Two friends visit their old apartment building and make haunting discoveries in this animated film from Hiroyasu Ishida.
You never know what you’re getting with real estate: a building could have water damage from sailing through the ocean; could have structural damage from colliding, Titantic-style, with other drifting domiciles; or it could have a spirit-child squatter. This makes for a terrible appraisal but might make for a great fantasy drama.
Just not in “Drifting Home,” Hiroyasu Ishida’s animated film on Netflix, which feels utterly lost at sea.
The film follows Kosuke and Natsume, sixth graders and longtime friends who were raised together in the same apartment complex, and whose relationship has been tense ever since Kosuke’s grandfather died. Natsume sneaks back to the building where they once lived, which is set to be demolished. When Kosuke and an irrelevant brat pack of peers find her, they’re magically transported to an ocean haunted by ghosts of buildings long past.
Though “Drifting Home” delivers a great visual concept (both a public pool and a department store with decaying walls sail by like the ghostly cousins of the Mary Celeste), it doesn’t deliver on the action. The pacing lags and the beats are predictable; the film’s go-to antic is having children repeatedly topple overboard.
The emotional battleground between the reticent but traumatized Natsume and the guarded Kosuke is rich territory but feels more procedural than fleshed out, as does the fantastical logic of the world, which lacks coherence. So the underlying metaphor is unclear: Is it how nostalgia is linked to places, or is it an elegy for the actual structures and neighborhoods that have changed? It’s hard to tell with a film whose narrative goes so unattended.
Drifting Home
Rated PG. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
