Ride Your Wave

An animated film set in a Japanese seaside town. Hinako is a university student. She moved to the town to surf and rarely goes to class. A fire breaks out in her building one night. A firefighter gets her out. Minato is about her age. Calm, orderly, and not at all comfortable in water. The two begin a relationship. Hinako teaches him to surf. Minato teaches her to cook and to live in order. One winter day Minato goes into the sea. He is trying to save someone and drowns. From there the film is a story of mourning. Hinako does not go in the water again. Then something happens. When she hums a song they used to sing together, Minato appears in the water. In every puddle, every glass, every rainfall. Nobody else sees him. Only she does. The narrative does not keep this as a charming fantasy. Hinako now carries a bottle of water and takes it everywhere. Minato's sister and his colleague grow worried. What the narrative is interested in is not love but letting go: its idea is that holding on to him is not healing her, and that the real work is going into the water alone. The last section is a rescue. Hinako has to save someone for the first time and has to do it by herself. The song is a mechanism inside the narrative. The same piece returns at the beginning, the middle and the end with different meanings. The images are far calmer than Masaaki Yuasa's other work; the formal experiment here is reserved for the water. The animation of water is the technical centre. Ryota Katayose, Rina Kawaei and Honoka Matsumoto are in the voice cast. Masaaki Yuasa directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes emotional Japanese animation and narratives built on grief. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the director's formal wildness; this is his most conventionally told film.