Mirai (PG)
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Honestly, I don't know what to make of this movie. But I did like it, and I could imagine some people loving it. (Of course I could also imagine some people liking it a lot less than I did.) There's a four-year-old boy named Kun, whose parents bring home his new baby sister, whom they eventually name Mirai (which means "future"). Kun becomes terribly jealous of the attention his parents give Mirai. But then, sometimes he meets people from his family in either the past or the future, including Mirai as a teenager. And I could never tell if Kun was just imagining these things or if they actually happened, but neither explanation really makes much sense to me. There's also one scene where Kun boards a train and ends up in a train station, and... things happen that definitely couldn't be real. Eventually we get a vague sort of explanation about a tree in Kun's front yard being an index of the important events from throughout the generations of his family. So it seems like some kind of magic or whatever, but... I don't know. The things that happen seem impossible for Kun to have imagined, things he probably couldn't have known about or conceived of, but which were real parts of his family's past. (I suppose at least some of it could have been influenced by conversations he'd heard about his family's past.) But his imagining these things still seems like the most plausible explanation for the movie's plot.

Anyway, if you just don't think too deeply about it, it's a reasonably engaging movie. Even in the scenes that aren't some sort of fantasy sequences, Kun seems to have a level of understanding that I would expect to be slightly beyond that of a four-year-old, but he also definitely has the temperament of a small child. And it's interesting to see his life from his point of view, even if viewers will obviously understand most of what goes on much better than Kun himself does (at least in the reality-based scenes). I think it's a fairly sweet and cute movie, but I also feel like it was trying to pull on my heartstrings a bit harder than it succeeded in doing. But your mileage may vary. I'm sure different people will be either more or less susceptible to the movie's charms than I was. In any event, I'm glad to have seen it.