Mark Reviews Movies: DRIFTING HOME

Drifting Home, Netflix

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | September 8, 2022

A group of kids end up on an unexpected adventure of survival in Drifting Home, the second animated feature from director Hiroyasu Ishida—the third feature film, in general, produced by Studio Colorido out of Japan. As an adventure story, Ishida and Hayashi Mori's screenplay is fairly imaginative, mainly because the central gimmick is unique and gradually provides the filmmakers with opportunities to inject increasingly fantastical elements into what seems like a fairly grounded setting. In a literal sense, the locale is anything but grounded, but that's beside the point at the moment.

What makes Ishida and Mori's story work on a level beyond its potential for scrappy survival, action, and fantasy, though, is that it is grounded in the lives, memories, pain, grief, and anger of its main characters. The film makes room for the other kids in the group, who have their own problems with which to deal, but for the most part, it's about a pair of long-time friends whose bond has become broken by a shared loss.

In the immediate pain of that, old feelings of bitterness, either real or conjured out of this new pain, emerge. Stuck together in a seemingly hopeless situation for an unforeseeable amount of time, all of that comes to the surface for them to confront, ignore, or use as more ammunition for regret and resentment.

That's the main way this story is grounded, and it goes a long way to giving some emotional heft to those imaginative elements—from the setup, which involves an apartment building that somehow drifts out to sea with the kids inside it, to the presence of ghosts or spirits within the tale, which come to represent how structures like an apartment become intrinsically connected to one's memories and emotions. To be fair, not all of these ideas—not to mention the ways in which some other characters figure into this story—come together by the end of this film. In the key ways, though, it succeeds at being an adventure that's about more than the spectacle of grand sights and clever action brought to life by some alternately stylish and impressively realistic animation.

Those two main characters are Kosuke (voice of Mustsumi Tamura), an elementary school-aged boy, and Natsume (voice of Asami Seto), a girl of the same age. The two were once inseparable, we learn, as friends and soccer teammates and even as a kind of family. Natsume comes from a broken home, now living with a mother (voiced by Nana Mizuki) who works from home but is too tired to pay much attention to her daughter upon Natsume's return home from school.

The kids' families each lived in the same apartment building, until the 60-year-old complex was closed and scheduled for demolition, as well as the death of Kosuke's grandfather Yasuji (voice of Bin Shimada). After the fighting between Natsume's parents became too much for them, the girl ended up living with Yasuji and Kosuke, and she grew to see the man as akin to a real father. His death ended a lot in their lives—primarily the friendship.

That's the background, which is provided more details—such as how and why the friendship ended—and specifics about the characters by way of flashbacks. The plot, though, has Kosuke and his friends—the athletic Yuzuru (voice of Daiki Yamashita), troublemaking Taishi (voice of Yumiko Kobayashi), spoiled-rotten Reina (voice of Inori Minase), and the all-around pleasant Juri (voice of Kana Hanazawa)—going to the boy's old apartment building. There are rumors of a ghost child haunting the place, and they want to investigate before the buildings are demolished.

As it turns out, the "ghost" might be Natsume, who comes her old apartment to wallow in misery, but before the kids get any answers, a violent rainstorm strikes. Somehow, it washes the building from its foundations and out to sea. The kids have to unite—or, at least, not fight all the time— and find ways to gather supplies from other buildings (Theirs isn't the only one to float out to sea) in order to survive this ordeal, which could be only a dream—although the hunger and injuries the kids start to experience surely seem real to them.

Most of this story revolves around the relationships and interpersonal dramas that exist or arise between these characters, drawn and animated in that traditional style of anime. Some are more developed than others.

However, whatever might be lacking from the ensemble—especially when it comes to a mysterious boy named Noppo (Ayumu Murase), whose existence doesn't matter until the nature of a major metaphor is revealed—feels irrelevant compared to the depth of the central relationship, as well as the senses of intimacy and scope Ishida and his animators bring to the narrative and the backdrops. The spectacle of that building, as well as others, drifting against the sky and along an endless expanse of water is undeniable, and the filmmakers are dynamic in the way they use a mixture of traditional and computer animation for certain scenes, such as Kosuke's slide toward a passing edifice and another structure rapidly moving to ram the apartment.

At the film's heart, though, is a mournful story of how grief shatters both memories and the present, as well as how spaces and places come to embody certain thoughts and feelings. Drifting Home is a fine, imaginative adventure tale, but the film's sturdy and thoughtful emotional core elevates it beyond that.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products