Back in January, New York-based animation distributor GKIDS made the exciting announcement that it’s bringing Mamoru Hosoda’s library of anime films back to digital and home video release in America, including in 4K UHD editions. That was a fantastic relief for fans of ambitious, intelligently made anime movies. Hosoda’s latest movies, including 2021’s twisted-future “Beauty and the Beast” retelling Belle or 2018’s playful time-travel fantasy Mirai, got American theatrical and digital releases. But his back catalog, terrific films including The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars, and The Boy and the Beast — were only spottily available in the U.S., popping up on streaming via Netflix or Crunchyroll, then then disappearing again.
In particular, when Belle came out and I tried to catch up on Hosoda’s work, his beloved, dark 2012 family drama Wolf Children wasn’t available in America via any legal means, or in any release format.
Ahead of Wolf Children’s Aug. 5 re-release, though, GKIDS is bringing the movie to theaters on May 11-13 only, for Mother’s Day. If you already know the movie, that plays like a grim, wry joke. If you don’t know the movie, you’re in for a treat — catch it in theaters while you can. Just be prepared: This isn’t a particular warm or comforting holiday tale.
Wolf Children (directed by Hosoda and co-written by him and his Summer Wars and Girl Who Leapt Through Time partner Satoko Okudera) is an original story, not adapted from any previous manga, anime, or other project. It’s certainly a story about the strains, pains, and personal losses of motherhood: It centers on Hana, a young woman who falls in love with a werewolf and has to raise his children alone after he dies in an accident while out hunting in the city.
Hana has a hard time of it even from pregnancy. Afraid her children may emerge as wolf cubs, she gives birth at home, alone, in hiding. She can’t rely on traditional baby books or websites to tell her how to support or raise these children, who shapeshift at will between human, wolf cub, and half-human forms, squabbling and attacking each other like young wolves, with destructive results. The older girl, Yuki, who narrates the movie, is sweet, well-meaning, and closer to human. Her younger brother Ame is more difficult, a sickly kid who grows up as a target for bullies, and becomes bitter, withdrawn, and more interested in his wolf nature than his human side.
So much of Wolf Children is about familiar stages of motherhood, from dealing with the terrible twos to having to let go of a child once they’re ready to explore independence. But it all comes with a tragic fantasy spin, as Yuki and Ame each pull away from their biracial heritage, leaning toward their different halves and finding that neither the human world nor the wilds comfortably accepts or wants them. As Yuki demands to attend school alongside other kids, Ame wants to withdraw from human society and live as a beast. For Hana, the question is always how to navigate what’s best for each of her children, even when that means suffering and sacrificing: dropping out of her university to focus on the kids, moving to a rural village where they won’t be found out, constantly trying to do everything on her own.
Hosoda’s animation, courtesy of his production house Studio Chizu, is as distinctive and dramatic as ever. Much like fellow anime auteur Masaaki Yuasa (Night Is Short, Walk On Girl; Lu Over the Wall, Inu-Oh), Hosoda takes an interest in expressionistic animation and shifting forms. His titular wolf children melt in and out of different shapes at will to express their mental states, and they’re more stylized than the average anime character: Hana in particular looks wan and thin throughout most of the movie, the strain of her position showing in the character design. The movie is full of lush countrysides and deep forests, as the two kids go their separate ways in worlds both marked by bright, verdant greens and unexpected shadows.
And the climax of Wolf Children in particular is a breathtaking, tactile piece of animation, where a fight for survival feels believably mundane and utterly ethereal by turns. This is the kind of movie where the environments are so detailed that you can almost feel the cold fog in your lungs after a torrential storm, or the jarring, bruising impacts as a character slips in mud and takes a thudding fall down a hill.
Hana in Wolf Children isn’t the kind of mother who usually shows up in Mother’s Day movies: She’s troubled and struggling, sad and lonely, visibly fighting to hold things together for her kids at her own expense. Early in the movie, she tells her werewolf lover a heartbreaking story about how her father named her Hana, “flower,” because he wanted a child “who always smiled, like the flowers, even when things got hard… even if the smile became forced.” She admits that she kept up that philosophy, even smiling at his funeral, drawing her relatives’ anger. The same struggle to put a brave face on her life stretches throughout Wolf Children, in ways that sometimes feel uncomfortable and melancholy, even bordering on horror. It’s a dark movie to hold up as a family experience for Mother’s Day. But it’s a beautiful one as well.
Wolf Children will play in U.S. theaters May 11-13. Check GKIDS’ website for locations. The company will also bring two more of Hosoda’s anime movies to theaters later this year.