First Anime Review : Summer Wars

In 2009 the creator of  The Girl Who Leapt Through Time introduced us to the wonderful world of OZ

only this OZ is not inhabited by flying monkeys and water allergic witches.

In the movie OZ is a insanely large and complex Online game where playes can do pretty much anything. from online shopping and board games to viewing news feeds and  competing in fighting arenas. But one of the biggest draws is that OZ is host to one of the most most sophisticated internet security lock that almost all organizations, both public and private sector have alot of their infer-structure in OZ.

Kenji (left) Natsuki (Right)

We then cut Kenji Koiso a timid but brilliant math genius and part time OZ admin. He has been hired by is classmate/crush Natsuki for an unknown job that has him accompany her to her grandmothers home for her 90th birthday. Kenji finds himself out of place in Natsuki's large extended family, even more so when it turns out Natsuki's job for him turns out to pretend to be her fiancé. As he contemplates why he is going along with this, he gets a odd email with a 1028 character encryption problem with the words "Solve Me!" after working on it for 4 hours he solves it and then goes to sleep.

The next morning he wakes up to find that he is now an internationally wanted man as he is suspected as the person who over night cracked the OZ security system and subsequently started to vandalize both the online world and the offline world.

It turns out that a sophisticated AI program called Love Machine was behind a mass emailing of the OZ encryption protocol to everyone in the world, and once it was solved Love Machine went to work using everything  that is connected to OZ, causing chaos everywhere, Kenji then sets off along with all of Natsuki's family to try to stop Love Machine.

So then my rating of this film. 

Animation: 10 The visuals for this movie are superb both the real world and OZ are done with amazing backgrounds and absolutely stunning fight scenes.

Sound: 9.5 The only reason this is not a 10 is because that in the english version, Kenji's voice actor is the same as Dean Venture from the Venture Bros. not a huge problem but kinda weird for me.

Plot: 10 The only is the main plot amazing but the subplots in this movie are very interesting and important in their own way. You will remember this movie for a long time.

Overall: 10 This is truly a master piece and in my opinion would have won the Oscar in animation last year if not for Disney/Pixars monopoly on the award.

I hope everyone enjoyed my first review and I look forward to your feed back.