Summer Ghost

One of those grab in the sale punts, Summer Ghost, is one of my least favourite things: a short film. Not that I am biased but most short films are calling cards, style over substance to try and get someone to notice you, finance you, and never feel particularly enticing. Not that I am biased, remember.

And of course you are up against Makoto Shinkai, where I would say – at risk of apparently contradicting myself – his short works are better than his longer form works. Not that his features are bad by any stretch of the imagination, but there’s something about Shinkai’s short films that manage to truly use the form to grasp a moment, a feeling, often a fleeting one, and the shorter form allows it to flutter away and evaporate into the ether as it should, so that the short film becomes genuinely, and very unusually, deeply satisfying.

So, director loundraw really doesn’t have much to live up to with the 30-minute Summer Ghost, does he? No pressure.

Three strangers come together to see if lighting fireworks will cause a ghost to appear as is foretold. And appear she does, an event that shapes the lives of the three teenagers.

Much of Summer Ghost is familiar but this is not necessarily a criticism, more an appreciation that there is rarely much that is new on screen and this should not be a barrier to what we are watching. Interestingly, as the film opens, we don’t really know how these three teenagers, Tomoya, Aoi, and Ryo came together to meet on an old abandoned airfield or what drove them to try and make the ghost appear. This is to the film’s credit as it wastes no time on unnecessary exposition, instead it takes us straight into their awkward meeting and the deed itself. That the way to call the ghost is by burning sparklers is surely a conceit to be able to introduce some sizzling animation, but again it doesn’t matter, it gives the camera a focus, the image a reason to crackle and light our three protagonists who suddenly become four, as the ghost, Ayane, appears.

That Ayane exists will come as no surprise, but the reason for her being there is. We find out that each of our characters have skeletons in their closets, aspects of their personality that they are suppressing or hiding or else are suffering with. Some of these issues are more successful in terms of narrative than others - Aoi’s history is a touch rote at best, but the ghost Ayane grants the story just the right amount of darkness, so that as the story progresses, especially her relationship to the A-student Tomoya, what could have been fluff becomes more intriguing.

Yet the human aspects never quite take on the delicacy of emotion that Shinkai is capable of - true, this comparison is perhaps unfair but we judge based on our benchmarks. Equally, the visuals are nicely constructed but not quite dripping with the same evocation that Shinkai is capable of. Yet the film does stand on its own merits. Though I shouldn’t have been, I was tripped up by the ending, which makes perfect narrative sense, and the darker aspects of the story are well drawn and never dragged out too much. In part this is due to it being a 30-minute film, but nevertheless many a feature film has bored me nearly to within tears in half the time.  

Visually, loundraw conjures up warm summer images and where necessary chillier ones. There is a flow to the film that shows a lightness of touch where necessary and humour when needed. This may not be a masterpiece, but it’s a stepping stone that shows he can construct a story, pace it well and even surprise, even if the film can be obvious in other aspects. Though only barely longer than your average episode of an anime show, Summer Ghost conjures a warm tale that doesn’t necessarily give answers to its characters, but it does give them hope.

The elephant in the room is perhaps if not buying this on sale you’d suspect you’d need to be relatively die hard to want it, but when on sale, snag it.