The Planet of the Apes and the waterworld in Interstellar aren’t the only places in cinema where the time dilation phenomenon can be observed. A few metres down the railway track from a smalltown station in Tomohisa Taguchi’s anime romance, downtrodden hero Kaoru (Oji Suzuka) slips down a bank to find a cleft in a rockface; it gives on to the Urashima tunnel, a magical passageway capable of granting your greatest wish. But mere seconds spent in this molten-canopied alley chasing after your heart’s desire equate to hours on the outside; minutes mean years.
Kaoru wants to bring his younger sister, Karen, back to life; his alcoholic father blames him for her death. And he finds an unexpected ally in Anzu (Marie Iitoyo), the new girl in his high-school class to whom he lends an umbrella one morning at the station. As they investigate the tunnel, and try to pin down its properties, Kaoru is drawn increasingly closer to this soft-spoken but hard-nosed free spirit – and troubled by her egotism in wanting to forge on inside to acquire the talent to become a superlative manga artist.
The film’s metaphysical setup – asking what price we pay in the real world for chasing our obsessions – aims at something with the grand lyrical sweep of Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name. But Taguchi doesn’t delve too hard into the premise. With much of the plot focused on Kaoru and Anzu gauging the time-bending parameters almost scientifically, the director isn’t completely committed to weighing up the cost of their ultimate wishes in terms of what it means for their budding relationship. The tunnel ends up feeling like a bit of a gimmick rather than an all-consuming anomaly.
The animation, though, is something else. Taguchi has an intuitive sense of when to embellish his elegant figurework with epiphanic flourishes: the intersecting contrails in the sky as the lovebirds get their act together, or Kaoru in profile on the floor caught in a cascade of Anzu’s hair. The emo-erotic bubble of the visuals does what the story can’t quite manage alone, and captures the momentousness of first love.
• The Tunnel to Summer, Exit of Goodbyes is released on 14 July in UK and Irish cinemas, with an Australia release date to be confirmed.
