This Week in Anime

WTF is Going On in Children of the Sea?

Steve
Micchy, as much as I'd love to "yes and" to this bit, I remember absolutely nothing about Children of the Whales. Mercifully. However, I will say that I relish any good whale chat opportunity that doesn't involve my gacha spending habits, so let's talk about these big beautiful boat-sized beasts.

It does also has a little-known guy called Joe Hisaishi on soundtrack duties, and he does a pretty good job! I think he's gonna go places. But yes, while the whole sea (and I do mean the whole sea) makes an appearance in Children of the Sea, whales are front and center. In fact, may I begin with a fun whale fact that I only just learned 10 minutes ago?

Well I think the jury's still out on that one, but it does have to do with breathing! So anyway, I know whales have blowholes, but because I'm an idiot, I've always pictured them to be these perfectly circular openings like you'd see in a cartoon. So when the big whale goddess in this movie shows up with this very human nostril-looking blowhole, I thought it was a neat way to symbolize the interconnectedness of all living things.

Lo and behold, humpback whales just actually look like that. I am punked by nature yet again.

That's honestly not too far off from the film's central theme! But that's getting a bit ahead of ourselves, and boy howdy, this is gonna be an interesting one to talk about.

This is a contender for the best-looking animated film I've ever seen. It's everything I love about going to an aquarium plus the keen artistic eye of an all-star collection of animators. It's easy enough to recommend on its technical merits alone, if that's your kinda thing.

I was going to see this on ~4/20~ and it was my most highly-anticipated theater experience of the year. Thanks for nothing, covid. However, if you, like me, are a landlocked sap suffering from ocean withdrawal thanks to, say, a global pandemic that discourages traveling, get a dark room and a good pair of headphones, and enjoy. It's not the full theatrical experience, but the sound direction is more than good enough to drop me right there in the surf.

I've never thought about a dugong chewing my hair, but thanks to Children of the Sea, now I do. It's probably nice.

That doesn't take much! But that is our relatively normal introduction to the story of Children of the Sea. Tomboyish loner Ruka runs away from her summertime responsibilities and befriends two boys who whisk her away into the magic of the boundless ocean.

Emphasis on "relatively" in my above statement there, because those two boys were raised in the wild by those aforementioned dugongs.

Admittedly, that's exactly where I wanted to be for the entire month of July. The sun is a bastard.

Meanwhile, his brother Sora is a little pricklier, but in his defense, I don't know if dugongs have the concept of "politeness" in their blubbery vocabulary.

Or the concept of "PDA," for that matter.

There's lots of us out there! I've been known to glow on moonlit nights. It happens. It's normal. I have to wear SPF 500. It's fine.

He bows out around halfway through the film, but he's also not really gone. This is also the point where the abstract crux of the film starts to manifest in the text and move away from the more concrete coming-of-age stuff. Some of Sora's own ruminations play a part here, on humans and their relation to the universe.

The elder pretty boy agrees.

This scene—and indeed the bombastic remainder of the film—is a synthesis of science and spiritualism as they relate and recapitulate the grand continuity of capital-N Nature. Like, what does it mean that most of the universe is almost totally unobservable? What does that tell us about the world? What does that tell you about yourself?

Most importantly, how do I get to look that good in a ponytail?

It's appropriate, too, that the film keeps coming back to this point that words alone are woefully insufficient when it comes to expressing these huge and important ideas about life and existence. The climax arcs definitively into the realm of the audiovisual to get its point across, which is why Children of the Sea is so difficult to talk about lol. It's deliberately constructed to be felt first and foremost. And that's why, despite some similar iconography, you really shouldn't go into this expecting something like your name. or Weathering With You. This gets about as artsy as art films get.

Oh my god yes. Very recently, when I was trying to get a good look at the comet NEOWISE before it faded, I found myself alone in a big dark field looking up at the night sky. It had been a long while since I did so, but I almost immediately felt this familiar lump in my throat from the primal vastness of everything I was, and wasn't, seeing. Like I was experiencing it all. It was overwhelming. Children of the Sea gets really, really damn close to that feeling.

Yeah I think we all have moments—whether they span a whole summer vacation, or longer, or just a few minutes—that have inspired us to think about where we are in the cosmic sense. These moments are going to be different for all of us, along with our subsequent perspectives, but the universality of the act itself can still connect us. Granted, I don't know how many of us visualize an Evangelion-esque outer space-bound egg cell insemination, but you do you I guess.

Maybe your dugong-raised boyfriend turns into a space baby and you gotta feed him a meteorite so he can finally manifest as another reincarnation of the initial and unending seed of all life as we know it. It do in fact be like that sometimes.

As wild as life itself!

With neither reservations nor abashedness, I loved Children of the Sea. This is smack dab in my wheelhouse of full-throated abstraction in service of cosmic interrogation, and it's fricking gorgeous to boot. Every closeup of a character's eyes mesmerized me anew. I'm in my delightfully pretentious element here, and I'll be coming back to this film for a long time.


I also recognize that most people's favorite anime film is not The Adolescence of Utena, so I don't begrudge people who are frustrated with Children of the Sea's deliberately dense direction. But it's worth experiencing nonetheless.

Once we unlock that, we'll surely have the codex to all of this film's soggy secrets. Also, good on director Ayumu Watanabe for taking his meticulous depiction of drool in Mysterious Girlfriend X and expanding it into an entire underwater universe. That's what I call growth as an auteur.

You know me too well.