Let me get right to the meat of the review: Spirited Away is an absolutely gorgeous piece of animation. It looks beautiful from start to finish. The action is fluid and dynamic. The design of scenery and characters is imaginative and detailed.

A coworker pointed out that she favored “Princess Mononoke” over this film. My reply was that “Mononoke” is to “Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind” as this film is to “My Neighbor Totoro.” This is a child’s film, albeit a wonderfully detailed and imaginative one.

The story is that of a young girl, Chihiro, trapped in a world of spirits and monsters. She starts out weak and afraid, but spurred by the desire to rescue her parents she finds an inner determination and generous nature that see her through an amazing series of challenges. Showing the value of determination, politeness and caring seems to be the driving principle of the movie.

Not everything is sweetness and light. Yu-Baaba, the matron of the bathhouse, is quite the intimidating and dangerous woman. Genuinely scary things happen to and around Chihiro. There’s even a rather disgusting sequence involving regurgitation. You’ve been warned.

I’ll briefly touch on the quality of the dub. Disney did right by this work, harnessing superb voices to a talented voice director and a quite decent script. Names were mostly unchanged, and the occasional instances of off-camera speaking used to explain certain cross-cultural elements weren’t jarring. I admit that I’m dub-agnostic when it comes to anime, so your mileage may vary. The zealots in the crowd will likely disagree with me, but the zealots probably aren’t reading this review.

So is the movie perfect? Perhaps not, but the downsides are subjective. Chihiro’s transformation from incapable to indomitable seems a bit sudden in some ways, though there are key events that spur this transformation. There are a couple of “huh?” moments in the movie, but those could be explained by an incomplete grasp of cultural cues. Maybe. Little things, subjective things, are all that keep this movie from being a perfect 10. Yes, it’s really that good.

“Spirited Away” is only in town through Thursday the 17th of October. As of this writing, that’s three more nights’ worth of chances to see this film in the theater. It is absolutely worth it. This is a splendid film.
Spirited Away at Nausicaa.net

Wendi and I went to see the Escaflowne movie at the Clinton Street Theater a couple of weekends ago. And yes, I’m so lazy that it took me this long to write up the review.

“Escaflowne” is a movie about giant robots that manages to almost entirely not be a movie about giant robots. A young semi-suicidal girl is brought over to another world, Gaia, where everyone thinks she’s the Wing Goddess destined to summon the Dragon Armor known as Escaflowne to either save or destroy the world. Oh, and this loner-hero named Van is on a mission to kill his brother who usurped the throne or something.

You see, while the plot isn’t what you would call terribly complex, you’re not really given any sort of real bead on the background involved. You also get the impression that there’s an awful lot of backstory and character development that you’re missing out on so that the movie’s running time can be kept short.

Or, put another way, you feel like you’d be a lot better off watching the televised anime series instead of this movie adaptation. (For the record, I’ve only seen two episodes of the American dub on Fox Kids so I really don’t know that much about what the story’s supposed to be about.)

What was good about “Escaflowne,” the movie rendition? Great action sequences. Nice character and machine designs.

What wasn’t quite so good? The sense of missing backstory and character depth. A rushed feel to the sequencing. No sense that the heroine has any impetus for the changes she appears to go through.

It’s not a bad movie. I’m glad I was able to see a subtitled version, since adding a bad dub to an already-underwhelming film would probably have made it unwatchable. On the other hand, it’s not something I’m going to pay to own when it comes out on DVD. Maybe I’ll see about borrowing the series instead…

Escaflowne Movie Site

Here’s one of those “genre films” that a lot of fanboys like myself have been looking forward to for months… nay, years. In many ways Spider-Man has been our last, best hope to see a good movie based on a Marvel comics title. X-Men, after all, could have just been a fluke.

I’m pleased to say that Spider-Man, the movie, does not suck.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve already been inundated with hype and info and imagery and so on. I’ll spare you things you don’t need me to tell you.

Here’s what works about the movie:

• Yes, Tobey does an outstanding job. He absolutely picks up this movie and carries it on his back from start to finish. Spectacular work.
  
• The interpersonal drama outweighs the fancy CGI and fight choreography. It really does. If it didn’t, the last scene wouldn’t have worked at all. (No, I’m not giving that away, even though it gets spoiled in a lot of other reviews.)
  
• Willem Dafoe manages to work some subtlety into what would normally be Just Another Nickelson’s Joker Ripoff.
  
• There were very few played-for-laughs moments. In a weird sort of way, this makes great sense. We’re watching an origin story, and while Spider-Man is one of the original wisecracking superheroes he doesn’t quite evolve to that point in this film. We’ll probably see more of that in movies to come.
  
• Setup. There’s an awful lot of setup, both blatant and subtle, for future Spidey films. Listen for the name of the place Peter gets fired from on account of poor attendance.
  
• The organic webshooters. As used in this movie, it works. It breaks from canon, but it works.

Here’s what doesn’t (quite) work:

• Danny Elfman’s score. Soulless. Lifeless. A vague pastiche of everything else he’s ever done. Just about the only good thing I can say about it is that it never once gets in the way of the movie. I dare anyone to pick out a real melodic sequence out of that awful score. I dare anyone to remember any given series of notes. It’s that lame, folks.
  
• Kirsten Dunst. Bless her soul, it’s not really her fault that MJ didn’t have much more to do in this film than to bounce from rich brat to rich brat and get saved a few times by His Spideyness. While she’s the center of Peter Parker’s emotional existence, only a few times does she appear to have the strength or depth of character to deserve it. Again, not the fault of the actress, and she does have a few moments in the film that indicate possible greatness in future films.
  
• Some of the CGI is a bit obvious. It doesn’t detract from the movie too much, and is probably kind of unavoidable, but every so often there’s a jarring “Ah, that’s CGI” bit that takes you out of the movie for a moment. Luckily the movie pulls you right back in again, but you shouldn’t have left in the first place.
  
• The organic webshooters. (On both sides of the coin, yes.) My objection isn’t that it breaks from canon, but that we lose the opportunity to see that Peter Parker really is a science whiz. We sure hear about it often enough, but at no point is it actually evident. The screen time used to show him getting the hang of the organic webshooters could have been used to show him developing the mechanical/chemical ‘shooters.

Overall, it’s a great superhero movie and a better-than-average movie in its own right. If you like “genre” films in the least, you owe it to yourself to catch a showing. As for the Kerezman clan, my son Alexander stated halfway through that “we have to buy this when it comes out.” And he was saying this during one of the better Peter/MJ scenes in the movie, so it wasn’t just a reaction to the cool fight sequences. That’s my boy!