Review: "Hotel Hibiscus" is an extraordinarily serene film that shares similarities in style to some of Takeshi Kitano's stone cold calm film moments as well as owing a bit to Hayao Miyazaki in its celebration of childlike irreverence. The film focuses on a dilapidated hotel which is run by an interesting melting pot of a family that never ceases to remind themselves of their international roots. We are introduced to the family as Mieko and her two friends wheel in a backpacker they find lying on the street. Notojima, played by Toshihiro Wada, wakes up in the hotel surrounded by the eclectic family, and is insistently invited to stay in their single guest room. While the idea of a hotel only having one available guest rooms seems funny, and it is, it reflects the off kilter attitude of the family perfectly.

Mieko also has a brother and a sister. The brother is an African American boy named Kenji who aspires to be a champion boxer. The daughter is a white American teenager, and although you would expect them to be out of place, they blend in so well with the rest of the Okinawan family, and the connection between all of the household members really helps to stabilize the films focus. There's never any mention of their race at all in the movie, and it is treated as naturally as anything else. Their mother still keeps in touch occasionally with their respective fathers. Kenji's father lives on a local US Military base, and the daughter takes a trip with their mother to the US at one point in the film to visit her father.

While the family is the centerpiece of the movie, everything is portrayed through the whimsical perspective of young Mieko. The equal parts exuberant and pouty nature of Mieko (played by Honami Kurashita) are what really makes this a Studio Ghibli-esque work. It's very hard to capture the colorful and intimate fashion of childhood that Miyazaki and his peers have gracefully committed to animation repeatedly in the past, and bring it to the screen in live action form. Perhaps part of this style comes from its original manga source material, but without seeing it myself I can't be sure. Either way, director Yuji Nakae (who also wrote the screenplay with Motoko) never wavers from showing the film from this particular, larger than life viewpoint. It's fairly magnificent at times.

The performances are all wonderful, and over the top when they need to be. The movie is almost completely bereft of sad, solemn moments, and aims more to capture the innocence and frivolity of a single summer passing by. Honami Kurashita stands out among the rest of the cast, and not only for being the main character. She's simply fun to watch, to follow around as she plays around the beautiful backdrop of Okinawa. It's hard not to keep relating her character and the film as a whole back to Studio Ghibli works, and to create a simple comparison, she is an amalgamation of the young girls from "My Neighbor Totoro", with a stunning (though more aged) likeness to the tragic Setsuko of Isao Takahata's "Grave of the Fireflies". Masao Teruya plays the eternally sleepy father, who runs a pool hall and has an incomparable "golden arm" when it comes to shooting pool.

Some may be turned off by the fact that nothing seems to really happen in "Hotel Hibiscus", but the intention of the film is to follow Mieko on her summer adventures, and it succeeds. The simplicity of everything is one of the real beauties of the movie. Contained within are a few chapters that each focus on the more notable events of the summer. "The Fence" tags along with Mieko and her friends as they trundle through the military base in search of a spirit called kijimunaa. This first chapter sets the mood of the film as a bright and sunny romp, which it never strays from. Following chapters such as "Sunny Mom" and "Mieko's Great Adventure" detail her mother leaving for the US and Mieko's consequent pouting, and Mieko's solo trip to the pineapple fields respectively. The final chapter focuses on Mieko's disbelief in the spirits of their ancestors since she can't see them. It's all so innocent and colorfully portrayed that it's hard not to get lost in it and reminded of how much fun it is to be a child.