The Boy and the Best (2015)

I've been in the mood to watch the kinds of films I don't have much experience with lately, and anime is one such genera. Other then the films of Hayao Miyazaki I don't know if I've ever seen an anime film, and my experience with anime TV shows is hearing my nephews talk about Pokémon and watching Voltron when I was in kindergarten. The Boy and the Best confirms some of the stereotypes I hold of the genera, that they contain dense unfamiliar  mythologies and relies on a lot of exposition to approach making sense and that they have a strange obsession with one on one fighting. This makes for at times a plodding and juvenile picture, though of course its aimed mostly at kids. However The Boy and the Best grew on me as it progressed, it has some interesting and I think relevant things to say to its target younger audience about controlling rage. The film is about a young boy named Ren who runs away from his relatives after his mothers death, the boys father long being out of the picture, and ends up in the care of a anthropomorphic bear like creature name Kumatetsu who he follows into a parallel dimension and to whom he becomes an apprentice/suraget child. Eventually Ren finds that he can pass back and forth between dimensions, reconnects with his human father and starts to pursue an education with the help of a teenage girl he meets in a library (Ren ages around 10 years or so over the course of the movie).  This all leads up to a beautifully animated and poignant climax that is quite well done and surprisingly literary. The Boy and the Best in the end had a substance to it that I hadn't expected and which really elevated it, even if it wasn't quite my cup of tea. ***