SPY x FAMILY CODE: White Anime Movie Review
There’s a common criticism of the manga/anime Spy x Family from “fans” online, where they spectacularly miss the point of the entire story: “there’s no plot progression”. It’s not as if tiny pink-haired moppet Anya is some kind of shonen action hero who must endlessly level up upon defeating a succession of increasingly overpowered enemies, videogame style. The central espionage plot is nothing but a wire frame over which to hang daft slice-of-life shenanigans draped with the occasional screwball spy caper pastiche. It’s a comedy with absurd characters in absurd situations. Sometimes those absurd characters must grapple with real feelings, but there’s never much in the way of progression, everything pretty much returns to the status quo after each story arc. That makes Spy x Family an ideal candidate for the “Shonen Jump Movie” treatment.
Although in the past few years we’ve seen a rash of prominent anime TV series integrate theatrical installments directly into their essential continuities (The Saga of Tanya the Evil: The Movie, Made in Abyss: Dawn of the Deep Soul, Jujutsu Kaisen 0, Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, The Quintessential Quintuplets, and the upcoming Chainsaw Man: Reze film), there’s long been a tradition of manga magazine Shonen Jump’s properties receiving regular movies that impact little, if at all, on their “canon”. For examples, look at the numerous One Piece and Dragonball movies, or even the trio of My Hero Academia films (and there’s a fourth on the way).
Spy x Family Code: White follows this second pattern, and it’s completely fine that it does so. I don’t need an earth-shattering, continuity-blasting, status quo-destroying film where spy dad Twilight/Loid deposes his ultimate target live on television, where assassin mother Yor eviscerates her husband’s handler and slaughters her coworkers in public, where psychic daughter Anya uses rapidly-developing mental powers to mind-control her teachers into awarding her enough Stella Stars for her to assume the country’s premiership, or where precognitive family pet dog Bond foresees an Evangelion-esque apocalyptic end for humanity, the world drenched in fire and blood. Code: White is, as befits the series, a goofy mix of slice-of-life nonsense and over-the-top espionage action that contributes not a jot to the “overall plot” of the show. In that regard, it’s like 99% of the series’ episodes, and that’s entirely the point.
The (un?)holy union of Wit Studio and Cloverworks continues to make the anime version of Spy x Family look great, and the animation quality in this film is frankly gorgous at times. Spy x Family’s TV incarnation already looks good, but especially during the incredible action scenes, director Takashi Katagiri squeezes as much juice out of his (hopefully well-compensated) animators as humanly possible. Mostly the film fits neatly with the clean and glossy aesthetic established in the TV show, but there are a couple of standout moments where the animators break the mould with some dementedly stylish and creative flourishes. The first of these involves the otherworldly realm of the “Poop God” (we’ll get to Him later), the other is a climactic fight between Loid Forger and the main villain, depicted with stark blacks and high contrast, like something out of Golgo 13.
Like many Spy x Family stories, Code: White starts off innocuously enough. Anya Forger needs to cook a dessert to win a school competition and thereby win a Stella Star, in order to eventually become an Imperial Scholar, and win entry to an exclusive social gathering frequented by the country Ostania’s (fictional East Germany’s) leader, Donovan Desmond. Her adoptive father Loid Forger (undercover spy codenamed “Twilight”, covert operative for the Westalis (fictional West Germany) government) suggests travelling to the mountainous Frigis, a snowbound city where the school’s headmaster grew up. As the headmaster is to be the cooking competition’s judge, Loid reasons they should visit the restaurant that cooks his favourite dessert, the old-fashioned “Meremere”, which looks like a lemon meringue tart, and find out how to make it. On the train to Frigis, Anya (of course) somehow manages to find and accidentally eat a particularly delicious chocolate truffle that contains a top secret microfilm, the information on which could trigger another war. Shenanigans, as they say, ensue.
While Loid desperately tries to locate obscure ingredients for the restaurant to make another Meremere (a particularly unpleasant army officer steals the last slice from under poor Anya’s nose), Yor is under the mistaken impression that Loid is cheating on her, and misrepresents his every little action. This is funny, but also a little sad. She accepts that their relationship is fake, but it’s so clear that Yor is very into Loid, and Loid, despite his increasingly desperate rationalisations, deeply cares for her wellbeing, over and above his desire to fulfil his mission. Anya just wants to do whatever will keep her fake but loving family together, though it’s usually her daft, confused little kid actions that cause havoc and threaten their fragile status quo.
At the heart of the Forgers’ supposedly fake relationships are the bonds between a trio of humans who have each suffered isolation and hardship. The movie reminds us that Loid swore to prevent another war, because his childhood experiences were so horrific (so far the anime hasn’t yet adapted his tragic backstory from manga volume 10). Yor was orphaned by the war and was forced to take on assassin work to provide for her beloved younger brother. She sacrificed her young adulthood and innocence for him, and it has left her doubting her ability to be a loving wife and mother, and quick to resort to violence to protect her current life and its thin veneer of normalcy. Anya was an orphan, abandoned to a dingy children’s home, is likely much younger than her peers at the prestigious Eden Academy, and knows only too well that should she be abandoned by Loid and Yor, that she’ll be back in the orphanage. Even loveable fluffy dog Bond has suffered brutal abuse under military experimentation. These guys all need each other, despite the enormous secrets between them.
It’s therefore delightful when Loid selflessly buys a gift for Yor, or plays the part of devoted father to Anya. He’s so far past pretending now that he embodies the husband and father roles utterly. Each time he performs some incredible act of spycraft or crazy physical miracle, Yor falls more in love with him, while he desperately attempts to backpedal. Yeah, sure, Loid. Sure you used to pilot enormous zeppelins in your spare time as a student. His excuses for his wide and varied skillset are hilariously lame.
While Code: White features many of these skewed yet heartwarming moments between the core cast, there are some disturbing moments of dire physical threat directed at poor Anya directly. At one point, when captured by the bad guys desperate to retrieve the important microfilm, they become impatient waiting for her to poop it out, triggering a deranged hallucination where Anya, becoming delirious from herculean attempts to control her churning bowels, enters the pastel-coloured psychedelic realm of the Poop God, a completely bizarre non-sequitur of a sequence that had half the cinema audience hooting with laughter, and the other half staring in disbelief. This light-hearted interlude is followed, however, by the enemy leader commanding his suboordinates to “cut it out of her” instead.
Understandably, this leads to several distressing scenes where Anya is desperately fleeing for her life from two adult men who don’t just intend to catch her, but to gut her like a fish. For that moment alone, the movie certainly isn’t suitable for smaller kids, and was enough to grant the film a “12A” rating in the UK. Although much of the chase is then played for laughs, the preceding scene where the men debate over which of them will hold her while the other cuts her open, is decidedly dark. Similarly, a later scene where Anya struggles to escape when she’s bound and gagged is also quite distressing. She’s not normally exposed to such profound danger in the TV show, so the stakes (for Anya at least) are escalated in this theatrical installment.
Yor’s role is, as usual, fairly secondary to the story. I sometimes wonder if the manga’s author, and the anime’s staff, don’t always really know what to do with her character. Despite this, I adore her. She’s both hilariously clueless and utterly badass. In Code: White, she’s either stressing over the state of her fake marriage, or instigating extreme beatdowns on bad guys. Most of her scenes could be removed without changing all that much of the story, but she adds much needed colour and an additional adult viewpoint, even though she misconstrues things almost as much as Anya.
Yor’s big scene is a tremendously kinetic, fiery battle against a monstrous metal soldier with gatling gun arms like something out of Wolfenstein. Imagine Marvel’s Black Widow and War Machine duking it out on the set of the first Captain America film’s action climax. It adds almost nothing to the narrative, the soldier dude’s only role is to be someone for Yor to fight. And you know what? That’s fine. I love Yor, she’s an amazing mother, fighting the bad guys to save her daughter.
Loid/Twilight remains terrifyingly competent yet emotionally dense. His perpetually exhausted expression really speaks to me as a father, as he must somehow deal with both the ridiculous demands of his employers and the chaos generated by his crazy family. I feel your pain, Loid. His female spy counterpart Nightfall gets a few annoying comedy scenes — I don’t like her, I don’t like her intention to replace Yor as Loid’s “wife”, but I dont think you’re meant to. Informant Frankie barely gets one scene, and self-titled “nemesis” Yuri Briar (Yor’s overly-attached brother) only appears in a couple. Out of the entire film, only these extraneous scenes featuring the otherwise un-needed peripheral cast, are newcomer-undfriendly (leading my non-anime-fan friend to ask who those characters were and what their relevance was). The opening narration otherwise quickly and neatly gets non-fans up to speed on the premise and characters.
My only real criticism of Code: White is that it did not need to fill 110 minutes. It takes a little too long to get started, and for it to be a truly snappy, funny spy comedy, it could have done with 10–20 minutes left on the editing room floor. Otherwise it’s a very entertaining and humorous film that’s (mostly) newcomer friendly. The action sequences are excellent, and the humour is broad and good-natured. As a kid who grew up watching Sean Connery and Roger Moore’s James Bond movies, plus reruns of Mission Impossible and The Man From Uncle, I adore Spy x Family, and by extension Code: White for its light-hearted tone and occasionally dark turns. I’d welcome more Spy x Family films of this calibre.
Spy x Family Code: White
Directed by: Takashi Katagiri
Screenplay by: Ichirō Ōkouchi
Based on: the Spy × Family manga by Tatsuya Endo
Music by: (K)now Name
Production studios: Wit Studio, CloverWorks
JP Distributor: Toho
JP theatrical release: 22nd December 2023
UK distributor: Anime Limited
UK theatrical release: 26th April 2023
Runtime: 110 minutes
Languages: Japanese audio with English subtitles, English audio
BBFC rating: 12A
