The Imaginary: a safe but enjoyable flight of fancy from Studio Ponoc

Studio Ponoc was formed almost a decade ago by a breakaway group of ex-Ghibli staffers, who took the Miyazaki playbook with them. The master’s influence runs close to the surfaces of Ponoc’s debut Mary and the Witch’s Flower (2017) and The Imaginary, its second feature. Both films are adapted from a British children’s fantasy novel, and both shuttle plucky young hero(in)es between a quaintly reimagined England and a charismatic magical world. 

The Imaginary, which is adapted from A.F. Harrold’s book of the same name, centres on Amanda and her imaginary friend Rudger. After an accident puts her in a coma, he ends up in a realm populated by other Imaginaries like him. He learns the same bitter lesson as Bing Bong in Inside Out (2015): imaginary friends run the risk of fading away as their inventors forget them. There is a touching parable about mortality here, which is regularly interrupted by pedantic explanations of the rules governing the Imaginaries’ realm, but also reinforced and darkened by intimations of death in the real world. 

The director is the unassumingly versatile Momose Yoshiyuki, who at Ghibli helped establish Takahata Isao’s vaunted realist style by animating and storyboarding (and more) on his films, before experimenting with bold designs as a director of shorts and music videos. The Imaginary is more classical: it is designed and animated in a Miyazaki-esque mode to match the story, notwithstanding the pronounced use of CGI and small innovations like the dimensional shading on the characters. The imaginary realm is a parade of whimsy that allows for moments of real eccentricity, including an unexpected nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). But overall, this is familiar terrain: the film takes no great risks as it advances (at an uneven pace) toward its conclusion. 

Some of the richest scenes unfold in the real world – the rainy English city where Amanda lives with her recently widowed mother. The bookshop that she runs, which doubles up as their home, may be fairytale-cute, but their life together is peppered with banal details that offset Amanda’s flights of fancy. There is talk of circuit breakers and job interviews. These scenes recall an earlier work Momose directed at Ponoc: the Takahata-like Life Ain’t Gonna Lose, a segment of the anthology film Modest Heroes (2018), which followed a young boy with an egg allergy and his hard-working mother. The radical domesticity of that short, and the anthology format itself, point to other, more innovative paths open to Ponoc. 

► The Imaginary is available to stream on Netflix from 5 July.