Ah, summertime. Who doesn't have nostalgic memories of spending those sweltering months indoors cranking up the AC and playing video games instead of going outside and enjoying the season like a normal, healthy human being? A right proper geek of a lad, high school student Kenji Koiso has spent his summer working as an online moderator in the virtual world of Second Life OZ.

In OZ, you can be who or what you want to be — from human to anthropomorphic cartoon animal to anything else you can imagine. Kenji's best friend Sakuma is an 8-bit monkey head sprite, and virtual fighting champion King Kazma is a badass cartoon rabbit. With a fanciful online world to play around in like this, who needs reality? Then a girl shows up.

When Natsuki Shinohara comes to Kenji and asks him to pretend to be her boyfriend, it almost seems too good to be true. Acknowledgment as a member of your sex by a member of the opposite sex? What more can a hopeless nerd hope for? Sure, Kenji balks at the proposition at first, being a regular bundle of teenage hormones, insecurity, and anxiety, but who could resist? Besides, it means hanging out with her super-cool family in Nagano for her great grandma's ninetieth birthday celebration. Not only is it Grandma Time™, it's GREAT Grandma Time™.

Things are going great until Kenji receives a strange text in the middle of the night, deciphers the number puzzle it contains — flexing his near-Math-Olympics level talent — and breaks the internet. Oh, shit.

The next morning, Kenji wakes up to find his face all over the news, and word of his inevitable arrest spreading in connection with the global Internet crisis that began overnight. OMFG WTFHAX!!!111

After jumping online again, Kenji finds that OZ was being completely rewritten by a malicious hacker who'd stolen his avatar. Natsuki's cousin Kazuma — who turns out to be King Kazma himself !!SHOCK!! — takes on Kenji's corrupted avatar himself, only to face a humiliating KO.

Just in time for Great-Granny's birthday, things start unraveling around Kenji as Natsuki's family sees through her lies and her Uncle Wabisuke — long gone great-grandpa's illegitimate son — turns out to have some ties to the hacking culprit: none other than the viciously-named Love Machine. As global society goes haywire and Kenji's own personal life takes a nosedive, GREAT Grandma Time™ kicks into high gear as Natsuki's great grandmother begins rallying the troops, so to speak, taking advantage of all her connections through friends and family to organize a real fight back against the very real threat posed by that goddamn nutzo Internet.

Soon after efforts to jail Kenji are thwarted by stalled traffic and Wabisuke — now taking the persona non grata thing to new levels — hits the road, the rogue Internets claim their first victim: the last person Natsuki's family could stand to lose.

With GREAT Grandma Time™ cut dramatically short, Kenji eventually decides to step up, rallying the despondent and otherwise annoyed Jinnouchi family to put their grief aside, channel their warrior blood as Takeda clan descendants, and fight to save the Internet, the world, and their very family home from every assault by that dastardly Love Machine.

After years of directing films based on established anime franchises, Mamoru Hosoda made a splash in 2006 with his adaptation of Yasutaka Tsuitsui's 1967 novel, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Working once again with screenwriter Satoko Okudera, Hosoda continues his outing as a relatively new anime auteur with the highly-anticipated Summer Wars. Neon Genesis Evangelion and FLCL's Yoshiyuki Sadamoto returned as character designer as well. This combination of talent, after proving itself five years ago, shows with Summer Wars that their previous success was no fluke.

As one of the breakout anime auteurs of the past decade, Hosoda's style differs significantly from fellow Madhouse director — the late, great Satoshi Kon, who similarly broke out as an auteur with a novel adaptation. Where the prolific Kon's work often veered into surreal territory, Hosoda's is consistently warm and friendly. Whereas Kon was heavily influenced by Philip K. Dick, Terry Gilliam, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet among others, Hosoda established himself as more of a John Hughes type with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, which told a warm, relatable tale of teen whimsy and angst in the face of impending adulthood. Summer Wars continues this overall tone, resembling WarGames more than any of Hughes' films in particular, telling a not-dissimilar story of hacking and digital conflict with a young couple at the center of things, not unlike Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy.

Visually, Summer Wars is quite the feast. Between the work of the animation staff, Sadamoto's character design, Yukihiro Masumoto's cinematography, and Youji Takeshige's art direction, the film is an unquestionable visual feast. Outside in the real world, you get a warm, friendly, familiar traditional animation style similar to that of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. In the scenes set within OZ, the film leaps into a whimsical CGI wonderland, with scenery dominated by voids of classic '80s sci-fi white and unimaginable depth as the endless data of the internet unfolds across the virtual world that acted as the popular global frontend for Internet access by the time Summer Wars takes place. The two visual styles have a sharp, appealing contrast — this incredible virtual Internet and traditional Japanese home in the countryside — and mesh together without clashing. The film leaves you wishing that our Internet were as exciting now.

Musically, the film is well-complemented by an enjoyable original score by Akihiko Matsumoto. The film's closing theme, "Boku no Natsu no Yume," by Tatsuro Yamashita, is laden with warmth and nostalgia perfectly befitting the film's tone.

At heart, Summer Wars is a film about family — not just blood relations, but even extended families — and their ability to pull together to overcome even the most absurd adversity. It's richly conceived with many roots in Hosoda's own life, overflowing with heart, visually lush, and pleasant in a way that makes it more accessible to most viewers than the average anime series airing on television these days. There's definitely an unquestionable bit of nerd wish fulfillment going on in the plot, as wasn't uncommon in American cinema of the 1980s, but the film's such a flight of fantasy that it works. While I wouldn't put Summer Wars quite up there with the best of what Satoshi Kon produced in his life or the likes of Hayao Miyazaki, it's still an exceptional work of Japanese animation in telling a light, fun, relatable summer holiday story, accessible to a wider audience than most of today's productions. I do have to wonder how the average Westerner would take to the nature of the Hanafuda-based climax of the film, though. At any rate, Summer Wars is too fun to not recommend — it'll leave you with a smile.