All of my reviews contain spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning. 880https://i.ur.com/Wq79MqT.png It is a daunting task indeed to try to set up a proper leadin for any kind of writeup about Penguin Highway. Marking Studio Coloridos first foray into the world beyond the domestic market in Japan. The film is consequently immensely important for the anime industry. Its a little weird to be saying that about a studio who are mostly known in the west not for their bevy of short films but for a McDonalds recruitment commercialhttps://www..com/watch?v=ZTrC86mmPaw but its the truth. Yet at the same time talking about it in those terms undersells the film itself. Said film being the kind of topnotch magical realist youth drama that is just plain good enough to bolster ones faith in the entire genre up there with Summer Wars and the seminal Your Name. So what then is Penguin Highway? Well as much as its about any central thematic point or plotline its a backdrop for a 2hour downpour of juxtaposed surreal images that evoke the highs and lows of the summers of youth. Cola bottles that transmogrify into the titular penguins a silver moon lurking in the forest that strikes all who see it ill that same cursed wood being demarcated with a no entry sign. Theres the allimportant Sea Orb more on that in a bit chess pieces turning into bats playing cards floating down a river Lewis Carrolls Jabberwock towering thunderheads and typhoons. Penguin Highway is great at twisting and rolling up scores of these splintered memories and crushing them down into a pure liquid of summer surreality. In this way it has something faintly in common with Fennesz seminal folktronica album Endless Summer. 880https://i.ur.com/A8QiH5C.jpg This is not to imply that Penguin Highway lacks a plot though. Our central character is Aoyama a precocious boy genius. Hes a wisebeyondhisyears type the kind that almost every nerdy child imagines they are. He keeps notebooks full of experiments and research is stoic in the face of adversity and is happily counting down the days until he becomes an adult. Joining Aoyama as the secondary lead is a woman who works at the dental clinic he visits who also happens to be his chess tutor. The woman is identified as simply Oneesan in the original and as The Dentist Office Lady in the English subtitles. She is quite the enigma and proves to be the films real central character. Shes also Aoyamas crush and the film thankfully does a pretty good job of keeping this on the cute side instead of dipping into anything unpleasant. Also along for the ride are the nervy Uchida Aoyamas friend Hanamoto a similarlysmart girl and Aoyamas primary chess rival and Suzuki the class bully. 880https://i.ur.com/Fiuiliw.png Aoyama left and Hanamoto right. Suzuki is on the far left just cut off by the scene boundary. There are of course also penguins. 880https://i.ur.com/sVAe60g.png To say that there are penguins in a film called Penguin Highway seems obvious but these are no ordinary penguins. We learn pretty quickly into the film that Aoyamas crush OneeSan is actually the one making them. Out of random everyday objects though most notably as briefly aforementioned soda cans. Solving the mystery of how shes able to do thisas even she doesnt knowis what drives the first half of the films plot but its not until the second half that the thematics really kick into high gear. The films central theme is a broad simple one. The kind of thing that this sort of movie works best with. All good things must come to an end is a maxim so ingrained in the human cultural experience that its more of a cliche than anything. Yet it is precisely this idea that Penguin Highway wrings for emotional impact. 880https://i.ur.com/35hnxPu.png Aoyama Uchida and Hamamoto discover something strange in a vast clearing in the middle of the forest. Its an orb floating in the air and made of pure water. Hanamoto dubs it UmiThe Seaand the trio spend their summer alternately playing near and studying the Sea Orb. 880https://i.ur.com/C8pxcbf.png The montage of the three playing together is probably the emotionally brightest moment in the entire film and to bring back that mention of Endless Summer from earlier this is where it most expertly weaves together fractious summer memories into a refined whole. Almost everyone has experienced something like the trios summer near the Sea Orb. I must imagine involving far fewer spherical anomalies but the sentiment remains. 880https://i.ur.com/5BnWncV.png Its every mystery of childhood rolled into one and scaled up a thousandfold. The three are having the time of their lives and Aoyama even imagines that hell be awarded a Nobel Prize for their work studying the Sea Orb fantasizing about OneeSan visiting his acceptance ceremony in a white dress. It of course does not last. Suzuki and his lackeys eventually trail the trio and discover the Sea Orb too. They menace the kids but are broken up by OneeSan whose army of penguins prove to react strangely to the orb. Aoyama fascinated by the reaction wants OneeSan to join the three of them in researching it. Hamamoto flustered by Aoyamas obvious crush on OneeSan and unable to reconcile it with her own obvious crush on Aoyama refuses. The two fight and the youthful summer comes to a sudden crashing halt. Here again is a stab at universality. Weve all fought with our friends as kidsoften over immensely silly things in hindsightand that feeling of endless days coming to a sudden blindsiding halt is all too familiar. 880https://i.ur.com/cLjiixm.png Things get worse. During subsequent meetups with OneeSan it becomes obvious that the same penguin energy that keeps her penguins around is also sustaining her. She stops eating and if she moves too far from the Sea Orb she becomes ill tying back to an early scene where a penguin that gets too far from town reverts into the soda can it was made from. Worse the jabberwocks that have been troubling her nightmares start appearing in reality putting the entire town on edge as scientists from the nearby university where Momotamas father works search for the creatures. 880https://i.ur.com/8jQteRO.png The Sea Orb starts expanding threatening to engulf the whole town and sparking an evacuation. It eventually becomes clear that the only way to stop the thing is to destroy it. Something that will kill the penguins. And OneeSan. The generality of loss is a hard theme to tackle. No two people grieve the same way. No two losses are exactly equivalent. People enter our lives and leave them in a plurality of ways. The reason that Penguin Highways scalingdown of all loss into Aoyamas loss of his first love OneeSan is that no matter who youve lost or how the suddenness is what is universal. One day someone is there the next they are not. No matter the actual timeframes there is a distinct before and after a time when like the endless summer it seemed like the relationshipwhatever it waswould go on forever and a time after when it becomes devastatingly clear that it wont. Yet it goes without saying that well nothing lasts forever. 880https://i.ur.com/vjunsSE.png They do destroy the Sea Orb in what has to be among the most beautifullyanimated runs of the decade. The entire final 30 minutes of the film is simply gorgeous and if anything blunts the heartache of OneeSans death its this. Colorido have a reputation as being a premier studio who do innovative expertlyexecuted work. If anything needed to further cement that reputation let it be this. The inside of the Sea Orb which turns out to be a sortof black hole is wonderfully imaginative. It resembles a sort of longaftertheapocalypse flooded earth with random bits of manmade scenery floating both in the air and under the water in the infinite sea. 880https://i.ur.com/QrHe1rd.png 880https://i.ur.com/nBdDIep.png This is more or less the end of Penguin Highway. After they leave the Sea Orb and the penguins finish hunting down the miniature water globes that constitute its remains Aoyama and we the audience say goodbye to OneeSan. The last time the two spend together is them rushing to the cafe that theyd meet at for chess lessons along a literal yellow brick road. 880https://i.ur.com/iPEgrpH.jpg Aoyama drinks bitter tea as the penguins outside fade one by one. OneeSan leaves and vanishes. The films credits are scored to a song built around the word goodbye as a central lyric. Is Penguin Highway a perfect film? No but its a good argument that more anime films need to make their way west. Its an expertlydone take on an ageold theme. Making something so broad and so simple seem fresh and newly timeless is no mean feat. At the very least it will hopefully raise the profiles of all involved from Studio Colorido itself who have been building a quietly impressive portfolio for the past decade despite escaping notice of most American otaku Director Hiroyasu Ishida scriptwriter Makoto Ueda to the many specific animators involved. If Penguin Highway is a sign of whats to come in the 2020s either from Colorido specifically or from the medium in general its a portent we should all be happy to heed. A lighthouse on the coast.