There’s no particular lesson to be learnt here. Morisaki gets a rough deal from Muto and also from Matsuno for most of the film, but he doesn’t ultimately stand in judgement over them, and that gets to something very important about Ocean Waves. The film deals with all kinds of issues, including bullying, and there is some troubling violence. At that point we begin to get some insight as to why she might be a little messed up. She can see that Morisaki and Matsuno are infatuated with her (even if one of them won’t admit it to himself) and she takes full advantage of that, borrowing money from them to fund a trip to Tokyo to see her father and her old boyfriend, and lying about why she needs the money. It doesn’t take long before she has marked herself out as one of the cleverest girls in the school. She arrives from Tokyo and immediately looks down on these simple kids with their silly accents, living in Kochi on the island of Shikoku, the smallest of the four main islands of Japan. To be honest, Muto (the characters call each other by their last names, as is their tradition) is not a very nice person for most of the film, quite the opposite of the usual kind of Ghibli female protagonist, although she does have the independence and bravery to a certain extent. The story concerns a schoolboy called Taku Morisaki, whose friendship with his best friend Yutaka Matsuno is thrown into chaos when a new girl arrives at the school, Rikako Muto. You won’t find heroes and villains here, just people. It is another of Ghibli’s slice-of-life films. Ocean Waves is well worth that extra little bit of effort though. Perhaps the younger generation will find this less of a problem, in this age of multi-tasking, scrolling through the internet while watching television, or whatever. Your attention is divided, and it is difficult to entirely appreciate the artwork when you are trying to read at the same time. It’s not that I particularly mind subtitled films, but it is a different kind of viewing experience. In fact, there are several Ghibli films that are far inferior to this, but have been dubbed nonetheless. It may not be the best the range has to offer, made by the younger members of staff at the studio for a 1993 release, and with a simpler form of animation to many Ghibli releases, but it still deserves the dub treatment. One Studio Ghibli film still remains frustratingly overlooked for an English dub: Ocean Waves. Full of shots bathed in a palette of pleasingly soft pastel colors and rich in the unexpected visual details typical of Studio Ghibli’s most revered works, Ocean Waves is an accomplished teenage drama and a true discovery.I was recently lucky enough to be able to enjoy Only Yesterday dubbed into English for the first time, which really brought the film to life for me. Ocean Waves was the first Studio Ghibli film directed by someone other than studio founders Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, as director Tomomi Mochizuki led a talented staff of younger employees in an adaptation of Saeko Himuro’s best-selling novel. When Taku joins Rikako on a trip to Tokyo, the school erupts with rumors, and the three friends are forced to come to terms with their changing relationships. But they soon find their friendship tested by the arrival of Rikako, a beautiful new transfer student from Tokyo whose attitude vacillates wildly from flirty and flippant to melancholic. Taku and his best friend Yutaka are headed back to school for what looks like another uneventful year. Rarely seen outside of Japan, Ocean Waves is a subtle, poignant and wonderfully detailed story of adolescence and teenage isolation.
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