The Imaginary Review
Following its premiere at the 2024 Annecy International Animation Film Festival, The Imaginary will stream on Netflix beginning July 5.
Expectations are sky high for The Imaginary, the latest animated film from Japan’s Studio Ponoc. Then again, that’s been true of every new release from the studio, which was founded by former staffers of Studio Ghibli during that legendary animation house’s brief closure in the 2010s. Ponoc’s first two films, Mary and the Witch’s Flower and Modest Heroes, continued the storytelling principles of Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki, down to the way their characters were drawn, how they express emotion, and the fairy tale lands they inhabit. The Imaginary itself boasts a Ghibli-esque setup, grounding us in a recognizable reality that gradually gives way to the fantastical – in this case the existence of “real” imaginary friends. (A particularly hot topic for movies in 2024, following Imaginary and IF.) Yet as gorgeously animated as The Imaginary is, it’s ultimately burdened by the weight of legacy. It aspires to the expertly structured stories of vintage Ghibli, but can’t muster the same sense of purpose for every step of its journey into the unknown.
In introducing Amanda, her imaginary friend Rudger, and her mother Elizabeth, The Imaginary works hard to make these characters endearing. Amanda is increasingly expected to grow up faster than she’s ready for, Elizabeth is a single mom struggling to make a living, and Rudger fears he might be left behind by the girl who dreamt him up. For the first 30 minutes, The Imaginary finds a perfect balance between real and surreal, setting up an interesting examination of what we lose when we grow up. When a Ringu-like demon emerges attempting to feed Rudger to an uninspired villain named Mr. Bunting, it feels like a great expression of the ways anxiety disrupts the capacity for escapist, imaginative play as we age.
However, the film doesn’t trust us to find this interesting. Amanda abruptly exits the story, Rudger is thrust into a Ghibli-fied version of Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, and The Imaginary completely loses its way. The focus shifts to a gang of imaginary friends whose wacky designs are fun on the surface, but who lack the depth Amanda gains in her relatively tiny amount of screentime. This, combined with the paltry motivations of Mr. Bunting, makes The Imaginary’s story a messy web of unfulfilled potential.
In contrast, the animation remains stellar throughout the entire 105-minute runtime. Thanks to The Imaginary’s setting, Ponoc’s storied animators – who previoulsy worked on the likes of Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya – are free to construct dazzling, nonsensical landscapes. The imagination of a child is much like the imagination of an animator: Both require tapping into a side of one’s self that expresses an emotional, rather than logical, sense. The Imaginary captures this by the way it embraces dream logic, where all the nonsense makes sense for as long as it needs to.
Rudger’s trips through the imagination of different children defy physics but are strung together with a dreamlike smoothness where any object, person, or environment can transform on a dime. This is a supremely difficult trick in 2D animation, so it’s electrifying to see it executed so well in The Imaginary,. There’s also a phenomenal attention to detail on display here. Spots of clutter in Amanda’s otherwise clean home give that setting a sense of coziness; when a character sips hot cocoa from a mug, the animators actually think to show the brown stain that’s left behind. Such details are drip-fed into each frame to further immerse us in The Imaginary’s world.
There’s some computer animation in the mix, too, which has its benefits and weaknesses. It enables ambitious camera movements, bolstering the disorientation characters feel as they tumble through imagined dimensions. The highlight of this technique arrives in a Star Wars homage where a high-stakes dogfight is rendered in a wonderful blend of 3D and 2D elements in a way we would never get from a hand-drawn Ghibli movie. The biggest drawback of this hybrid style is how easily the 3D elements are identifiable. Watching a bus round a bend on an English high street (something that would difficult to achieve in hand-drawn animation), the vehicle looks out of place amongst its 2D surroundings. It took me out of the story and made my brain say “oh hey, that’s CG.”
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