Wolf Children Anime

July 27, 2013, San Francisco Japanese Film Festival—Wolf Children is a story about growing up with a single mother, who is trying to hide the secret of the children’s lineage. Mamoru Hosoda directed this love story about a young college student who falls in love with a wolf-man and has to raise her children. The children have to make choices to become total outsiders, or be a part of society.

The first half of the story is about Hana, a college student, meeting a moving company truck driver and falling in love. His initial reticence is due to the secret that he can change from human to wolf form at will. Hana has a daughter Ame, who was born at home during a rainstorm, because the parents were not sure if the baby would be as human or wolf. Yuki, who was born during a snowstorm followed in a similar manner.

Having the children in the city is a challenge, because they randomly change between their human and wolf forms. When the father dies while trying to get food for his family, Hana decides to move to the county to be away from people. They move into a dilapidated farmhouse in a small village far from other people and start growing up.

In the mountains, the family meets a gruff patriarch, who thinks Hana will be like all of the past city folks who left shortly after finding how hard farm work is. After she tries and fails a number of times to grow crops, he tells her how to farm, continuing his gruff manner. He also tells all of the other villagers to help her out. Hana is the only one in the village to successfully raise potatoes, because wild boars dig up al of the other potatoes. The wild boars don’t come near the farm because they smell wolves. The villagers happily trade other vegetables for the potatoes.

The children are allowed to be in either form while at the farm, until Ame finds out about school. Here Ame finds out the challenges of making choices, she can go to school as long as she remains a human. She doesn’t fit in well with the other girls, and continues to have difficult choices. Yuki follows her path to school the following year.

Yuki prefers nature and eventually drops out of school to work with an older wolf in the forest. Ame is being bothered by the attentions of a transfer student who finds out her secret during a hostile encounter in the schoolyard. A big rainstorm forces Yuki to permanently go to the woods because his sensei (teacher) is injured and unable to control the forest alone. Ame, conversely, decides to stay as a human, and hopes to learn to control her emotions and changes to wolf form.

I was challenged by the changing levels of artwork. At times, backgrounds were sparse sketches with the characters pasted on top. At other times, the backgrounds were highly detailed drawings with integrated characters, but in some scenes, the characters seemed to not really part of the artwork. A few shots had photo-realistic backgrounds. Characters would change shape in tight versus wide shots, and the lighting on faces changed from shadowed to full light in one frame, with no transition.