 as follows: four boys are staying unsupervised during the summer holidays in a school boarding house which resembles a spacious European mansion set in the countryside. One night one of the boys, Yu, kills himself by jumping in a nearby lake and drowning. He kills himself because one of the other students, Kazuhiko, does not return his feeling of love. After Yu's death, the other students try to continue with their lives, studying, playing and cooking for themselves. But the death causes tension amongst the students and one of them blames Kazuhiko for Yu's death because he had been unkind to him on previous occasions. Then one day a mysterious new boy named Kaoru arrives at the boarding school, looking and behaving like Yu. While Kazuhiko finds the likeness disturbing, after a while he finds that he is attracted to this new boy and the two become very close. But the eldest boy Naoto, suspects that Kaoru is actually Yu. Naoto believes that Yu has come back from the dead to make Kazuhiko fall in love with him. One day on the cliff by the lake, Naoto and Kaoru confront each other and Naoto tries to push Kaoru over the cliff. Kazuhiko comes along just in time, and saves Kaoru. Then Kazhiko and Kaoru kiss. Kaoru admits that he is actually Yu and he tries to persuade Kazuhiko to join him in a suicide pact. When they fall in the lake together the other students manage to save Kazuhiko but Yu dies for the second time. The students' lives slowly return to normal; that is until a new boy arrives at the school who looks just like Yu.
As with the girls' comics, the characters in Summer Vacation 1999 are totally isolated from society. There are no adults; they don't shop; their food is delivered, and they do all the cooking and cleaning themselves. There are no teachers or adult supervisors; the only mention of an adult is when Kaoru has imaginary conversations on the phone with his mother (who is actually dead). Being far away from adults, the implication is that they are so far away from their own adulthood that it is no longer a threat waiting around the corner to get them.
the young girl's dream, then is to go as far away as possible, sexually, emotionally, geographically from everyday reality: in outer space or in fantastic pseudo-European palaces.
At the beginning of the film, an adult narrator says that he recalls the summer of 1999 as if it was just yesterday: 'that summer I broke out of my shell of ignorance'. This is repeated again at the end. This and the multiple returns of Yu, suggest that their life is indeed an ongoing childhood. This film, shojo manga and the Takarazuka Young Girls' Company create illusions based on this fantasy of an endless childhood.
The Takarazuka Young Girls' Company is an Osaka theatre company. Its girl performers play male and female roles, and many of their plays are based on shojo manga stories. As in Summer Vacation, these women actors all have short hair and look like schoolboys; indeed their plays are sometimes about boys in love. Takarazuka productions are popular with young girls. But while there are similarities with Summer Vacation, Takarazuka's plays are more kitsch and theatrical. Takarazuka's performers dance and sing cabaret style while the performances in Summer Vacation 1999 are more conventionally'realistic'.
The lives of the Takarazuka troupe, off stage, are similar to the fictitious world represented in the girls' comics. (But then it is common in Japan for performers to live lives like the ones they act on stage, like the onnagata - female impersonators - of the Kabuki who often play the parts of women in their own lives as well.) However, the lives of the Takarazuka troupe are far more surreal.  The troupe is forbidden to have relationships with men or boys, and if they have any sexual contact with the opposite sex they are dismissed. They live in a secluded town in Osaka, called Takarazuka, which is painted pink and is a 'feminine Disneyland with rose coloured bridges spanning artificial water courses' (Bornoff 647) just like the settings in comics. The Takarazuka is the realisation of the ultimate comicbook fantasy where the company members ward off the fear of adulthood by remaining virgins and living in a separate imaginary world.
Moreover, female idols and characters in Japanese popular culture who dress and behave like men are assertive and free. This quality seems to appeal to young Japanese girls who feel they don't have the same freedom and are not encouraged to be assertive. Boys are also not encouraged to be assertive, but they do have slightly more freedom than girls. Indeed girls seem to envy the fictitious masculine woman or girl more than do their male counterparts. Some of these dynamics are played out in both Japanese television animation and films. Dr Slump, for example, is about the eponymous inventor, his wife and their robot children. The favourite game of Ararechan - the robot daughter and main character - is playing with the faeces she finds in the street. In one episode, her body is damaged after a fight with another robot. As Dr Slump repairs Ararechan's body, he takes off her head and puts it on the body of a male robot.  And in a similar vein, Obayashi Nobuhiko's Tenkosei ( Exchange Students 1983) is about junior high school lovers who find, by some strange accident, that they have swapped souls. The girl has the boy's body and the boy has the girl's. This means that they must adopt the physical and social roles of each other's gender. The film explores the changes of adolescence, seemingly the more dramatic as they are experienced by the couple in reversed roles.
The films based on or influenced by comics are, in some ways, a response to the rigidity of Japan's social structure. This does not mean, for example, that women who enjoy going to movies about love between gay or androgynous characters, are any the less heterosexual. It is probably more likely that these films offer an escape from lives in which women traditionally conform to a fixed image. Effeminate male characters appeal to young girls because they seem closer to them than other boys or men. The girls can relate to the effeminate male and his gentle ways, while more masculine men may seem mysterious to them.
Many of the female protagonists in comic-influenced films are purposeful in almost a transcendental way; they are a little distant and look different from the typical Japanese girl. Their legs and their necks are long and slim and they have large wide eyes. Invariably they appear in control of their lives and, in the adult films at least, the male characters seem to be there to satisfy their needs. Even in the animated films for younger audiences, the female characters are often self-possessed and seem to have little need for their parents.
In 1988, Obayashi made The Discarnates. While this film is a departure from Tenkosei's theme of adolescence and transsexuality, the story derives from a frequent popular cultural theme: vengeful spirits which can found, as noted above, in both movies and early folktales. One evening a recently-divorced television scriptwriter, Harada Hideo, finds out that his best friend has fallen in love with his ex-wife and intends to marry her. After making this discovery, he sits around in his apartment drinking, feeling confused and melancholic. The proceeding events unfold like a drunken hallucination: a beautiful woman knocks on the door and asks him to share her bottle of champagne as she is feeling lonely; he declines and closes the door. She goes back to her apartment in the same block as Harada's and kills herself. When Harada bumps into her in the elevator a few days later, he has no idea she is a ghost. They start going out together and eventually Harada returns to the part of Tokyo where he had lived as a child. He feels drawn to an old vaudeville theatre which he goes into and watches a show. He sees a man who resembles his dead father; the man smiles at him. And in fact it is his father. His father takes him back to his apartment where Harada's mother is waiting. His parents are as young as Harada remembers them, as they are the ghosts of his parents who had died in a car accident when Harada was twelve. After this strange encounter, he starts to visit them often. But, as a result of cavorting with the dead, Harada starts feeling unwell. He decides that he must not see his parents' ghosts anymore. But his health still does not improve. Slowly it dawns on him that the woman he has been seeing is also a ghost. After a confrontation with her, she makes an Exorcist -like exit and once again Harada is alone. As a result of these encounters he is able to reconcile his misgivings about the new relationship between his friend and his former wife, and in the last scene he is together with them as friends.
Obayashi has taken a traditional character, the vengeful female spirit, from Japan's history of storytelling and combined it with an Exorcist type of demon borrowed from the West. This is in line with those broad changes to depictions of female spirits in the cinema since the success, in Japan, of The Exorcist in 1973 noted by Gregory Barrett in his book Archetpyes in Japanese Film. For hundreds of years the Japanese have told stories about dead spirits capable of harming the living. Eventually, under Western influences, the idea developed that such a spirit could only torment the guilty, and