Interest
Summer Wars Airing Tops Totoro, Spirited Away in Tweets
posted on by Jennifer Sherman
According to the Japanese portal site BIGLOBE's Twipple Trend service, Friday's airing of Summer Wars triggered more tweets than My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away did when those two films aired earlier this month. Summer Wars garnered an average 341,000 tweets per five minutes, while the July 6 broadcast of Spirited Away averaged 336,000, and My Neighbor Totoro's July 13 broadcast earned 340,000.
Mamoru Hosoda and Madhouse's Summer Wars film began airing at 9:00 p.m., and Twipple Trend recorded the average number of tweets at five-minute intervals for about 150 minutes. Summer Wars' broadcast ended at 10:54 p.m., after triggering more than 7.8 million tweets. "Koi-koi!," a term featured in the anime's climax at about 10:50 p.m., also topped Twipple Trend's "Hot Word" tweet ranking.
The Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli film My Neighbor Totoro's peak tweet was "Nekobus" (Catbus; blue line on graph) at 10:50 p.m. during its broadcast, while Spirited Away's peak tweet was "Haku" (red line) at 11:30 p.m. Both messages ranked below Summer Wars' peak tweet "Koi-koi!" (green line).
Even though Summer Wars' tweets peaked at the "Koi-Koi!" climax, that term was only the ninth most popular word tweeted during the film:
| Rank | Spirited Away | My Neighbor Totoro | Summer Wars |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Haku | Totoro | Kazuma |
| 2 | Yubaba | Mei | Hanafuda |
| 3 | Chihiro | Satsuki (katakana) | Riichi |
| 4 | Kaonashi (No-Face) | Satsuki (hiragana) | Wabisuke |
| 5 | Ghibli | Eva* | Love Machine |
| 6 | Yatsuzaki | Nekobus (Catbus) | King Kazuma |
| 7 | Haku-sama | Summer Wars | Avatar |
| 8 | Setsuko** | Ghibli | OZ |
| 9 | Totoro | Kanta | Koi-Koi! |
| 10 | Summer Wars | Piano* | Natsuki |
* Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo was previewed at the end of the airing with piano footage
** There is an urban legend about a girl with a striking resemblance to Grave of the Fireflies' Setsuko in Spirited Away. The girl appears alone on a bridge at about the 1:40 mark in Spirited Away.
Japanese Twitter users set a record in December when they sent 25,088 tweets per second during the re-airing of Laputa: Castle in the Sky. The record was set at the moment that the main characters Pazu and Sheeta say the spell word "balse" at the climax of the film. Fans also posted 530,000 when Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind re-aired in May.
Source: animeanime.jp
Image © 2009 Summer Wars Film Partners
