The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes — Anime Movie Review
Summer 2023’s looking great for anime movies in the UK. Coming up over the next couple of months are: 1) the highly-anticipated (by me, at least) Psycho-pass: Providence movie that promises to explain some of the lingering mysteries left over from the fantastic third TV season; 2) The First Slam Dunk — a movie adaptation of the seminal 1990s manga (first serialised in the West as part of Raijin Comics — anyone else remember that?); and 3) today’s review, the SF/fantasy romance The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes. The UK got this a few weeks before the US in this instance, which is more than can be said for Miss Hokusai director Keiichi Hara’s newest movie Lonely Castle in the Mirror which showed in US theatres last month, but there’s still no sign of a UK distributor willing to take it on.
Based on a 2019 light novel by author Mei Hachimoku and animated by Studio CLAP (Pompo the Cinephile), The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes is directed by the very busy Tomohisa Taguchi whose most recent works include the excellent TV anime Akudama Drive, plus Bleach: Thousand Year Blood War and Kino’s Journey: The Beautiful World. Perhaps his past work on two Persona 3 movies and the Persona 4 Golden TV show helped prepare him for this movie that expertly straddles the mundane, the melancholy, and the magical.
Kaoru Touno is a quiet high school student, the only son of a broken family. After a tragedy destroyed his parents’ marriage, his mother left Kaoru with his abusive, alcoholic father who blames him for the accidental death of his little sister, Karen. Kaoru’s sole wish is for his beloved sister to return to life. When he accidentally stumbles upon the mythical and spooky Urashima Tunnel, he discovers a way to make his dream a reality — but at great personal sacrifice.
Kaoru’s ally on his quest is misanthropic fellow student Anzu Hanashiro, a recent transfer to Kaoru’s class who fails to endear herself to her classmates with her standoffish attitude. As they spend more and more time together investigating the mysteries of the magical tunnel, they gradually become closer until they must make a terrible choice, one that could cost both of them dearly.
Despite a brisk runtime of only 83 minutes, making this one of the shortest anime movies I’ve seen in a while, The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes takes its time to build a bleak picture of Kaoru’s sad life. He is neglected and victimised by his drunken, threatening father, and even internalises the blame for his sister’s death, while his father outright accuses him. He’s a vulnerable kid, for whom life is painful and his home is anything but a refuge. Kaoru can barely muster up the courage to vocalise answers to his father’s questions, let alone challenge him, on more than one occasion suffering panic attacks, even vomiting, when triggered by his father’s brutish insensitivity. It’s no wonder he’s willing to throw his entire life away for an elusive dream.
Anzu has traumas of her own, and a deeply-held wish — but hers is rooted in impostor syndrome — she feels she isn’t good enough, and her self-critical beliefs are reinforced by rejection from her family. Her angry and aloof exterior hides a wounded heart that pines for validation and success, but she feels unworthy to seek it out. In Kaoru she finds someone who accepts and encourages her, and she gives him the structure and drive to investigate the possibilities of the sinister Urashima Tunnel.
I always enjoy when a film provides its characters with a puzzle that requires methodical, logical investigation in order to achieve a defined goal, however mystical or far-fetched. The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes achieves this with remarkably satisfying efficiency. The Urashima Tunnel with its unsettlingly triangular entrance is an endless, dark, freaky place filled with glowing trees covered in what looks like large metallic bismuth crystals. The floor is submerged in water, on which floats a mat of colorful leaves. The legend is that those willing to travel deep enough into the tunnel will find their greatest wish granted — but they will age a hundred, maybe even a thousand years in payment.
What this means in practice is that time moves extremely slowly in the tunnel compared to the outside. Anzu and Kaoru investigate the intricacies of this using their cellphones. Past a certain threshold, seconds become hours, minutes become days, hours become weeks, and days potentially become years. The deeper one penetrates the tunnel, the more life outside speeds on by. It’s not that the person ages a hundred years, so much as the world outside does. To seek one’s desire means to forgo all other attachments to the world — to family, friends, school, career, home etc. To Kaoru such a concept is dangerously enticing.
It’s a fascinating idea, ripe for narrative exploration, and the film mines it well for moral quandaries and emotional devastation. Does Kaoru really have no attachments? Is it right for him to sacrifice everything to bring back a dead loved one? Folklore is rife with stories of people unstuck in time — Washington Irvine’s story Rip Van Winkle no doubt homaged multiple tales of people sleeping for extended periods and wakening to find their world irrevocably changed. British folklore in particular is full of tales of people unwittingly “spirited away” by fairies to dance and make merry, only to return to the mundane world to find years or even centuries have passed. The Urashima Tunnel takes such story concepts and streamlines them. The tunnel has tangible, predictable rules. It seems like fantasy, but in execution is more like science fiction. If anything, it’s a lot like the time dilation from Gunbuster or Voices of a Distant Star. Like those anime, it explores the separation of characters by vast swathes of time.
The best fairy stories make even terrifying concepts seem strangely alluring — and like a trip to fairyland to seek a sort of immortality, we feel how profoundly Kaoru is drawn to the tunnel. I wonder if given the same situation as a teenager, whether I might have been tempted. Kaoru doesn’t care that his father will miss him (other than it being an inconvenience on more than one occasion when he accidentally miscalculates and spends too long in the tunnel), nor does he seem to consider things like “where will I live when I come back in the future when everyone I know is dead?”. Teenagers do tend to be singleminded and blinkered like that.
Outside of the tunnel, Kaoru’s mundane rural seaside town looks like anything from any standard anime production — muted grey when it rains, bright summer yellows with the sunshine. The summer Kaoru and Anzu spend together as allies has itself a dreamlike quality, as they enact common anime tropes like an aquarium visit, a summer festival, and climactic fireworks. But unlike the usual slice-of-life anime featuring these events, Kaoru wants to reject it all and chase an ephemeral dream.
That dream is depicted in the strangeness of the tunnel and its jarring otherwordliness in comparison to Kaoru’s town. There’s always a sense of urgency, a wrongness in the tunnel. We’re aware that every minute spent in there is a further sacrifice. Nothing about the tunnel is comforting — if anything it’s menacing, or at least indifferently malign. Some of the film’s most dramatic moments happen in the tunnel, and its imagery isn’t something I’m likely to forget any time soon. I don’t want to spoil the ending other than to say it is cathartic and emotional, and thankfully not as contrived or tidy as I worried it could have been. There are consequences, and some… unusual obstacles for our characters to tackle later offscreen.
I took my two oldest children and my two younger brothers to see this film, and their opinions were uniformly positive. My son said it was the best anime film he’d seen in a long time, and I would agree. It’s far superior to any of the franchise-related theatrical releases we’ve been subjected to lately. There’s something to be said for a short, succinct movie with something to say, that’s not part of some overarching metanarrative, that’s crafted well, and likely to remain long in the mind afterwards. The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes is that movie, and I heartily recommend it. It painfully evokes the hopes, disappointments and intensity of adolescence, reminding us of the times we’ve lost, but also the memories we retain. Hopefully it will reach wider release in North America after its premiere at the end of the month at Otakon. It’s currently on wide release in the UK, with presumably a home blu-ray forthcoming from Anime Limited at some point in the coming months.
The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes
Based on the light novel by: Mei Hachimoku (18th July 2019, Shogakukan)
Writer and director: Tomohisa Taguchi
Music: Harumi Fuuki
Character design: Tomomi Yabuki
Production studio: CLAP
Language: Japanese audio with English subtitles
JP theatrical release: 9th September 2022
UK theatrical release: 14th July 2023
UK distributor: Anime Limited
US Premiere: Otakon, Washington D.C., July 28th-30th 2023
US Distributor: Sentai Filmworks
BBFC rating: 12A
Runtime: 83 minutes
