The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

Saw The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, a film by Werner Herzog about a feral man who appears in a village one day with no sign of where he came from or who had been taking care of him.  As a film about a feral person, it cannot help but also be about people living on the fringes of society.  Kaspar cannot navigate this world, needs people, but also lacks people.  He must rely on the largesse of the state and on charity.  It is kind of comforting to see that even with so many disadvantages (or perhaps due to them) he is still able to find some kind of place in this world.

The appeal of the story to Herzog, I think, comes from the fact that Kaspar does not seem to really want to be saved.  He spent the beginning of his life in a cellar and, after being freed, expressed a longing to return to the cellar.  He says that he is most happy in bed, and his various forays into the wider public are always hassle-filled, humiliating trials.  Perhaps he has too much isolation within him already, perhaps this society is not suitable for him anymore.

The film follows Kaspar very closely.  We are not really told what's happening to him, we just see that now he seems to be living in this place, now that place.  The film moves along nicely and has some fairly funny scenes where policemen and doctors officially react to Kaspar.  It didn't fully grab me, but that's probably my fault.  I dunno.

Summer Wars (2009)

Saw Summer Wars, an exciting anime about a boy caught up in events beyond his control.  He is recruited by his high-school crush to pretend to be her fiancé when she visits her wealthy grandmother.  Simultaneously, he solves what he believes to be a brain teaser and becomes accidentally involved in the destruction of OZ, a futuristic metaverse-style pseudo-internet which is deeply integrated into the real world.

The film is fairly straightforward.  The boy is a fish out of water among the sprawling and loud family he's been dumped into.  A fair amount of the movie is just him reacting to the rambunctious kids or the brash men or whatever.  The OZ stuff is not super realistic, but it's more cinema-friendly depictions of avatars punching each other or struggling to open doors etc.  It's nonsense, but it's relatable nonsense.  Also, having actually been part of fairly serious tech outages in the past, I can tell you that that's how it feels, even if we're just watching little scripts run.

This film depicts tech and the internet generally as being another universe where other rules apply.  It was made in 2009, but even by that point I think it was becoming clear that the internet is just people.  There are no new rules, just mobs of people and companies.  This film recognizes this and centers most of the action around real people in the real world.  There is a theme, for example, of misbehaving bastard offspring.

The film is cute and silly however.  It's somewhat over-cute (the ending bits especially made me squirm with sugar overload) but the action is thrilling and it does a good job of topping itself, always coming up with some yet-more stunt for the family to get involved in.  The emotions are big and bold and the art is beautiful (the sun coming up over the mountains!  Muah!)  It's a fun movie.