Parents' Guide to Ride Your Wave

Beautiful and gripping (if too sad for sensitive or younger kids), this anime film has a satisfying emotional arc and absolutely gorgeous visuals. The first notice viewers get that they're in for a unique love story arrives in the first few minutes, as Hinako swirls joyously through the ocean's waves while Minato watches wistfully from the top of his fireman's tower. When a friend asks what Minato is looking at, Minato replies dreamily that the woman out on the water is his hero. Wait, what? In American movies, women watch men admiringly, not the other way around. What a delightful romantic departure to see a woman providing the action, with a man responsible for the admiration. Minato does get his chance to play the hero, too, and then we watch as our leads, slowly, slowly spend more time together: cooking on the beach, going out for coffee or tea, stumbling through Minato's first surfing lessons.

Then something terrible happens, as it will, in life and in movies, and Ride Your Wave becomes something else: a portrait of a woman learning to live again after a tragedy, to pick up the pieces of her life and go on. Part of Hinako wants to look backward, where Minato was always there to hold her hand and keep her safe. But with time and the support of friends, both her own childhood ones and Minato's loved ones who rally around, Hinako starts to find her way. It's a sad but ultimately fulfilling story, shot through with incredible visuals. Yuasa seems to have a particular affinity for showing patterns of light: fireworks exploding in a clear sky, sun-dappled water, the shadows thrown by the revolving red light on the front of firetrucks. It's a fitting visual metaphor for Hinako's journey through a long, dark tunnel of grief and back into the light.