Final Rating: 4.5/5
How Dare You, directed by Mipo Oh, centres around Ueda Yuishi (Tetta Shimada), an elementary schooler who loves bugs and animals and is something of a class clown. During a class assignment to write a short essay about his typical day, Yuishi struggles, but is awestruck when his classmate Miyake (Ruri) delivers a passionate speech about climate change.
Fascinated by Miyake’s boldness, Yuishi learns all he can about climate change, eventually working up the courage to talk to her, only to learn that simple interest in the climate is not enough. Instead, Miyake proposes the two – and energetic class bully Hashimoto (Youta Mimoto) – send a message to the adults around them through vigilante activism.
How Dare You takes its name from a fiery speech delivered by Greta Thunberg at the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019. Thunberg’s speech blamed adults for their inaction in the face of climate catastrophe. Thunberg herself had already begun developing a reputation for her climate activism with her Fridays for Future school strike movement.
The film shows the impact activists can have, with Thunberg’s passion moving children in Japan to action, and those children’s actions in turn influencing other children and adults in their own community.
At the same time, the film posits that even well-intentioned activists can be self-interested and are liable to make plenty of mistakes. While all three leads care about the environment, each is more motivated by something else. For Yuishi, activism is a way to get closer to a girl he likes; for Miyake, it’s rebellion against her overbearing mother; Hashimoto just likes causing trouble, and vandalism is a good way to do that.
With so many competing motivations, the children’s acts of protest never meaningfully have a greater goal than disruption and annoying the adults around them. As a result, they escalate. At first, they stick posters with their demands around parking lots. Later, they buy fireworks to throw at butchers. In their greatest act of vandalism, the children destroy a fence at a cattle farm so the cows can escape “if they want to.” To the children’s credit, the adults certainly notice. But that’s about where the effect of their activism ends.
On the adult side, How Dare You comments on the difficulty of parenting ten-year-olds. When confronted with her son’s budding interest in environmentalism, Ueda Keiko (Yu Aoi) is initially baffled. Despite this, Keiko is supportive, reading environmentalist books with him, and even briefly indulging her son’s desire to become a vegetarian. When the latter doesn’t stick, later scenes nonetheless imply that she’s begun taking steps to reduce the whole family’s meat consumption.
In conversation with her husband, Keiko is torn between parenting her son with a heavy hand and being too permissive. Those extremes are depicted in the parents of the other children. Miyake’s mother is shown to be overbearing and unsupportive of her daughter, telling her to “knock it off” when it comes to her interest in the environment, and openly reminiscing about when her daughter “used to be sweet.” Hashimoto’s parents are the complete opposite of the spectrum, so permissive of their son’s actions that they immediately blame the other children for “bullying him,” despite Hashimoto’s demonstrated mean streak within his class.
Director Mipo Oh gets fantastic performances out of her young cast, with each of the three leads an absolute joy to watch. Despite the heady subject matter, the child performances feel authentic. The screenplay by Ryo Takada cleverly works in plenty of social tangents as well. As Yuishi starts hanging out more with his environmentalist friends, the kids he used to hunt bugs with get sad. A different girl with a crush on Yuishi invites him to go to the candy store when she finally sees him away from Miyake. These little asides bolster the feeling of being in an elementary school and still figuring out who your closest friends are.
How Dare You takes a classic storyline of young love and adds a timely social commentary. It’s a sweet story with great child performances that uses the uncertainty and danger of climate change to explore the uncertainty of being a child.
How Dare You was seen during the 2026 Toronto Japanese Film Festival.
