Fantasy is Japanese filmmaker Mamoru Hosoda’s preferred language for exploring family dynamics — and more acutely, parenting — within ever-surprising, imaginative, and richly stylized animated fables. Across his first four features as an auteur (not counting the “Digimon” and “One Piece” movies based on anime series), the adroit animator-turned-director has harnessed time travel, anthropomorphic wolves, digitized warfare, and beast-like role models to speak about the bonds and absences that sculpt our worldviews, either by bloodline or through personal agency.
Breathing rare emotional truth into on-screen depictions of small children and the parents who raise them, Hosoda’s unassumingly sumptuous “Mirai” is a hand-drawn miracle, rivaling Pixar and Ghibli’s efforts to devise family entertainment with a complex and humanistic edge.