Oct 15, 2021
If you go in expecting this movie to look like it’s from the early 2000’s, it’s enjoyable
All I knew about this film was what I gathered from that god-awful trailer that premiered a few months ago. But that would not stop me from watching another film from Ghibli!
Obviously the most jarring part of this film was the 3D animation. The original Ghibli style of simple characters does not translate well into CGI. Bella on the other hand translates the best due to her more cartoony features, easier to push her expressions. The characters in the orphanage looked pretty ghastly though, the weakest designs. The
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designs were basically not a style, it mostly reminded me of The Polar Express, slightly hitting that uncanny valley. The backgrounds and sets were okay, sometimes the exterior of a building or a floor looked more polished than the entire scene. This film lacked texture, from hair, to clothes, to background, it all felt like plastic.
Of all the things visually, I could get past those. What I could not get used to was the voice acting versus the faces, expressions, and phonemes(mouth movements for pronunciation), since they didn’t match a good part of the time. How did they mess that up when it’s all recorded beforehand and then animated to?
Despite all of the visuals, I thought the story was simple but effective. Straightforward, you can pretty much guess what will happen. But I found the individual details and interactions to be more interesting cumulatively. This movie was quite simple, and is definitely meant for a younger audience. I personally thought the opening and ending credits were stronger than the rest of the movie. There are a few fun parallels and references to other Ghibli movies that I found interesting. Mandrake drew so many parallels to Coraline’s (American stop-motion film from Laika) other father, it felt a little like a rip off in ways. Tall and lanky, glasses, writes, down a circular passageway, I could go on!
Goro has definitely not made too many masterpieces, the only other movie that I thought was noteworthy was From up on Poppy Hill, but this one felt like he genuinely took his own direction for the first time. Though that might indicate he could perform better telling different types of stories through a different media at a different studio.
I can say that I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to. Will I watch it again? Probably not for a very long time if again, but definitely way better than it was made out to be.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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