![]() So Kun's unnamed dad takes the spotlight for a moment by becoming a stay-at-home caregiver, a role that Dad initially imagines he might be good at. At first, Kun screams and shouts and demands that his mommy ( Rebecca Hall) pay attention to him while she, being as frazzled as you might imagine a mother of a new-born infant might be, tries to get her clueless husband ( John Cho) to help shoulder her parental burden. That's not just a catty remark from a child-less egg-head thirty-something: that seems to be the filmmakers' perspective too (to a point). Kun, like many little children, is a tantrum-prone brat because he's gotten used to being the center of attention. I get why some adults might enjoy "Mirai," but I can't honestly say that I like it, nor can I imagine kids liking it either. These hallucinatory interludes are so dramatically under-developed that it's often hard to nod along in agreement with the film's trite but true-enough life lessons. This kid, who constantly struggles with sympathetic feelings of displacement following the birth of his cherubic sister Mirai (Kaede Hondo), doesn't daydream: he gets swept up, Walter Mitty-style, in fantasies that simply don't feel like anything a real child would imagine. ![]() The biggest difference between "Inside Out" and "Mirai" is that the consistently arch latter film seems to suggest that imaginary friends and play-dates just happen to child protagonist Kun (Jaden Waldman, in the film's English-dubbed release). ![]() I imagine fans of Pixar's " Inside Out" might like the patronizing but well-meaning animated Japanese fantasy "Mirai." That's not a knock on Pixar fans (well, maybe a small knock) so much as an up-front acknowledgment that both "Inside Out" and "Mirai" are not only not to my taste, but also do not, in my opinion, speak meaningfully to children.īoth "Inside Out" and "Mirai" re-imagine the inner lives of children through the lens of an individual child's innermost thoughts: the emotional turmoil of both protagonists is expressed through literal-minded fantasies that too-neatly explain where bad feelings come from for the sake of curing normal, albeit childish, emotions.
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