The latest in the set of 4K Mamoru Hosoda rereleases might be his strongest work, a graceful and emotionally rich fable from 2012 that gathers in its arms themes of single motherhood, neighbourliness, ecological conservation and the meaning of adult independence. It’s indebted to My Neighbour Totoro in its setup: urbanite mum Hana (voiced by Aoi Miyazaki) brings her two werewolf children, Yuki (Momoka Ono as a child/Haru Kuroki as a teenager) and Ame (Amon Kabe/Yukito Nishii) to a beaten-up country house. While not quite matching the Miyazaki masterpiece’s complete storytelling economy, Hosoda achieves a rawer sense of wildness and elation by pitching his fantasy closer to young-adult realism.
Hana has to raise her two transmogrifying toddlers alone after her lycanthrope beau (Takao Osawa), whom she first spies across a lecture hall, is accidentally killed. (The details of how they conceive their children are best glossed over.) With the neighbours asking whether she has pets as well as kids, she decides to move the family to the mountains to avoid scrutiny. But locals frown on her fumbling attempts to feed everyone from her vegetable patch, as she simultaneously struggles to cope with Yuki and Ame’s bestial and human needs. Her son is a clingy mother’s boy, while her daughter is a whirlwind of claws and teeth who awkwardly insists on starting proper human school.
Wolf Children doesn’t follow the typical moon- or emotion-related rules of lycanthrope transformation; Yuki and Ame are able to change back and forth at will. Hosoda also shows a marvellous flexibility with the animal conceit, which expresses many things, some in tension with one another: the alien contact of love, the uncontrollable nature of children, a longing for a state of innocence, puberty’s metamorphosis, the imperative to let your offspring run free. Yuki, embarrassed about her inner nature, and Ame, horrified by the demonisation of wolves and drawn to the mountains, diverge. But they mirror their parents, as she draws closer to her normie classmate Sōhei (Takuma Hiraoka), and he emulates his absent dad.
Hosoda tells his story with a subdued simplicity compared with the digital convolutions of Summer Wars, Belle and even the realm-switching Mirai. His stripped-back characters stand out with fantastical boldness against impeccably realist backgrounds (though he occasionally accelerates into hyper-real first-person sequences, as when the siblings dash out into the snowy countryside). Swept up in potent nostalgia for early parenthood, childhood and the cradle of nature itself, this is a modern classic.
• Wolf Children is in UK and Irish cinemas from 17 August.
