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Director: Masaaki Yuasa
Release date: June 10, 2019
Rating: ★★
Review:

One of the most interesting animation directors to come from Japan is Masaaki Yuasa. He brought us very idiosyncratic movies as ‘Mindgame’ (2004) and ‘Night Is Short, Walk on Girl’ (2017). Both features have striking visuals that make them stand out within the vast anime canon.

‘Ride Your Wave’, Yuasa’s feature film from 2019, is remarkably normal compared to these earlier features. True, the human designs are strangely elongated, there are some distorted shots, and strange perspectives, and the color designs are brighter than usual in anime, but the background art is much more standard anime fare. The story, too, has nothing of the mind-blowing qualities of the earlier features. In fact, ‘Ride Your Wave’ is a disappointingly normal love story with a supernatural element, an almost obligate story ingredient in Japanese feature animation.

‘Ride Your Wave’ tells about a surfing girl who falls in love with a fire fighting boy, but then disaster strikes… Yuasa uses standard montage techniques to tell of the lovers’ bliss, and equally standard flashback techniques and repetitions of what people had said to make his message come across. This makes the film all too explanatory and heavy-handied. In fact, there’s little to enjoy in ‘Ride Your Wave’ besides the designs and some shots, and the film doesn’t rise above the standard fare. From Yuasa we certainly expect better…

Watch the trailer of ‘Ride Your Wave’ yourself and tell me what you think:

‘Ride Your Wave’ is available on Blu-Ray and DVD