Wolf Children Review

The fantasy is established quickly and then largely set aside. Hana loses her partner within the first twenty minutes and moves to a mountain village with two small children who turn into wolves whenever they are startled, and from there the film is about rent, crops, neighbours, school and the impossibility of asking anyone for help. Hosoda shoots the farm work with the care other directors reserve for action, and the sequence of a first harvest failing and then succeeding carries more weight than any of the transformations do.

The two children diverge, which is the real story: one chooses the human side and one does not, and Hana has to accept a decision made at thirteen that she cannot argue with. The animation is clean and unshowy apart from a snow sequence that ranks among the best in the medium. It is sentimental and knows it, and the resolution asks for tears rather more directly than the preceding hour did. What keeps it honest is that the film never pretends the mother was rewarded for any of it.