Then things begin to get really complicated for Taku. She lost all the cash she brought for this trip, you see - and whatever you do, she admonishes him, don't tell anyone! But Taku ends up telling Yutaka anyway the last thing he wants is for his friend to start getting the wrong ideas about him and that girl. When the class goes on a summer trip to Hawaii (compensation for another, canceled trip), Rikako confronts Taku, apropos of nothing, and asks to borrow a pile of money from him. Then, over the next few months, Taku and Rikako are thrown together by one discomfiting set of circumstances after another. Maybe someone will be nice enough to roll out an emotional red carpet for her, but Taku doesn't seem himself as that someone. Maybe the real story, as Taku learns from his mother, is that Rikako (still just 'Muto' to her classmates) is lonely and displaced - her mother's divorced, and she's not even living at home. Stuck up, she is, or so the other girls say.

Both of them have their eyes on the new girl who just transferred in from Tokyo, Rikako Muto. Yutaka is the more studious and buttoned-down of the two Taku is more footloose. The guys in question are Taku Morisaki and Yutaka Matsuno, who attend the same high school in a little town on Shikoku. 'I can hear the sea'), and it involves one of the most staple of subjects for such material: Two guys and a girl. Waves is a light comedy of teenage manners based on Saeko Himuro's novel ( Umi ga kikoeru, lit. I mentioned Only Yesterday, but My Neighbors The Yamadasalso fits.

Originally released in 1993, Ocean Waves is one of a clutch of movies produced by Ghibli that is not fantasy, but unpretentiously rooted in everyday life. © 2002 Saeko Himuro - Studio Ghibli - N Scoping out the new girl. Is it essential viewing? Not really, not in the same way Princess Mononokeor My Neighbor Totoro are. And like Only Yesterday, it's worth forgetting that this is a Studio Ghibli film, because I worry that imposes unrealistic expectations about its quality, intentions, and end results.

Ocean Waves, like Only Yesterday before it, is one of a handful of Studio Ghibli films that are only just now seeing their first releases in the United States.

Studio ghibli ocean waves