Drifting Home review: Netflix’s anime celebrates change, with a fantasy spin

When you are a kid, it can feel more like an adventure to move into a new house than to face the devastation of the existing world. In hindsight this apocalyptic feel should be seen as too dramatic. Penguin Highway Hiroyasu, the director, is serious about it and puts it in a very literal light with his second animated feature. Do you drift home?You can now stream it on Netflix. Do you drift home?’s elementary schooler protagonists Kosuke and Natsume are coming to terms with the loss of their former apartment building, when it suddenly heads out toward the middle of the ocean with them and their friends aboard.

The Kamonomiya Apartment Complex is an example of the 1960s post-war growth in a neighbourhood on the cusp of revival. Kosuke and Natsume used to live in these “haunted apartments,” now scheduled for demolition, and reportedly occupied only by ghosts. The gradual disappearance of their home has been a clear sign of an ailing friendship. They have fallen apart due to an exchanging of poorly chosen words, exacerbated by their diverging priorities and interests.

The opening sequence is beautiful and simple. It traces their friendship, going back in time to the days when the area was alive. As the images shift towards the past, the scaffolding, weathering, mold and rust slowly disappear. Kosuke, her friends and their schoolmates quickly set up at school. They then travel to the abandoned flats looking for the ghost who haunts them. They instead meet Natsume, her new strange friend Noppo and a former resident.

Image by Netflix

Soon, they are separated from reality by a torrential downpour. The apartment block, which is in disarray, begins floating along the seafloor like a boat, without any hope for rescue. Similar to Penguin HighwayIshida creates an early tale about coming of age on the porous frontier between the supernatural and the everyday. It shows how the world suddenly disappears, yet seamlessly. It’s an uncanny moment that feels like real magic, tied up in concise editing. That sense of uncanniness holds throughout the film, thanks to Ishida and co-writer Hayashi Mori’s good instincts to avoid getting bogged down in the mechanics of what’s happening. It is a story that’s driven only by feelings, and not by explanations.

It is both a journey down memory lane for the old friend and an opportunity to confront each other about what lies ahead. As they fumble toward mutual understanding, their friendship carries more complications than either of them realized, in part because of their shared relationship with Kosuke’s recently deceased grandfather Yasuji, who lived in the apartments since they were first built. Yasuji involved both kids in his hobby, photography, and became Natsume’s replacement for her own dysfunctional family. As Yasuji dies, so does the apartment, and Kosuke and Natsume’s friendship hits a point of its entropy. Natsume is unable to let go her attachment to this place. This could lead to a difficult future with Kosuke.

Two children find change shockingly foreign at this time in their lives. Therefore, leaving behind a home and its memories is like removing an limb. Ishida Mori plays with the notion in their script. The symbolism of young people becoming castaways at a transitory point in life — even the specific idea of impossibly castaway buildings — has seen a number of iterations in anime, most recently in the series Sonny BoyShingo Natsume directed “The Greatest Showmanship”.

ButDo you drift home?Different because Ishida, Mori both ask this question: How would it be if these characters felt the same feelings for this place? Noppo is the film’s most uncanny magic touch: He’s a lanky, vaguely creepy boy who seems to be the personification of the apartment complex. Noppo’s true nature is heavily telegraphed, but the depth of his connection to the children is both novel and moving. It is evident how deep his grief runs. He laments his abandonment: “Everyone’s gone now, but I’m still here.”

The anthropomorphization of an entire housing complex — who has his own journey to reconcile the process of losing Kosuke and Natsume to new apartments — threatens no small amount of corniness. But the story’s slightly morbid details make it work: His bones are made of concrete rebar, and his skin is being reclaimed by plant life, much like an abandoned building disappears under grasses, moss, and mold. Through Noppo, the presence of this postwar architecture becomes something ephemeral, and it’s interesting and often moving to see Ishida tackle the ways the children are confronted with these ideas of impermanence, for people and place alike.

Studio Colorido has produced a charming animation (Penguin Highway, Get A WhiskerThe outlandish idea is well-sold by (). Although the action centers around a structure floating in the water like a boat, it shifts and breaks easily. The young characters have similar effects. They are drawn using gentle, subtle lines. Akihiro Nagae’s designs remain down-to-earth even with the more fantastical figures that appear to the children. The photorealistic background art contrasts modernity with midcentury, postwar architecture, but Ishida’s direction doesn’t obsess over realism. It never feels at odds with the film’s sense of peril when the director inflects broad, sometimes elastic physical comedy on the characters’ interactions with these environments, like when Kosuke daringly uses a makeshift zipwire to reach an adjacent floating building, crashes through the corrugated iron roof, and bounces through the room below like a pinball.

Explore both the childish fickleness of children and their sensitivity. Do you drift home? continues the work of Ishida’s Penguin Highway: The movies show children in their full potential for selfishness, selflessness and wisdom. Both films portray them equally. It is easy to believe that there are moments of insight, but also immature impulses. Even mature realizations can quickly merge into childish feelings, such as Kosuke’s inability to reconcile with Natsume because of petty jealousy.

Image by Netflix

Ishida once again likes characters who clash and disagree without necessarily having to be right. As they grow up, each character discovers a side to themselves that is less apparent. Through the film, Ishida helps them learn how to be more self-aware and more compassionate toward others. One girl, Reina, who moves increasingly into the film’s focus, is amusingly contradictory in this way — she postures as the adult, pragmatic member of the group, but she’s also obsessed with rollercoasters. She makes a big show of herself by constantly bragging about her upcoming trip to Florida (even wearing a Miami T-shirt as a constant reminder), but it’s quickly made clear that the bluster is a childish bid for Kosuke’s attention. In the end, Natsume is a target of her ire. Reina is a window into Ishida’s compelling approach to writing children — often as capable of being self-absorbed brats as they’re capable of dispensing straightforward wisdom, and never villainized either way.

There’s enough liveliness to Do you drift home? that two hours in a single location against a minimal background doesn’t actually feel like overkill — the apartment is made to feel expansive, and the kids end up drifting past other abandoned buildings that become chances for adventure. The movie doesn’t quite manage to maintain intrigue in the same way that Penguin Highway’s amusing avian hijinks do, especially with that film’s gradually unspooling scientific approach to its fantasy. However, the thrill is not Do you drift home?It is nevertheless compelling.

Ishida & Mori are not great characters. As they get more panicked and screaming at one another, it is easy to see that Ishida & Mori have hit repetitive notes. That tension hits diminishing returns quite quickly. These moments are believable and make it seem like children who have been left on their own during an intense race to find food.

Although the journey itself is intelligently and sensibly realized, there are certain points. Do you drift home?Does it feel? It is a bit lost as the characters struggle between their youthful instincts and compassion for their friends. Regardless, the film is admirable for its patient commitment to unpacking the children’s feelings about each other, the building, and other relics from their pasts, all as they learn how to carry their attachments and memories to new places.

Do you drift home?You can stream Netflix right now