The Imaginary: The Case for Child Imagination for Life

Rudger is a boy no one can see, imagined by Amanda to share her thrilling make-believe adventures. But when Rudger, suddenly alone, arrives at The Town of Imaginaries, where forgotten Imaginaries live and find work, he faces a mysterious threat.

REVIEW:

Imaginary friends are having a renaissance. If , released a few months called them IF. Their rich symbolism and dream like existence are suited for animation of the Miyazaki style. So one of his disciples Yoshiyuki Momose, who went on to form Studio Pognoc on Miyazaki’s supposed retirement, is a natural heir to adapt a story of this nature.

The Imaginary is based on the British novel of the same name by A.F. Harold. Momose had to go outside of Japan for inspiration because Nipon culture has no mythology or belief in imaginary playmates. Here, every child has a secret friend when the stresses of human life create the therapeutic need for it. For Amanda, (voiced in the English language dub by Evie Kiszel) that is Rudger (Louie Rudge-Buchanan) a highly protective blonde blue eyed boy, who with which she has a lot of after school adventures with. Amanda’s father passed a few months back.

However, the thrust of the story is not Amanda’s but Rudger’s. An accident has her separated from him, and Rudger wandering levels of allegory, symbolism and reality that threatens to dissolve him to dream dust, to find and reconnect with her again. It’s all touching and powerfully rendered designed to carry the concept so that it can function inside the adult world full of responsibilities and bracing realities.

Like a fairy tale it delivers gentle moral and insights that will resonate with small and big humanity. It always adheres to the three rules that Rudger makes Amanda swear to- never disappear, protect each other and never cry. The last is the only one that is broken.

The two are metaphorical siblings. No messy crushes can intervene. They just spar and compromise to make sure their identities are properly respected. Rudger exists to assuage the grief of life, find an accommodation between dreams and nightmares. Reality is portrayed as a fat and voracious, old British man with a walrus mustache and big clear glasses, a hidden cannibal that eats imagination, and is always accompanied by a Ring spirit dressed in gray and black.

The imaginary world is vividly rendered, a heaven portrayed as a vast library full of imaginative tales, and creatives- an old dog, pink hippo, a curious timepiece and other boys and girls waiting for the need to exist in some child’s mind. Rudger fights through all the temptations to be with Amanda. That is where his true harmony resides.

The film can stretch itself too thin in depicting the varieties of child-like imaginations. It slows a bit in the heaven scenes. Strays some. Rudger’s confrontation with reality and death can be blunt and obvious, studded with slowly delivered platitudes about seeing and dreaming and being an adult.