Porco Rosso anime review

The only Ghibli movie so far that I haven’t watched until the end. It was going so well until they introduced Fio. Beautiful visuals as always, a unique protagonist, a bittersweet setting and moderate amounts of action.

I was all set to love Porco Rosso, then they had to introduce a nosy, fast-talking, high-pitched squealing girl in the form of Fio. She just wouldn’t shut up. Instead of letting us enjoy the movie ourselves, she kept butting in where she wasn’t welcome and providing unnecessary commentary where they should just have let the viewers make up their own minds. We can see the place is beautiful, thank you very much. We know Porco isn’t a bad guy, thank you very much. Ugh, who let the kid into an adult’s show?

Anyway, I quit at around the 1:15 mark and watched the last few minutes to find out what happened to everyone. What a waste of potential. Next Ghibli movie I have to watch? Pom Poko.

Only Yesterday (Omoide Poro poro) anime review

Shnzzzzzzzzzzzzzz *snrk* zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz… Hmm, huh, what? It’s over? THANK GOODNESS. Summary of the movie: Taeko, a city girl who likes the countryside, works on a farm and reflects back to when she was 10. More boring than it sounds. Work on farm, drive around, remember childhood, hang out with country boy, roll credits, the end.

Only Yesterday (Omohide poro poro) is by far the most boring thing I’ve watched all year. The parts about her childhood were interesting and funny in places, but her adult life is overt pro-farming anti-city propaganda. I have to wonder if Isao Takahata and Studio Ghibli didn’t get a cut from the Japanese Farmer’s Association, since the moral of the story was clearly “If you’re old and can’t find a husband, go to a farming village and some country boy will take you for a wife.” [this is apparently true, btw. Farming villages in Japan suffer from a dire shortage of eligible bachelorettes, especially ones who will put up with all the meddling, lack of privacy and backbreaking work that comes with living in a farming community]

Anyway, it seems like Taeko only idolizes farm life because she grew up in the city. What’s more, it seems she just enjoys it as an occasional break from city-life, and not for its own sake. None of the frequent flashbacks to her childhood show her particularly yearning to live in the countryside, just to visit it from time to time.

Which means once the first glow of excitement wears off and everyone stops treating her like she’s oh-so-special, I won’t be surprised if she falls out of love with farming and wants to go home again. Especially once she wakes up and finds out she’s married to a man she barely knows. The little episode where she was planting rice plus the scene where she makes city-food (cake!) near the end seem to hint at the fact that she isn’t cut out for this kind of life in the long-term. She’s been shown to want what she can’t have (her sister’s bag, the restaurant trip, holidays in the countryside) and to change her mind frequently, and she says she’s grown up but has she really?

Well, that’s her problem, I’ve got myself to worry about. Other people’s lives are boring, which is why fiction and fantasy come in handy so often. I’d like Studio Ghibli to remember that in future. Next up, Porco Rosso. Haven’t heard much about that one, but hopefully it should be interesting. Can’t be worse than this, anyway.

Kiki’s Delivery Service anime review

Well I watched it all right, but I didn’t like it much. After the halfway mark I was just yawning non-stop. Some Ghibli movies are just about admiring scenery, not telling a story, and there’s certainly plenty of nice scenery to admire in Kiki’s Delivery Service. The plot itself though… This rather unpleasant girl named Kiki flies around on her broom delivering a few items over 1h 45mins, meets a couple of nice people, makes a couple of friends, has a crisis of confidence and gets over it in time to save one of the new friends she has made from falling to his doom. I can’t exactly say “Nothing happened” though. It’s more accurate to say that everything switched over so quickly and all problems were resolved so easily that I couldn’t really appreciate what was going on.

How’s she’s going to find a place to live?
“Hey there!”
Oh. That’s settled then. Now she’s running a delivery service.
*cough cough*
Oh. So much for that. Well at least she made a friend.
*sulk pout*
…Or not. Oh no, she lost her powers!
“Help me!”
…Guess not… And there go the credits… Good riddance.

I always did like the ending theme though, which I heard long before watching the series and which made me a Yumi Matsutoya fan. But the movie itself is pretty, but dull, and I’ll have forgotten most of the characters by the time I wake up tomorrow. You win some, you lose some. The next Ghibli movie chronologically should be Only Yesterday (Omoide Poroporo) but I’ll watch some regular anime before that.

My Neighbor Totoro anime review

Continuing the run of Ghibli movies, I watched My Neighbor Totoro. I’d heard a lot about this movie, and of course the totoros are all over Ghibli’s advertising, but the movie itself was rather underwhelming. Two little girls move to the countryside with their dad, run around for an hour, have a fight, run around for another 30 minutes, the end.

The mythical “totoro” creatures themselves only show up a few times in the film, and only the big one plays any sort of important role. It was a decent watch, but probably one of those things I’d have to be 6 years old to truly appreciate. Actually I know a trio of sisters aged between 9 and 4, and the dynamic between the oldest and the youngest is pretty much like that between Satsuki and Mei in the film. I was impressed they managed to capture that interaction so accurately, but beyond that, yah, nothing special.

Next is Kiki’s Delivery Service. According to a Studio Ghibli special I watched, Hayao Miyazaki spent a whole day staring at women in skirts as research (ahem, ahem) for this movie, so let’s see how it turned out.

Laputa: The Castle in the Sky anime review

I’m watching the Ghibli movies in chronological order, so after Nausicaa comes Laputa: Castle in the Sky (or just Castle in the Sky if you’re American). Another excellent movie, with an amazing soundtrack. It picks up faster than Nausicaa and has a happier ending, too. I just wasn’t happy with the bad guys getting away with murdering Nausicaa’s sick old dad in the previous movie, but this time everyone gets what’s coming to them so it feels really good.

“Be careful what you wish for” is normally the theme of this kind of movie, but in this case it’s more like “Wish for whatever you want, just don’t be mean to other people while doing it.” Wanting to find the legendary Laputa wasn’t a bad thing in and of itself, and as Pazu said, someone would probably have found it eventually. In fact, if the bad guys had treated Sheeta and Pazu a little better, they might have cooperated willingly (Pazu especially, seeing how eager he was to find it). So they really got what they deserved in the end for their child-kidnapping robot-killing town-blowing up ways.

Laputa is more child-friendly than Nausicaa as well. It’s not half as preachy and Pazu and Sheeta feel more like regular kids just having a fun adventure. What a lovely movie. But the castle itself is such a sad place. I’m not sure I’ll be able to watch it again for a while, but it was a great experience nevertheless.