Hailing from the legendary Japanese distributor Toho, WOLF CHILDREN was a hit theatrical release in Nippon in 2012 and, and no wonder (well, aside from riding the lupine coattails of TWILIGHT movies, of course). Visually stirring and hitting a lot of buttons for longtime Japanimation connoisseurs, animator Mamoru Hosoda's tender fantasy does not hail from Hayao Miyazaki's renown Studio Ghibli - but there is a strong affinity, particularly in its reverence for the natural world.
Heroine Hana is an orphaned, big-city Japanese college student with a keep-smiling attitude to life (pretty girl, big-city college student, keep-smiling attitude to life? Like I said, it's a fantasy). She falls in love with a handsome loner on the fringes of the campus. The nameless man reveals his astounding secret, that he is actually a Japanese wolf, the last of his kind, hiding in human form. Werewolf movies have it all wrong, he affirms.
