Ride Your Wave

A lifelong surfer, Hinako is completely at home cresting the waves in the open sea. When her apartment catches fire, the first thing she thinks of saving is her surfboard. However, she has trouble living on the land. Clumsy in her environment, she can barely cook for herself and is the unfortunate type to be splashed by a passing truck. So when Hinako meets ace firefighter Minato, opposite to her in every way, it is the beginning of the perfect love story. But tragedy strikes, and the couple’s relationship is forever altered.

Japanese filmmaker Yuasa Masaaki’s funny and touching anime feature Ride Your Wave is a marriage of water and fire that casually combines everyday realism with spirited fantasy to poignant ends. Delicious close-ups of coffee and omelette rub shoulders with striking vistas of conflagrations and high tides. As cool blues and buoyant oranges make way for a more sombre colour palette, the film itself metamorphoses from a breezy seaside romance to a delicate study of loss, grief and acceptance.

An adept melange of humour, whimsy, pathos and spectacle, Ride Your Wave achieves resonance through the layered quality of its intricately shaded characters, who save each other through deeds and words, help one another fight the fire or ride the high waves of life.

– Srikanth Srinivasan