The Quarantine Stream: ‘Ocean Waves’ May Be Studio Ghibli’s Secretly Queer Film
By Hoai-Tran Bui/July 30, 2020 8:00 am EST
For a long time, Ocean Waves eluded me. I was an avid Ghibli fan and eagerly bought all of the studio’s films on DVD in my childhood, but Ocean Waves was the one gap in my collection. But its absence never bothered me that much; even among Ghibli aficionados, Ocean Waves is one of the lowest-rated films of the studio’s 22 movies, and it’s written off as the one made-for-TV movie that only hardcore Ghibli enthusiasts, and local Japanese residents, would have seen.
But in 2014, Ocean Waves finally received a Blu-ray restoration that made its way to the States, and in 2020, it was made available to stream for the first time ever on HBO Max. So I popped it on without much expectation for how it would stand up next to Ghibli’s all-timers like Spirited Away or even similarly mundane coming-of-age classics like Whisper of the Heart. But as Ocean Waves lazily told its story of two high school boys whose close friendship would eventually be tested by the arrival of a new girl at their countryside school, something piqued my attention. This movie was very, very queer.
These kind of queer-coded moments are seeded throughout the film, culminating in a dockside conversation through which a lonely saxophone plays as the two friends mull over their relationship. Unfortunately, Ocean Waves never goes for the kill, shoehorning the romance between Taku and the new girl, a fiery Tokyo transfer named Rikaku, in at the last minute. But while most of my enjoyment of watching Ocean Waves was in reading into its accidental queerness, this delicate film is not without its merits. Director Tomomi Mochizuki imbues Ocean Waves with a sense of melancholic regret and longing that is made more effective by the soft lines and lovely pastel colors of the animation. The wistful nostalgia that Ocean Waves wears on its sheer, fragile sleeves feels like a breath of fresh air among the bombast of today’s animated movies.
