It is a daunting task indeed to try to set up a proper lead-in for any kind of writeup about Penguin Highway. Marking Studio Colorido’s first foray into the world beyond the domestic market in Japan. The film is, consequently, immensely important for the anime industry. It’s a little weird to be saying that about a studio who are mostly known in the west not for their bevy of short films, but for a McDonald’s recruitment commercial, but it’s the truth. Yet at the same time, talking about it in those terms undersells the film itself. Said film being the kind of top-notch magical realist youth drama that is just plain good enough to bolster one’s faith in the entire genre, up there with Summer Wars and the seminal Your Name.

So what then is Penguin Highway? Well, as much as it’s about any central thematic point or plotline, it’s a backdrop for a 2-hour downpour of juxtaposed, surreal images that evoke the highs and lows of the summers of youth. Cola bottles that transmogrify into the titular penguins, a silver moon lurking in the forest that strikes all who see it ill, that same cursed wood being demarcated with a “no entry” sign. There’s the all-important Sea Orb (more on that in a bit), chess pieces turning into bats, playing cards floating down a river, Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock, towering thunderheads and typhoons. Penguin Highway is great at twisting and rolling up scores of these splintered memories and crushing them down into a pure liquid of summer surreality. In this way, it has something faintly in common with Fennesz’ seminal folktronica album Endless Summer.

This is not to imply that Penguin Highway lacks a plot, though. Our central character is Aoyama, a precocious boy genius. He’s a wise-beyond-his-years type, the kind that almost every nerdy child imagines they are. He keeps notebooks full of experiments and ‘research’, is stoic in the face of adversity, and is happily counting down the days until he becomes an adult.

Joining Aoyama as the secondary lead is a woman who works at the dental clinic he visits, who also happens to be his chess tutor. The woman is identified as simply “Onee-san” in the original, and as “The Dentist Office Lady” in the English subtitles. She is quite the enigma, and proves to be the film’s real central character. She’s also Aoyama’s crush, and the film thankfully does a pretty good job of keeping this on the “cute” side instead of dipping into anything unpleasant.

Also along for the ride are the nervy Uchida, Aoyama’s friend, Hanamoto, a similarly-smart girl and Aoyama’s primary chess rival, and Suzuki, the class bully.

There are of course, also, penguins.

To say that there are penguins in a film called Penguin Highway seems obvious, but these are no ordinary penguins. We learn pretty quickly into the film that Aoyama’s crush Onee-San is actually the one making them. Out of random, everyday objects though most notably, as briefly aforementioned, soda cans. Solving the mystery of how she's able to do this--as even she doesn't know--is what drives the first half of the film's plot, but it's not until the second half that the thematics really kick into high gear.

The film’s central theme is a broad, simple one. The kind of thing that this sort of movie works best with. “All good things must come to an end” is a maxim so ingrained in the human cultural experience that it’s more of a cliche than anything. Yet, it is precisely this idea that Penguin Highway wrings for emotional impact.

Aoyama, Uchida, and Hamamoto discover something strange in a vast clearing in the middle of the forest. It’s an orb, floating in the air, and made of pure water. Hanamoto dubs it Umi--The Sea--and the trio spend their summer alternately playing near and studying the Sea Orb.

The montage of the three playing together is probably the emotionally brightest moment in the entire film, and to bring back that mention of Endless Summer from earlier, this is where it most expertly weaves together fractious summer memories into a refined whole. Almost everyone has experienced something like the trio’s summer near the Sea Orb. I must imagine, involving far fewer spherical anomalies, but the sentiment remains.

It’s every mystery of childhood rolled into one, and scaled up a thousandfold. The three are having the time of their lives, and Aoyama even imagines that he’ll be awarded a Nobel Prize for their work studying the Sea Orb, fantasizing about “Onee-San” visiting his acceptance ceremony in a white dress.

It, of course, does not last.

Suzuki and his lackeys eventually trail the trio, and discover the Sea Orb too. They menace the kids, but are broken up by Onee-San, whose army of penguins prove to react strangely to the orb. Aoyama, fascinated by the reaction, wants Onee-San to join the three of them in researching it. Hamamoto, flustered by Aoyama’s obvious crush on Onee-San, and unable to reconcile it with her own obvious crush on Aoyama, refuses. The two fight, and the youthful summer comes to a sudden, crashing halt.

Here again is a stab at universality. We’ve all fought with our friends as kids--often over immensely silly things in hindsight--and that feeling of endless days coming to a sudden, blindsiding halt, is all too familiar.

Things get worse.

During subsequent meetups with Onee-San, it becomes obvious that the same “penguin energy” that keeps her penguins around is also sustaining her. She stops eating, and if she moves too far from the Sea Orb she becomes ill, tying back to an early scene where a penguin that gets too far from town reverts into the soda can it was made from. Worse, the jabberwocks that have been troubling her nightmares start appearing in reality, putting the entire town on edge as scientists from the nearby university (where Momotama’s father works) search for the creatures.

The Sea Orb starts expanding, threatening to engulf the whole town, and sparking an evacuation. It eventually becomes clear that the only way to stop the thing is to destroy it. Something that will kill the penguins. And Onee-San.

The generality of loss is a hard theme to tackle. No two people grieve the same way. No two losses are exactly equivalent. People enter our lives and leave them in a plurality of ways. The reason that Penguin Highway’s scaling-down of all loss into Aoyama’s loss of his first love, Onee-San, is that no matter who you’ve lost, or how, the sudden-ness is what is universal. One day someone is there, the next they are not. No matter the actual timeframes, there is a distinct before and after, a time when, like the endless summer, it seemed like the relationship--whatever it was--would go on forever, and a time after, when it becomes devastatingly clear that it won’t. Yet, it goes without saying that, well, nothing lasts forever.

They do destroy the Sea Orb, in what has to be among the most beautifully-animated runs of the decade. The entire final 30 minutes of the film is simply gorgeous, and if anything blunts the heartache of Onee-San’s death, it’s this. Colorido have a reputation as being a premier studio who do innovative, expertly-executed work. If anything needed to further cement that reputation, let it be this. The inside of the Sea Orb, which turns out to be a sort-of black hole, is wonderfully imaginative. It resembles a sort of long-after-the-apocalypse flooded earth, with random bits of manmade scenery floating both in the air and under the water, in the infinite sea.

This is more or less the end of Penguin Highway. After they leave the Sea Orb, and the penguins finish hunting down the miniature water globes that constitute its remains, Aoyama and we, the audience, say goodbye to Onee-San. The last time the two spend together is them rushing to the cafe` that they'd meet at for chess lessons, along a literal yellow brick road.

Aoyama drinks bitter tea as the penguins outside fade one by one. Onee-San leaves, and vanishes. The film’s credits are scored to a song built around the word “goodbye” as a central lyric.

Is Penguin Highway a perfect film? No, but it’s a good argument that more anime films need to make their way west. It’s an expertly-done take on an age-old theme. Making something so broad and so simple seem fresh and newly timeless is no mean feat. At the very least, it will hopefully raise the profiles of all involved, from Studio Colorido itself (who have been building a quietly impressive portfolio for the past decade, despite escaping notice of most American otaku), Director Hiroyasu Ishida, script-writer Makoto Ueda, to the many specific animators involved.

If Penguin Highway is a sign of what’s to come in the 2020s, either from Colorido specifically or from the medium in general, it’s a portent we should all be happy to heed. A lighthouse on the coast.