#Ocean waves ghibli full story movie#

She has the guts to strike out on her own to see her dad she stands her ground against other girls who accuse her (wrongly) of flirting with their boyfriends and in the end, she thought more highly of Taku than most anyone else, even if she expressed it all in the clumsy way young people often do. At bottom, those stories tend mainly to be about one thing anyway, and Ocean Waves is mostly about one thing - how Taku comes to realize this girl, infuriating as she can be, is actually someone to be admired for her verve and her spine. This is especially true for romances or comedies, or mixtures of both. This was for me the reason why Makoto Shinkai's barely one-hour-long Garden Of Wordsworked better than other movies twice its length (whether his or other peoples') there's only so much detail you can go into, only so much convolution you can explore before it becomes tedious, charmless, soap-opera shrill.

#Ocean waves ghibli full story movie#

But one positive side effect of such economy is the movie doesn't overstay its welcome or become ponderously outsized. Ocean Waves is barely eighty minutes including credits, and some of that is practicality: the film was originally developed for TV, and so needed to fit a timeslot with room for commercials. Material like this works best when it's approach with a light, fast-moving touch. © 2002 Saeko Himuro - Studio Ghibli - N Bailing out Rikako. Every time he tries to extract himself from them, he only gets all the more entangled - not least of all because Yutaka is himself smitten with Rikako, and the last thing Taku wants is to lose a friend over someone he doesn't even like very much. It's all the more infuriating, Taku finds, because of the web of consequences that wind up developing around this girl. His embarrassment deepens even further the next day, when Rikako trots him out as a way to embarrass a former boyfriend. It ends badly, with Rikako getting drunk when she finds out Dad is more interested in his new girlfriend than in his own daughter, and with Taku crashing out in the bathtub so nobody will think anything happened. Taku ends up taking the friend's place, pseudo-chaperoning Rikako back to the big city so that she can see her father. His money, as it turns out, was used to buy plane tickets for Rikako to fly to Tokyo, and he only found out about this because she tricked a classmate - the only female friend she has in the school, no less - to go with her. Then things begin to get really complicated for Taku. She lost all the cash she brought for this trip, you see - and whatever you do, she admonishes him, don't tell anyone! But Taku ends up telling Yutaka anyway the last thing he wants is for his friend to start getting the wrong ideas about him and that girl. When the class goes on a summer trip to Hawaii (compensation for another, canceled trip), Rikako confronts Taku, apropos of nothing, and asks to borrow a pile of money from him. Then, over the next few months, Taku and Rikako are thrown together by one discomfiting set of circumstances after another. Maybe someone will be nice enough to roll out an emotional red carpet for her, but Taku doesn't seem himself as that someone. Maybe the real story, as Taku learns from his mother, is that Rikako (still just 'Muto' to her classmates) is lonely and displaced - her mother's divorced, and she's not even living at home. Stuck up, she is, or so the other girls say.

Both of them have their eyes on the new girl who just transferred in from Tokyo, Rikako Muto. Yutaka is the more studious and buttoned-down of the two Taku is more footloose. The guys in question are Taku Morisaki and Yutaka Matsuno, who attend the same high school in a little town on Shikoku. 'I can hear the sea'), and it involves one of the most staple of subjects for such material: Two guys and a girl. Waves is a light comedy of teenage manners based on Saeko Himuro's novel ( Umi ga kikoeru, lit. I mentioned Only Yesterday, but My Neighbors The Yamadasalso fits. Originally released in 1993, Ocean Waves is one of a clutch of movies produced by Ghibli that is not fantasy, but unpretentiously rooted in everyday life. © 2002 Saeko Himuro - Studio Ghibli - N Scoping out the new girl. Is it essential viewing? Not really, not in the same way Princess Mononokeor My Neighbor Totoro are. And like Only Yesterday, it's worth forgetting that this is a Studio Ghibli film, because I worry that imposes unrealistic expectations about its quality, intentions, and end results. Ocean Waves, like Only Yesterday before it, is one of a handful of Studio Ghibli films that are only just now seeing their first releases in the United States.