It was actually a pretty good, interesting and watchable movie. The animation is good, the funimation dub from the voice actors were good and I got to hear new voice actors who I had never heard of before.At first I actually though by the trailer that it was going to be a cheesy Disney anime moving because of Kenji's first avatar's had Mickey Mouse like ears but I was wrong.Anyways I am not going to spoil any plots or events but it was a good movie.

THE STAFF Recipe: Take one half standard slice of life comedy, and one half Digimon formula. Stir them in a bawl for ninety minutes and add a rather high budget for flavor. The result is Summer Wars. - Animated by Madhouse, the king of animated series. OK, it's not a series but they still did a great job with the material they had. - Directed by Hosoda Mamoru, who also did the first Digimon movies; so no wonder they feel so similar.SCRIPT We have a stereotypical spineless geek boy (blushes even by touching a girl), with a bad future career yet with a good heart. Duh, now what does that remind me of? Could this be some sort of wish-fulfillment romantic comedy? He is sort of forced to pretend being the lover and future husband of the prettiest girl of his school. Yup; it is. The reason she wants that is because she promised her one step before the grave grandmother to let her see the next heir of their proud, old fashioned house. And if that is not forced drama, I don't know what it. Some misunderstandings, some erotic teasing and lots of secondary characters in the form of relatives doing their eccentric stuff. And then the story switches to the internet, where the dork's virtual avatar is hijacked by an A.I. which plans to absorb cyberspace and bring a nuclear apocalypse. WOAH where did that come from? But worry not, since there seems to be a way to defeat it by playing video games. You can start face palming now. OK, it's a very far-fetched scenario full of plot conveniences and a cop-out solutions to everything but it's not like the movie pretends to be serious. It's silly fun and does it well. Doesn't excel at script for the same reason of course.CAST The characters are all very lively but because of their large number and the short duration of the film, they don't escape their stereotypes. There is a bit of character development for the major ones but if you happen to have seen a couple of school comedies, you know how it will turn out right away. And don't do the mistake of thinking about their goals and motivation because they will only appear to be retards this way. Hell, what does nuking the whole world has to do with with an A.I. learning? Or how can you call legit a victory that is based on pure luck? Hm, whatever, the cast is colorful but nothing special or memorable.PRODUCTION VALUES The animation is of rather high budget as the characters have a wonderful lively body language and the 3D visuals used to represent the virtual world are indeed geeky detailed and very reminiscent of video games. Each block of arena or message board is represented in an interesting way and Love Machine's Hindu God appearance and battle style are plain awesome. Even the real world is presented fine in all its typical glory, with characters being drawn in plain outfits fitting their persona and a house mixing the traditional with the modern in decoration… inside a land-bound ship, in the green outskirts. You still can't consider the whole thing to be Ghibli-level, as the animation is not that smooth in motion or rich in textures but the aesthetics are in the right place and can easily win the average viewer. Voice acting felt rather dry as although the actors tried to breathe life into their characters, they still don't sound very professional. Maybe this applies just to the Japanese dub since it is basically a Korean production. Anyway, besides this minor glitch, the characters feel alive and interesting and the background music is somewhat epic in style with all that happens while the sound effects during the battles are pretty damn good.LEGACY A fine movie to spend n a joyful evening, without making you think or gasp too much. It is not a masterpiece in any way as the plot is far fetched and flows too convenient, while the characters are just colorful stereotypes without much room for development. Fun but eventually forgettable.

Summer Wars features LM, the most boring villain in anime thus far. Granted, its backstory is amazing, but, without spoiling anything, it is rendered dull by the fact that it does not have any true motivation behind its atrocities. If you have watched the film, you may understand why it doesn't have any motivation, but what good is a bad guy who's bad for the sake of being bad? And the moment the movie goes into detail as to how its characters fight LM, the movie loses its damn way. Here, the action of countering LM is represented visually, but that also means that the action on screen is all a loose interpretation of what the computer aficionados at home are actually doing. They dedicate so much time and effort into forcing viewers to watch Oz-related action sequences that it drags me away from what made me love the film initially - the awesome characters. I don't know if just 'general hacking' and 'better computers' are really what are needed to best an AI opponent in a fighting game, but yeah...as I said,

A teenage boy lives two lives, as everyone does in the world of this film: the real and the virtual. In the real, he goes on vacation to his would-be girlfriend's family reunion, where he is forced to pretend to be the girl's actual boyfriend. While navigating the tricky situation there, in the virtual world he's tricked into releasing a malicious A.I. that starts to consume the accounts of a good chunk of the world population. The virtual world, called OZ, has a lot of influence on how the real world runs, and the A.I. begins destroying the real world from the inside out. This film isn't bad, but it's a little too vague to work. The characters are all paper-thin and the rules of its universe are ill-defined. It's also ugly to look at. The animation is too choppy and cheap-looking. The virtual world is a little more interesting than the real world, but it's nothing too special to look at, either. Worth checking out, but it's far below the director's earlier work, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.