Review | The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes movie review: Japanese animated teen romance tackles grief, abandonment and self-doubt
- Anzu seeks escape from the present, Kaoru to rewrite the past when they discover a magical tunnel in this beautiful tale of adolescent angst and first love
- The simplicity of the film’s narrative and its unhurried pacing play into its message of embracing the present and treasuring what time we have on Earth
3/5 stars
Would you sacrifice the time you have in the present in order to recapture something lost from your past? The discovery by a pair of melancholy teenagers of a magical tunnel poses precisely this quandary in Tomohisa Taguchi’s new animated feature film The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes.
Adapted from the award-winning light novel by Mei Hachimoku, this beautifully realised tale of first love and adolescent angst achieves an emotional maturity through its weighty themes of grief, abandonment and self-doubt. While it clocks in at a brisk 83 minutes, Taguchi never feels rushed in his execution.
Set in 2005, in a small rural town, the story opens with a chance meeting at an isolated railway station between timid high-schooler Kaoru Tono (voiced by Oji Suzuka) and Anzu Hanashiro (Marie Iitoyo), a brash girl from the city.
Although initially cold and reluctant to make conversation, Anzu slowly warms to Kaoru and they exchange numbers. This takes on greater meaning when they learn that they are to be classmates, yet Anzu shows no interest whatsoever in making friends with the other students.
On the way home, Kaoru stumbles across a tunnel in the woods beside the railway tracks. He ventures inside to discover a brightly lit and seemingly endless cavern, but on exiting, finds that Anzu has followed him; she informs him that he has been gone for hours.