Mirai

Golden Globe Nominee! Best Animated Feature “Japanese animation master Mamoru Hosoda delivers a story of such intimate, unpretentious simplicity. Mirai — which inventively depicts the way a young boy’s world is turned upside down by the arrival of a baby sister — could not have been made by anyone else. It’s the work of a true auteur presented as innocuous family entertainment.

“Who but Hosoda could have imagined a scenario — every bit as enchanted as Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, though entirely original in its own right — in which four-year-old Kun comes to accept his initially unwelcome sister via a series of hallucinatory visitations from other members of his family: past (his war-hero grandfather and decades-younger mother), present (an anthropomorphic version of the pet dog), and future (Mirai, appearing as her later teenage self)? Real siblings don’t have it so easy, yet these magical interactions charmingly convey how bumpy it can be to make the adjustment from only child to older brother.

“Emotionally speaking, Mirai reaches deep, aided by a lovely, featherweight score from Masakatsu Takagi, subtly reinforcing the gradual evolution of the boy’s attitude toward his kid sister.” - Variety