YMMV / Summer Wars

• Adorkable:
  • Kenji is shy and easily flustered.
  • Surprisingly, Sakae Jinnouchi, when she makes her big goofy smile.
• Applicability: Similar to My Big Fat Greek Wedding, anyone who comes from a large, extended and tightly-knit family will recognize more than a few characters in the Jinnouchi clan from their own families, regardless of nationality or cultural background.
• Award Snub: Or rather, Nomination Snub. After a limited theatrical release, Funimation attempted to submit Summer Wars for an Academy Award, but, due to the fact that there were less than 16 entries submitted that year, only three nominations were allowed instead of five as the Academy policy dictates, and Summer Wars was not chosen.
• Awesome Music:
  • Battle Again, which plays during King Kazma's rematch with Love Machine and during Natsuki's Hanafuda card game with Love Machine.
  • Our Summer Dream, the ending song by Tatsuro Yamashita is touching and happy at the same time
• Complete Monster: Love Machine is a deranged, rogue computer program out to throw the world into chaos for his own amusement. Designed to crave knowledge and unleashed onto OZ as a "test run", Love Machine quickly evolves beyond his parameters and begins absorbing avatars to take control of infrastructure across the globe and cause traffic pileups, sewer system damages, and many other forms of destruction. Ruthlessly shutting off the heart monitor of Sakae Jinnouchi so a heart failure would go unnoticed and result in her death, Love Machine later takes control of the Arawashi satellite in hopes of dropping it onto a random nuclear plant and killing countless people. When the Jinnouchi family uses a fair game of Koi Koi to steal away the A.I.'s power—with Love Machine trying to cheat in any way possible—Love Machine reacts to the loss by spitefully attempting to redirect the Arawashi to crash and kill the entire Jinnouchi clan, giggling all the way.
• Crack Pairing: The pairing of Riichi (the uncle in the Self Defense Force) and Wabisuke grew immensely popular on Pixiv and elsewhere despite the fact that the two are never shown directly interacting with each other.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Kazuma, along with his avatar King Kazma, has quite a lot of fanart; enough to get a spin off manga.
  • The series's resident Cool Old Lady Sakae, who was so awesome that her eventual death due to Love Machine's meddling not only hit the Jinnouchi clan rather hard in the heart, but also anyone and everyone who watched the film.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The climax of the movie prominently features a Japanese asteroid sample-return probe being hijacked by Love Machine and set on a re-entry profile that will destroy a nuclear power plant. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa mission was a similar asteroid sample return probe which did return to Earth in the summer of 2010, and which did experience failures leading to a barely-controlled crash-landing in Australia.
  • Love Machine makes plans to drop a satellite on top of a nuclear power plant, which draws disturbing parallels to Fukushima reactor incident.
• Jerkass Woobie: Wabisuke. Despite the smarmy way he acts and the fact that he's responsible for Love Machine's creation, all he wanted was to be accepted as part of the Jinnouchi family again. He also gets more pitiable following Sakae's death.
• Moral Event Horizon: Love Machine doesn't seem too evil at first; in fact it's theorized that he only sees what he's doing as a game. Then he cut the power for Sakae's heart monitor so that no one would hear that she was in danger of dying. Another potential crossing is when he tries to drop a satellite on the house purely out of spite for having lost a game. And keep in mind that before all this, he planned to drop it in a way that would kill millions, to say nothing about what he possibly did overseas that was never shown.
• Narm: The scene in which Love Machine steals Kazuma's account is terrible, as it marks the lowest point for the characters. However, it's bit ruined by the fact the evil AI also grows rabbit ears after absorbing King Kazma.
• Popular with Furries: King Kazuma is an anthropomorphic rabbit. What would you expect?
• The Scrappy: Shingo and Yuhei are disliked for their obnoxious behaviour and costing Kazuma his first chance at getting Love Machine.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • It's the best Digimon film ever made. It helps that it's the Spiritual Successor to part of an actual Digimon film.
  • It's not intentional, but the setting also draws a lot of parallels to the Mega Man Battle Network series.
• Superlative Dubbing: A lot of people absolutely LOVE the English dub for its voice choices and no awkwardness at all.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: 'Overture of the Summer Wars' is a heterogeneous piece of music that includes a just-barely-changed sample from Ralph Vaughan Williams's suite 'The Wasps'.
• Tough Act to Follow: Fans of Summer Wars haven't been the most charitable when judging Hosoda's third go at depicting a personal story in a virtual space that was Belle (2021), arguing that the story was undercooked in comparison. It's not helping that in many ways Belle ended up being a re-thread of the exact same story bits, character archetypes and their personal conflicts - and with far less depth put into any of it.
• The Un-Twist: The mastermind behind the Love Machine is none other than the shady Black Sheep of the Jinnouchi family, Wabisuke.
• Too Cool to Live: Cool Old Lady Sakae ends up the first victim of Love Machine.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Kazuma's character design and voice are so feminine that many an audience mistook him for a young girl when he first appeared.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The movie was G-rated in Japan and spawned merchandise aimed at that demographic, like picture books and plushies of the cute animal critters from the movie. But it has instances of blood, tragic death of a family member, swearing, child nudity, a doomsday scenario, and so much more.
• The Woobie: Natsuki in the second half of the movie after her great grandmother's death.

---