Lu Over the Wall
Nobody does drugs in Lu Over the Wall, but watching it you get the sense that everyone responsible for making it might have. You could chalk up the film’s unbridled strangeness and unfailing whimsy to demographics. Distributor GKids is selling it as “family friendly,” which it is, an innocuous, offbeat alternative to the conventional computer animated joints typically found in modern multiplexes. But there’s “whimsical” and there’s “weird,” and Lu Over the Wall ventures well past the former and into the latter before director Masaaki Yuasa gets through the opening credits. It’s tempting to assume everyone in the studio dropped acid during production and scribbled their hallucinations on celluloid.
Or then again, maybe Yuasa’s team is just imaginative, and maybe they bought into everything Lu Over the Wall is selling without thinking twice. Frankly, if you worked on a production this cheerfully eccentric, you’d get caught up in its idiosyncrasies, too, if only because there are so damn many of them. Barely a moment goes by where we come close to touching base with reality: Even its most human beats, those precious hints of relatable qualities that encourage our empathy, are elongated, distorted, rendered nigh unrecognizable by exaggeration. Lu Over the Wall isn’t a movie that takes itself seriously, and for the average moviegoer, that’s very much a trait worth embracing.
The plot is both simple and not: Teenager Kai (voiced by Michael Sinterniklaas in the English dub), recently relocated from Tokyo to the quiet fishing village of Hinashi, spends his days doing what most teenage boys do, sullenly hunkering down in his room and shutting out the world. When he isn’t sulking, he’s composing music and uploading it to the internet for all to listen to, and they do, especially classmates Yuho (Stephanie Sheh) and Kunio (Brandon Engman), two overenthusiastic but well-meaning rock ’n’ roll aspirants. They have a band. They want Kai to join their band. Kai, of course, would rather be left alone, but when you’re a city kid in a tiny podunk town, locals tend to exoticize you even if you’re just an average adolescent.
As Kai struggles with his self-imposed isolation, he befriends Lu (Christine Marie Cabanos), a manic pixie dream mermaid wrought in miniature. It’s his music that draws her to him, you see, because what kind of merfolk can refuse funky homemade beats? She forces an introduction, he plays some tunes, her fins turn into feet and she dances. Naturally, Kai finds the whole thing completely counterproductive to his “gloomy loner” brand, but Lu is adorable, and eventually he warms up to her (and also to Yuho and Kunio). But Kai’s friendship with Lu has its limitations as well as dangers: Merfolk, like vampires, can’t endure direct sunlight without getting flambéed, and Hinashi’s townspeople don’t take too kindly to the fish-legged.