I Wish
Kiseki

I Wish is a charming, funny, pleasantly meandering film about childhood from Japanese director/screenwriter/editor Hirokazu Kore-eda. The film stars two brothers, Koki and Ohshirô Maeda, who play siblings separated by their parent’s divorce. Each boy has gone to live with a different parent in a different city, but both live fairly happy lives with plenty of good friends. Still, the older brother wishes to reunite the family and discovers the idea that the new bullet train service could make this happen if both brothers make a special wish at the exact moment two trains pass each other at a specific time and place.

The film captures childhood feelings, dreams, and states of being with a unique and authentic voice, totally free of condescension. All the young stars give performances that feel like kids rather than child actors. This is a sweet and tender coming-of-age picture whose wistful and whimsical narrative style will connect more with adults than children. Koreeda walks the line between Steven Spielberg, the American master of childhood dreams, and Yasujiro Ozu, the Japanese master of minimalist observation, in creating a film that feels neither overblown nor underdeveloped.

The first half of the film does take a while to find its focus, spending perhaps too much time developing the adult characters in the town where the older son lives, and I do wish the movie had been more equally told from both boys’ perspectives. Still, once the kids and their respective gangs of friends hit the road, the film settles into a delightful pace and presents wonderful moments along the stops and starts of its coming-of-age/road-movie structure.