Official Entry for Best Animated Feature Oscar SUMMER WARS opens in SF December 24, 2010

SUMMER WARS
A Film by Mamoru Hosoda (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time)
Official Entry for Best Animated Feature Oscar®
Opens Friday December 24 in San Francisco

...Landmark’s Opera Plaza Cinemas, 601 Van Ness Ave.,San Francisco (415) 267-4893

Tickets available on 12/21 at: http://www.landmarktheatres.com/tickets and theatre box office.

SUMMER WARS is the scintillating new animated feature from Mamoru Hosoda, a film whose “dazzling fluency of motion and untethered brilliance of invention make the usual fantasy anime look childish and dull." - Japan Times. Kenji is a teenage math prodigy recruited by his secret crush Natsuki for the ultimate summer job – passing himself off as Natsuki’s boyfriend for four days during her grandmother’s 90th birthday celebration. But when Kenji solves a 2,056 digit math riddle sent to his cell phone, he unwittingly breaches the security barricade protecting Oz, a globe-spanning virtual world where millions of people and governments interact through their avatars, handling everything from online shopping and traffic control, to nuclear launch codes. Now a malicious AI program called Love Machine is hijacking Oz accounts, growing exponentially more powerful, and sowing chaos and destruction in its wake – and it is up to Kenji, Natsuki, and her extended family to band together to try to stop the mayhem.

Hosoda’s sci-fi fantasy is a visual tour-de-force, with the amazing virtual world of Oz as the highlight. Like the Internet as conceived by pop artist Takashi Murakami, Oz is a hallucinatory pixel parade of cool avatar designs, kung fu jackrabbits, toothy bears, and a bursting rainbow of colors.
http://www.gkids.tv/summer /

WINNER
Best Animated Feature – Japan Academy Prize
Best Animated Film – Sitges, Fantasia Film Festivals
Official Selection – Annecy, Berlin Film Festivals

“Spectacular! Visionary! Mind-Bending! Staggering!” - Variety
“A Whirlwind of a Film!” - New York Times
“Dazzling! Gorgeous! Hosoda is the best storyteller working within the animated medium in Japan - and possibly the world!” - Twitch

GKIDS President Eric Beckman said, “SUMMER WARS is an iconic, breathtaking film, and places Mamoru Hosoda on a very short list of the world’s most innovative and exciting animation talents and storytellers. In terms of Japanese animation, SUMMER WARS sits alongside the best works of Hayao Miyazaki and the late Satoshi Kon, and demands attention well beyond anime aficionados to a wider audience of adult and family fantasy lovers. Unlike the more timeless works of Miyazaki, SUMMER WARS is very ‘of-the-moment,’ taking Japanese cinema’s traditional ambivalence towards technology and overlaying current trends in social media, gaming, and networked communication, to create a near-future where reality and virtual lifestyles become intermingled – with all the pleasures and dangers such a world presents. And visually, the film is pure eye-candy – just a fun, thought-provoking, mind-blowing cinematic experience.” GKIDS is a distributor of award-winning filmed entertainment specializing in animation that crosses over between adult and family audiences.

The film’s running time is 113 minutes; it is rated PG.

http://www.landmarktheatres.com/

Official Website: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1031028072#!/event.php?eid=182626715087351