives of their families. But what makes these revelations bearable is the way they are presented. Katabuchi brings us these harsh lessons of Shinko and Kiiko’s coming-of-age through the eyes of innocence. And it works. We understand the world through their perspective, and through the blessings of friendship and imagination, these characters get through everything life throws at them.

This was a delicate and inspiring film, and hopefully it will garner enough attention to be made available to North Americans at more than just the festival circuit. Katabuchi is obviously poised to take up the mantle left behind when Miyazaki eventually retires.

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