Napping Princess

Kokone is in her last year of school and should be preparing for her examinations. But she keeps falling asleep. When she sleeps she has the same dream: there is a country called Heartland, a princess with magic lives there, and a giant threatens the country. Kokone does not take the dream seriously. Then her father is arrested. He is a car mechanic and why he was taken is not clear. Kokone goes to Tokyo. On the way she notices that the objects in the dream have counterparts in the real world. The dream is not a story; it is something her father told her and there is information inside it. Kenji Kamiyama writes and directs. Mitsuki Takahata voices Kokone. It is a Japanese production. The narrative takes place just before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and takes the race for driverless cars in the motor industry as its subject. Kamiyama had worked on science fiction television series and this is his first original feature. Its form has two layers; the dream sections and the real sections tell the same events in two different languages. The matter it treats is inheritance; a piece of software left behind by the mother is at the centre of everything. The dream sections are drawn in a different palette. The narrative joins a family story with a technology story and brings them together at the end. Its limit is structure; the plot is tangled, the explanations come late and the middle stretch comes apart. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese animation and family narratives on a science fiction ground. Who it is not for: it is tangled, the pace uneven, and the ending rushed.