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When I started watching Sky Crawlers, I had an idea that it should be interesting because of cool unusual aircraft, battles in the air and calm everyday atmosphere of the airbase, familiar to me from my military training time. But it turned into completely surprising experience, full of hints and details of life, specific for autistic personality. To be more precise, for high-functioning autism or Asperger syndrome.

The art style itself has the really huge contrast between super-detailed backgrounds and locations, while human characters are very schematic. Indeed, it can be often found in anime, but here, the scale of this contrast is striking. It fits ... autistic perception perfectly: many Aspies (people with Asperger syndrome) have unusually high attention to visual details, while their perception of other people is (not literally) schematic due to difficulties with interpreting non-verbal language, emotional reactions and other aspects of behavior.

As I said before, locations were painted with very high attention to every detail. And for me personally, these are absolutely great locations, since these large open spaces with cliffs, dividing land from the sea, remind me of ocean coast of Ireland and Brittany. Megaliths, heather, stone walls along the roads are just beautiful. It feels like someone spent many days thinking about all these details, showing up on the screen for only a second. I mean, for example, circular patterns on megaliths, definitely borrowed from the stones of Gavrinis tomb - mysterious megalithic site, located in Morbihan, Brittany. Same thing with aircraft, aerodrome equipment (being an avionics engineer, I can recognize many pieces of it), with architecture and atmosphere of the town, where pilots staying on their way to another base. It looks just like an old part of Krakow, Poland, with tiny details such as tramway or taverns.

“Kildren” - most of the main characters, definitely have autistic personalities. Physically, they are very young, but being a bit childish and immature mentally, they all bear a sign of being tired of life, fighting boredom in an own way. It resembles some psychological features of people with Asperger syndrome. Many other things fit the picture too: keeping a distance from life, having some odd pragmatic relationships with death. Interpersonal relationships are a kind of cold and awkward between them, but sometimes we can see, how strong their attachment can be, so they are not really cold psychopaths. Logic rules their everyday world, but emotions can burst out in their own special cases.

Description of suicidal thoughts is very natural. There is a study of suicidal behavior in Aspies, telling that it is a relatively common thing for them to think about suicide in connection with a purpose or “function” of own life. Often, it doesn't lead to an actual suicide, but planning and preparations could be made. In Sky Crawlers, we can see all that.

I honestly don't know, if anyone from film crew has this mental condition, but somehow, Sky Crawlers got so many different independent features, related to it, so it is hard to imagine that nobody knows about it from own experience. And I believe that for people, who have never met any Aspie, it might be interesting to watch Sky Crawlers keeping all that in mind.

As a disclaimer, I want to add, that Asperger syndrome has many faces, and I'm talking about only one of them, familiar to me. So, if it doesn't fit someone’s experience, I'm not responsible for that.

I'm not a big fan of anime in general, but as a genre, it allows directors to create own worlds, telling exactly those stories they wanted to tell, to put characters in very special circumstances. Mononoke Princess fits this description perfectly and it's a part of joy I felt watching it.

For me, it's about the nature. Large, powerful, very complex, still unknown, fragile and wonderful organism. I love how it is possible to recognize certain species of not only plants, but moss and lichen, despite specific art style, where large strokes are unable to show pixel-sized details. Only another person, who loves nature, can pay ... enough attention to natural backgrounds to show that.

Forest creatures are also very expressive, every non-human character definitely has some personality and I enjoyed watching them. It's definitely hard to create fictional non-human characters to make people feel who they are, but here it was successful. You can feel strength, power, weakness, sadness, feeling of fate, rage - all those things represented by non-human individuals. It is both in their appearance, voices and manner of speaking.

I know, that Hayao Miyazaki doesn't like how people treat nature. I have the same views. Watching it I've been immersed in the atmosphere of desperation and fate, same as I feel when studying maps of deforestation, climate change statistics, reading growing endangered species lists. It's a feeling of world falling apart, very hard, devastating and deeply sad feeling. And this is great, because somebody, who have never noticed that before in the real world, might finally look around and see similar things. In the same time, it is not a kind of "green propaganda".

Ending seems to be happy, but only from very human-centric point of view, because it is not an equal coexistence they finally settled for there. Nature lost much more than people did, and people didn't actually learned any lessons. So, for those who have strong attachment to our real nature, it will not look "happy", just "better than total destruction".

Summarizing everything, I want to say, that even being sad, it is great.