100 Days of Anime: Day Eighty – Mamoru Hosoda

Mamoru Hosoda
Birthday: September 19, 1967
Notable Works: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars, Wolf Children, The Boy and the Beast

Mamoru Hosoda began making movies in middle school in the days of 8mm film. At the Kanazawa College of Art he studied oil painting. His career as an animator would begin at Toei.

I’ve found these brief write ups more challenging than I expected. Often, even with prominent directors like Shinkai and Kon, it can be difficult to find research material. Much of what I can find is often too long for me to use in my evening writing hours or too vague or fluffy to be of much use. But for Hosoda I found this interview on Anime News Network. It’s from 2013, and I think it provides us with a valuable snapshot of Hosoda’s creative core.

It seems to me, based on his movies and on this interview, that what Hosoda values most is everyday family life. He says in this interview that he has chosen female protagonist because the stories of male protagonists so often focus on work, and a female protagonist’s tale can focus freely on family relationships.

He also talks about how he draws on his own life to inspire his movies. When he made Summer Wars he was only recently married, and the experience of suddenly being surrounded by a new family helped inspire the sprawling Jinnouchi clan. Wolf Children, a story of a mother raising her two children who are essentially werewolves, draws on his and his wife’s love of children. In Wolf Children he wanted to encapsulate what it’s like to raise a child and see them grow up before you.

He also uses Toyama and Nagano Prefectures, original homes of he and his wife respectively, as settings for some of his movies. Hosoda says he uses science fiction and fantasy to highlight simple, everyday things that we take for granted. At the same time, I think his tendency to ground his work in not just family life but his experience of family is an essential part of the charm of his works.

Hosoda’s career has seen him touch a number of major franchises. He has worked on entries in the Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, Digimon, One Piece, Slam Dunk and Yu Yu Hakusho franchises. He, like Sayo Yamamoto, worked on Samurai Champloo, specifically its opening.

After leaving Toei, Hosoda worked at Madhouse until 2011. When he left Madhouse, he and producer Yuichiro Saito starteted their own Studio Chizu, which has produced the last three of his films.

There is one great “What if?” for Hosoda, and I’m very intrigued by it. In the early 2000s, Hosoda was recruited by Studio Ghibli to direct Howl’s Moving Castle. But he was let go when he couldn’t reach a creative compromise with Ghibli’s higher ups. While I still love Miyazaki’s version of Howl’s Moving Castle, I would really like to see Hosoda adopt Diana Wynne Joness’s book into a movie.

Hosoda’s most recent feature is Mirai, a story about a young boy and his time traveling younger sister. It came out just last month, and is scheduled for a U.S. release by GKIDS in November.

Now we’re moving on. The next post will be about Isao Takahata’s Hols: Prince of the Sun, the ’60s film that helped shape decades of anime. Until tomorrow!