Wolf Children is largely a mood piece. It's a very slow, gentle exploration of a family's life from the first meeting of the parents to the adolescence of the children. With a film like this, success hinges on whether the people who made it can draw you into the world of the characters and get you to care about the little mundane details of their lives. Fortunately this is a Mamoru Hosoda film and Hosoda has a tremendous knack for getting all the myriad feelings to do with family life up on the screen. This is a beautiful film.

I think it's a testament to Wolf Children's quiet power that I actually found it quite stressful a lot of the time. Hana is a single mother of two children with limited savings and limited job prospects, and also the children are partly ungovernable wild animals caught between the world of humans and the natural environment. All these things create very real difficulties for the family, at a persistent low level. Of course things are going to be alright in the end, because it's that sort of film, but that doesn't make the fragility of their lives any less vivid. The family is consistently in a position that feels horrifyingly tenuous. Every time they pull through is a small, wonderful triumph, and the simple kindness that others show to them gains immense dramatic weight.

All that underlies a story about how raising children is immensely difficult but is also immensely rewarding. Unfathomable effort is expended caring for these tiny, vulnerable people, and in the end they will leave you to live their own lives, but the process is its own reward. The struggle but also the joy seeps from every frame. The animation renders the man made world with real care for the little details that matter to the people who inhabit it, and the natural world with incredible beauty. The children also change between human and wolf with a wonderful fluidity which never makes it seem like their wolfishness is unnatural or strange. There are many stretches of wordless montage following the family through their lives and yet they never feel like padding, because every fibre of the film's being is dedicated to emphasising that all of these small moments of everyday life are important. They may not even feel important to the characters as they're happening, but each one is a memory that gradually forms the people that they are at the end of the story. Masakatsu Takagi's score is excellent, perfectly capturing and heightening the mood of every scene.

The end result is what I think is one of Hosoda's best films, a truly tender exploration of family life that radiates with love and care.