Mirai is truly precious and downright heart-melting, while rarely coming off as treacly or overly-saccharine thanks to the clear place of experience and insight showcased in the portrayal of family and siblings that Hosoda possesses. His understanding of the essence of family grows more profound with every film. The man has always been fascinated with the theme of family and how our bonds to our lineage form us into the people we are. Mirai is perhaps the most resonant implementation of this theme the visionary director has yet conceived. Truly a beautiful, heartwarming and downright infectious and endlessly charming experience. The film doesn't follow a traditional plot structure and is possibly the director's most "arthouse" work yet, and this may not work for viewers less inclined to be fully absorbed by its child's eye view of the world, but the film perfectly captures that essence of a child's point of view.

In less capable hands the main character Kun, as a young child, could have easily been unrelentingly obnoxious and insufferable, but in his grasp the character is often more endearing than not. And when he isn't, its purposeful. The entire family feels extremely real and grounded. Kun feels like a real 4 year old kid. The parents feel like real, well-meaning but exhausted people simply trying not to screw up raising these little gremlins. Their relationship together is often chaotic and just barely avoids tearing at the seams, but ultimately their intrinsic love for each other always brings them to reconciliation.

Like many of his works, Mirai is an ode to the bonds that tie multiple generations of family together. It wasn't structured like a traditional narrative, or even most other Hosoda films, working rather as an interconnected set of dreamlike vignettes tied together by the recurring theme of familial ties and Kun's arc of understanding them instead. But the 4 year old protagonist made the film's childlike perception of the world and the blurring between reality and imagination believable. The film isn't interested in exploring the sci-fi mumbo-jumbo implications of the time-travelling aspect and it's honestly probably better for it. It would unnecessarily convolute its simple message.

Production-wise, this was possibly the director's best-looking work yet, with lots of interesting and diverse implementation of both traditional AND CG animation. Particularly, the use of CG for the house in the tracking shots to convey time passing through different sections of the massive structure was super cool and reminded me a lot of the extended take in Wolf Children that continuously shifts between the classrooms to show the children growing progressively older and climbing grades, only much more ambitious in scale. The final act was possibly the most exciting portion of the film for me, filled with dark, twisted imagery in a vast, disturbing and purgatory-esque train station. The art and color choices on display here was absolutely entrancing, expertly blending the 2D and CG mediums together.The level of detail in the character-acting in general was truly impressive. They went above and beyond to make every character's movements in the world perfectly fit their personalities and age.

This is simply one of the most effective cinematic expressions of a pure idea/theme I've ever seen, and the stunning visual and sound direction (particularly in the final act) can not be understated in its contributions to this. And regardless of one's opinions on the Oscars as a legitimately respectable awards ceremony, Mirai was certainly more than deserving of its nomination for Best Animated Feature, as well as being the first to hold the distinction of being the first non-Ghibli/Miyazaki Japanese animated film to earn such an honor.