Studio Ponoc/Netflix. Animated Fantasy. 105 minutes.
Grade: 3.5/4
The second major movie this year in so many months to be about imaginary childhood friends, the Japanese animated feature The Imaginary takes a drastically different tack than IF, by making the imaginary friend the protagonist rather than the kid. What do they do when they’re not playing with the kid? Well, that’s a scenario that takes a lot more imagination – figuratively and within the story – than wondering what the kid does when their friend’s not there.
As an atheist, I think I took a different interpretation away from IF than most. It seemed to me that the imaginary friends behaved as – and served the function of – God and Jesus, at least as a large cross-section of the American Christian community perceive them, and thus the movie was metaphorically about evangelism. It’s no less believable to me that a kid could talk to a sentient flaming marshmallow that flies than that an adult could mentally speak English to an Israeli carpenter who’s been dead for 2000 years. The IF’s functions seemed similar – rekindle a spirit of love, generosity, and joy, and provide a higher power to give your troubles up to. A friend of mine in AA once explained to me that the “higher power” in the 12 steps not only doesn’t need to be God, but it could be anything – a toy on the shelf, perhaps. Or a flaming marshmallow. The point is to externalize something beyond yourself that can help you.
In both IF and The Imaginary, the imaginary friend emerges as a coping mechanism after a parent has died. This being anime rather than Disney, it’s the dad who’s dead, and the mom, Lizzie (Hayley Atwell in the dubbed version) who runs a bookstore by herself while raising Amanda (Evie Kiszel) and the invisible Rudger (Louie Rudge-Buchanan).
An aside for a moment, regarding the audio: I opted to watch the dubbed version, in part because it actually seemed cast with care and talent, and also because on my screener copy, the only English subtitles were the descriptive kind, which I find unbearable. I don’t need every sound effect written out for me in parentheses, nor do I want to be told what mood the music on the score is going for. I love that this exists for deaf audiences, but I think an extra set of subtitles that simply aim at translation and nothing else would be welcome. I generally prefer the original audio, as it was that which the director directed. But on a Netflix screener, with extra words in the letterboxing to watermark the screener anyway? Too much. The English dub, on the whole, is fine.
Not that you’ll be paying a lot of attention to the words, when the visuals of this Studio Ponoc film capture the imagination. Using a hand-drawn look, but with computer enhanced depth effects that recall Disney’s Tarzan‘s “deep canvas” upgraded to 2024, The Imaginary doesn’t pull the aesthetic move you’d expect, which would be to do a Wizard of Oz and make reality drab by comparison to the imagination. Here, the real world – England, as conceived by Japanese animators, which makes it an imaginary realm on a meta level – is a feast of bright colors, dark alleys, and gravity-free rooftops. The actual imaginary world, which resembles fantasy versions of a different major city every night, differs mainly in its wildly creative residents. Rudger, who is just a regular boy in appearance, is perhaps the least “imagined,” next to various sentient plants, Pokemon-ish hybrids, and a giant pink hippo. Amanda clearly sought comfort and a male friend in her mind rather than creativity.
The religious allegory doesn’t work as closely for this film as in IF, because here it’s Rudger who becomes detached from Amanda and must find her again – it’s tough to imagine Jesus in that position without some really out-of-character scripting. It’s a lot easier to see Satan in the form of Mr. Bunting (Jeremy Swift), a Hawaiian shirt-wearing, gin-blossomed man who eats unseen friends and has his own invisible sidekick resembling the J-horror girl ghosts of yester-decade. The character was described as drawn in the original 2014 novel by A.F. Harrold, so perhaps any resemblance to a certain overly touchy-feely head of a competing animation studio is purely coincidental. It nonetheless occurred to my mind, though since Netflix has a deal with his current employer, maybe not.
The world of the imagination and its rules and guardians recall nothing so much as a Neil Gaiman fantasy, especially when it comes to the talking cat with David Bowie eyes, who’s voiced by Kal Penn doing his best Jeffrey Combs. (That entire sentence is a major compliment, as fans of all involved must know.) Particularly poignant is the casting of LeVar Burton as an aging Imaginary who was once a puppy, and is now a slow old dog. It’s the first time Burton has really seemed like an old man in a role, and a meta-reminder that even our favorite fictional characters, when played by humans, start to show their age eventually. (As the guy who taught so many kids to read via Reading Rainbow, he’s now practically the elder sage of millennials’ imagination.) If, as adults, we shut ourselves off from them as a result, what does that teach the next generation?
It makes sense, perhaps, that animators are more concerned about the living embodiment of the creative muse than with any person who has already lost it. How do we nurture it, and where does it go when we lose it? The Imaginary suggests it will still try to find us, and give us inspiration, even indirectly if that’s the only way. As an allegory, it gets complicated; as a story, I’ll take it far more gladly than yet another simplistic morality tale.