Ōkami Kodomo no Ame to Yuki AKA Wolf Children (2012)

Hana, a first-year university student, falls in love with the homeless guy who is secretly auditing her class. Soft, romantic string music plays over the montage of them getting to know each other. After a few dates, he warns her that he has to show her something. She closes her eyes, and when she opens them she sees his wolf fursona. They immediately do some yiffing, he moves in with her, and the optimistic string music lets us know that everything is wonderful, despite her newfound morning sickness.

They have two babies back-to-back, and then the father never returns home from a shopping trip. The mother goes out looking for him, and finds him in wolf form, drowned in a canal. The trash men toss his lifeless corpse in the back of the trash truck and drive off. The whole thing is in a narrative framing story of the daughter reading her journal, so the daughter's narration sometimes just tells us what's happening.

The now-single mother has to raise toddlers who covert suddenly to wolf forms when they get over-excited, which is constantly. In wolf form, they chewed on everything in the house. When one of the toddlers becomes sick, she has to decide between going to the vet or the doctor's office. Her world starts collapsing as she tries to conceal their secret under the watchful eye of modern society.

They move out to the most rural mountain village they can find, and then even farther outside of that, multiple hours from anything. Her real estate agent does not approve. She tries to figure out how to farm from books, and tries to figure out how to convince wolf kids not to show their wolf form to villagers (or get in fights with cats).

The local old man comes by to yell at her for being an incompetent farmer. He marches around shouting orders at her about how to fix her fields. The other villagers slowly start coming to visit and befriending the mom, though the children mostly stay away. When her potatoes are the only ones that grow, she barters them with the townsfolk for tons of other food and equipment. The wild boars seem to dig up all fields except hers.

The kids go to school, for which there is an infinitely long montage of kids learning to be kids. The daughter wolfs out and scratches a fellow student when he harasses her. Nobody else sees it, so her secret is safe, but it leads to an awkward parent-teacher conference.

The daughter embraces human life, focusing on making friends at school. The son embraces wolf life, skipping school to hang out with foxes and chase rabbits. They disagree with each other's preferences and fight like the kids they are, smashing their house to bits. Building houses out of thin paper is particularly poor architectural design when your kids are wolves.

The big final conflict is a typhoon moving in. The daughter is stuck at school, the mom busy trying to find her son who has run off into the woods to be a wild animal. The daughter shares her wolf secret with her almost-boyfriend when they're stranded alone in the classroom, and he shrugs disinterestedly to a soundtrack of heartfelt piano music. The mom fails in her mission to bring her son back, and is unwillingly forced to accept that he's a permanent forest-dwelling wolfman now.

Despite being well-made and well-animated, it has a very lackluster story. It's a slice-of-life story, but about a fictional slice of a fictional life, that goes on for much too long and doesn't build any narrative tension. The plot is basically "kids, amirite?" with a mild man-vs-nature dilemma investigated with all of the depth that an adolescent child can muster, which means my interest is more diminished than piqued. I'm sure it's more enjoyable to parents of teenagers, but not because it has anything interesting or insightful to offer about the struggles of child-bearing. Just because kids, amirite? But if you want a film about werewolf child raising, you'll probably have a better time with Good Manners.