The Imaginary: Sweet, but slightly flawed

 

The Imaginary (2023) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG, for scary images and dramatic intensity

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

Despite its often melancholy tone, director Yoshiyuki Momose’s wildly colorful film is a heartfelt valentine to children and their imaginary friends.

 

Amanda and her "imaginary friend," Rudger, enjoy wonderfully colorful adventures
limited solely by what she dreams up.

This is the third film from Tokyo’s Studio Ponoc, founded in 2015 by Yoshiaki Nishimura, former lead producer of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. The Imaginary follows 2017’s Mary and the Witch’s Flower and 2018’s Modest Heroes, all three boasting the colorfully lush, hand-drawn animation that has long been a hallmark of Studio Ghibli.

And, just as Studio Ghibli dipped into British children’s literature with 2010’s The Secret World of Arrietty — based on Mary Norton’s beloved 1952 novel, The Borrowers — Momose and screenwriter Yoshiaki Nishimura have adapted A.F. Harrold’s popular 2014 British children’s novel, with illustrations by Emily Gravett.

 

That said, Momose does his film no favors with a chaotic prologue likely to overwhelm viewers ... and perhaps even put them off. (Grit your teeth and hang on for five minutes, at which point things will make sense.)

 

Young Amanda (voiced in the American edition by Evie Kiszel) and her mother, Lizzie (Hayley Atwell) live above the Shuffleup Book Shop, a charming little store her parents established in an unspecified English country village. But Lizzie hasn’t been able to make ends meet since her husband’s recent death; job interviews haven’t been promising, and the shop is days from closing.

 

Her father’s absence explains Amanda’s creation of Rudger (Louie Rudge-Buchanan) — please, never “Roger” — an imaginary friend who proudly boasts that he was born “three months, three weeks and three days ago.”  Thanks to an active imagination fueled by the contents of her marvelous attic bedroom — a retreat most of us would have hungered for, at a similar age — Amanda and Rudger share all manner of exciting, colorful and just-dangerous-enough-to-be-thrilling adventures.

 

Rudger is completely real to her, which — and this is the story’s core point — makes him real, although he can be seen only by Amanda. During their flamboyant exploits, all of them opulently realized by Momose and his talented animators, the two frequently chant a mantra:

 

“Whatever happens, never disappear ... protect each other ... and never cry.”

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