Ride your wave

"After the production of Lou and the Mermaid Island, I was asked to make a new love film with a strange creature. So I wanted to tell a romantic comedy, very simple, aimed at young adults. Ride your wave is a very ordinary love story about a couple that you would find anywhere. For each of these two young people, the other is their hero, while these two help each other. I have always thought that heroes exist in our surroundings, nearby." - Masaaki Yuasa

Japanese animated films have always held an important place in our hearts because some of them mark forever your memory and remind you that our time is counted on earth and that you must know how to fight for your dreams and especially find your other half who will give you the desire to live. Certainly Ride your wave would have deserved to be released in France earlier but our sad time linked to a world pandemic decided otherwise in France (the film was released in the United States in August 2020). After several episodes of Japanese animated series and films such as Mind Game (2004), The night is short, walk on girl (2017), Lou and the mermaid island (2017), the director Masaaki Yuasa delivers here his best film and imposes it as one of the masterpiece of animation. 

We can never say enough the importance of having a scenario as mastered as the animation to give life to tell a story. Masaaki Yuasa's script might seem simplistic, but if you look closely, the story told here tackles with a rare intelligence the themes of love, mourning and the reconstruction of a balance in order to regain a taste for life and regain self-confidence. Director Masaaki Yuasa, who is undoubtedly one of the greatest directors of Japanese animated films, brings his undeniable talents as a storyteller to bear and above all shows the beauty of life and the important balance between the sea and man, even if he resorts to the fantastic to illustrate this important link.

In a seaside resort, the young student Hinako has left her family to be able to combine her studies and her true love for the sea. A seasoned surfer, she loves to surf and find this strong link between her and the sea. However, her life is changed when an important fire breaks out in her building and she owes her life only to a young fireman Minato. Their meeting will make that they will have a real natural attraction, Minato being fan of the way Hinako surfs. However this one will have a terrible accident while wanting to surf alone. Hinako, full of sadness, abandons surfing and moves away from the sea to not think about Minato anymore. However this last one like a ghost finds a human appearance while being in the water whether he has or not a human size. Hinako will find again taste for life and resume her romance with Hinako who can't go to heaven without having accomplished a mission. Of course Ride Your Wave takes some time to set the scene but it knows perfectly how to capture our attention and move us by reminding us of the people who left us and who remain engraved in our memory forever. 

The different levels of reading of Ride Your Wave make this film appeal to both young and adult audiences because it deals with life with a rare intelligence and reminds us of our own fears, this lack of self-confidence that prevents us from living our lives to the fullest. In the same way, the poetry that emerges from this film with notably an omnipresent metaphor of water and life makes Ride your wave a true masterpiece that will find its way to your heart and really move you. Far from the big American animation studios, Ride Your Wave is more mature, original and perfectly mastered so that you will love this film and want to see it again. 

Ride Your Wave
Directed by Masaaki Yuasa
Written by Reiko Yoshida
Produced by Eunyoung Choi, Yuka Okayasu
Starring Ryota Katayose, Rina Kawaei, Honoka Matsumoto, Kentaro Ito
Cinematography: Toru Fukushi
Edited by Kiyoshi Hirose
Music by Michiru Oshima
Production company : Science SARU
Distributed by Toho (Japan), Alba films (France)
Release date : June 10, 2019 (Annecy), June 21, 2019 (Japan), August 4, 2020 (United States), September 1, 2021 (France)
Running time : 96 minutes

Seen on August 26, 2021

Mulder's Mark: