Director: Mamoru Hosoda
2009, Japan, 115 min.
This Japanese anime (manga) film centers on Kenji, your typical teenage outsider. He’s good at math, bad with girls and spends most of his time hanging out in the all-powerful online community called OZ. When the girl of his dreams, Natsuki, asks him to pretend to be her fiancé at a family reunion, things only get stranger. Kenji receives a late-night email containing a cryptic mathematic riddle. His solution to the equation causes the hijacking of the networking site through which most of the world’s social and business traffic flows and leads to the unleashing of a rogue artificial intelligence intent on using the power of OZ to destroy the real world. As Armageddon looms on the horizon, Kenji and his new family set aside their differences and work together to save the world in this “near-perfect blend of social satire and science fiction.” From AnimeNewsNetwork.com
