#Ocean waves anime full movie movie#
#Ocean waves anime full movie series#

The problem is that The Ocean Waves didn’t even meet those very-much-lowered standards.

Knowing that, it’d be hardly be fair to walk in with the same set of expectations that I’d carried to later films like The Wind Rises, Howl’s Moving Castle, or Spirited Away. Now to be fair, The Ocean Waves was one of Studio Ghibli’s earlier films, released in 1993. The wistful nostalgia that Ocean Waves wears on its sheer, fragile sleeves feels like a breath of fresh air among the bombast of today's animated movies.For a very, very long time, I thought Studio Ghibli was invincible. Director Tomomi Mochizuki imbues Ocean Waves with a sense of melancholic regret and longing that is made more effective by the soft lines and lovely pastel colors of the animation. But while most of my enjoyment of watching Ocean Waves was in reading into its accidental queerness, this delicate film is not without its merits. Unfortunately, Ocean Waves never goes for the kill, shoehorning the romance between Taku and the new girl, a fiery Tokyo transfer named Rikaku, in at the last minute. These kind of queer-coded moments are seeded throughout the film, culminating in a dockside conversation through which a lonely saxophone plays as the two friends mull over their relationship. This was the real romance of Ocean Waves. Then Taku admits to the audience, 'I always thought of Yutaka a bit different than my other friends,' and my decision was sealed. As the pair sit in a comfortable silence in the art room, surrounded by classic Roman head busts and bathed in a pink sunset, I wondered if I had stumbled on a long-lost scene from Call Me By Your Name. The two of them were the only ones to protest the cancelation of a school trip, and ended up stuck in the art classroom together writing notes to the administration that would never be read.

#Ocean waves anime full movie series#

It happens early on in the film, when Taku, the insecure protagonist, recalls in a series of flashbacks his first meeting with his best friend Yutaka, a serious and somewhat mysterious classmate. So I popped it on without much expectation for how it would stand up next to Ghibli's all-timers like Spirited Away or even similarly mundane coming-of-age classics like Whisper of the Heart. But as Ocean Waves lazily told its story of two high school boys whose close friendship would eventually be tested by the arrival of a new girl at their countryside school, something piqued my attention.

#Ocean waves anime full movie movie#

But its absence never bothered me that much even among Ghibli aficionados, Ocean Waves is one of the lowest-rated films of the studio's 22 movies, and it's written off as the one made-for-TV movie that only hardcore Ghibli enthusiasts, and local Japanese residents, would have seen.īut in 2014, Ocean Waves finally received a Blu-ray restoration that made its way to the States, and in 2020, it was made available to stream for the first time ever on HBO Max. I was an avid Ghibli fan and eagerly bought all of the studio's films on DVD in my childhood, but Ocean Waves was the one gap in my collection. But while on the surface Ocean Waves is a film about two best friends stuck in a love triangle with a truly unlikable girl, the movie's theme of repressed teenaged angst unexpectedly becomes a fascinating ode to repressed sexuality.įor a long time, Ocean Waves eluded me.

Ocean Waves is a wistful slice-of-life film so steeped in nostalgia that it may as well be shot entirely in sepia tones, with a paper-thin plot that is stretched over 72 slow-moving minutes.

Why It's Essential Viewing: To be honest, the film that Studio Ghibli ended up making is far less interesting than the queer-coded film they accidentally made. But what those young Ghibli animators did manage to achieve sets Ocean Waves apart from the rest of the studio's filmography: they made Ghibli's most queer film. Ultimately, the experiment failed in the first two aspects - Ocean Waves went over budget and over schedule, airing on local television in 1993 to little fanfare. (Welcome to The Quarantine Stream, a new series where the /Film team shares what they've been watching while social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic.) The Movie: Ocean Waves Where You Can Stream It: HBO Max The Pitch: In the early '90s, Studio Ghibli launched an unusual experiment: the studio gave its youngest animators, all in their twenties and thirties, a chance to make a cheap, quick film to show what they could achieve.