Mirai Reviews

I love this movie for its premise but cannot wrap my brain around its execution. Ostensibly a family-themed animated film, I can’t picture this resonating with a child audience or keeping the adults enthralled. It exists in the no man’s land between these twin points.

Granted, the fantasy sequences are quite lovely to behold, but Mirai can’t quite decide what to do with them or figure out when to leave its emotional resonances alone without thundering into cheap sentiment and heavy-handed crocodile tears. There’s enough weight in the story of a toddler grappling with the presence of a younger sibling and trying to understand his new place in the family unit. Once the prince of the kingdom, he’s now struggling for maintaining his parents’ attention and prone to fits in order to regain it.

This is the stuff of naturalistic cinema and a solid enough foundation to spring in elements of fantasy and whimsy. So Mirai does as the toddler meets the human embodiment of the family dog and various relatives from the past and future, including the teenaged version of his younger sister. It’s here that the film frequently goes off the rails as its fantasy sequences provide disarray in a narrative that was a clean line just moments prior. These two halves never quite meet in harmony and Mirai is too slight to take on this much water.

Namely, that one of the family members he meets is a handsome prince claiming to be his dog is just bonkers. The type of bonkers that never folds itself in nicely to the rest of the film. Same goes for a scene where the toddler steals the dog’s tail and transforms into puppy. Mirai quickly drops this much whimsy and fantastical action for explorations of family mythology and discovering your place in the family dynamics. You’re left wondering what exactly this interlude was all about and why it was there in the first place. Mirai is just too emotionally shallow to entertain the tots or provide meaningful engagement from the adults.