As this is my own blog I am sometimes happy to stray outside of the lines of what is tonally resonant with my mainly horror focussed content. I find the notion of time travel an endlessly captivating subject, so when I got the opportunity to check out a Japanese anime, the Tomohisa Taguchi directed and co-written The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes (original title Natsu e no tunnel, Sayonara no deguchi) for a review I had to go for it. This was based on the novel of the same name, telling quite the bittersweet story of living for the past.
Kaoru Tono (voiced by Oji Suzuka) is a high school student who lives out in the Japanese countryside with his alcoholic father. His home life is unhappy, something that is linked back to the accidental death of Kaoru's younger sister some years previously, which led to his parents splitting up, and his father bearing an unfair grudge against the boy ever since. One day he encounters a strange girl at the local train station, Anzu Hanashiro (voiced by Marie Litoyo), she is new to the area and happens to be in Kaoru's class. One night, after an argument with his drunk father, Kaoru flees his home and accidentally stumbles across a strange tunnel. Heading into it he discovers his childhood pet bird returned to life, and upon leaving a few minutes later he is shocked to discover an entire week has passed in the outside world. There is a local legend about a place named the Urashima Tunnel, somewhere which is said to grant you your heart's desire at the cost of time off your life, and Kaoru comes to realise he has found this tunnel. He becomes obsessed with the idea of being able to bring his dead sister back to life by visiting the tunnel, but on his second visit he finds Anzu has followed him. With her own private reasons for wanting to visit the tunnel, the two form an alliance, to help each other achieve their wishes.
At its core this is a love story, not really something I typically watch. I do love anime though, so this was a delight to watch regardless. In Japanese with English subtitles, it was easy to follow, and despite a reliance on text messages by the two leads, I never felt like I wasn't getting information at the same time as the characters in the film. The time travel part was what most interested me, and bizarrely this most closely matches the idea used in the classic children's film The Flight of the Navigator (a personal favourite of mine). It seemed more nefarious than it actually was, as while people in the tunnel experience time at a far faster rate, they themselves don't age quicker. Much of the middle section of the movie was concerned with the two teens exploring the limits of the tunnel's time abilities, playing out as a montage of their experiments.
The bittersweet part of this anime comes from Kaoru and Anzu's growing attachment to each other, with Kaoru obsessed with being able to see his sister again, and Anzu's reason for visiting the tunnel more to spend time with the boy than anything, there was going to come a time when I felt the boy would travel deep into the tunnel. With the characters semi-joking that likely a thousand years would pass in any deep exploration, there come a feeling they would become separated by time.
The animation went for a realistic anime look, which worked well with the morose and serious story. I didn't really like the music choices, but it made sense for an anime to have somewhat soppy sounding love songs sung by a female singer. The focus is on the two protagonists, with other characters barely featuring, only really during a handful of school classroom scenes, and Kaoru's home. With the two both having absent parents, it skipped that aspect of regret, with the insular look more at how the time travel would affect them as a close pair.
Is there any horror? Of course not, there is a hint of the supernatural, and of course some interesting time travel, wrapped up in a bittersweet love story that I did find myself getting a little drawn into. The Annecy Award winning The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes opens in over 120 cinemas nationwide in the UK on Friday 14th July.
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