A particularly bad week for my movie viewing.
Movies
If you watched the trailer, you already know how aesthetically abominable this movie is—Studio Ghibli's signature character designs do not work at all when transcribed basically whole-cloth from hand-drawn animation to 3d-computer-generated animation (nor does English dubbing onto Japanese CG animation, for that matter). But what the trailer doesn't show you is that the movie is also narratively incomplete. This movie's gigantic shrug of an ending is so baffling that it rivals The Turning in terms of how much it feels like the people making this simply went, "Eh, whatever—roll the credits." It's hard to imagine how this movie was allowed to happen within the Studio Ghibli framework. Grade: D+
One of those slow-burn artsy horror movies with a meaningful metaphor at its core. The problem is that there's not a lot to this metaphor (dementia is scary/dehumanizing!), and also, the movie doesn't really find a good way to zero in on the core of this metaphor until the last 20 minutes or so, when it veers into some pretty good House of Leaves-style architectural horror followed by the one truly great scene here, the last scene in the entire movie. The rest is pretty vague and familiar—we've seen movies in which elderly people experience health problems and act erratically as their relatives try to take care of them, and this version of that is mostly just sad and boring, lacking a lot of the specifics of real-life elder care while also not going enthusiastically into the horror material until really late in the game. So it's a movie not well-enough observed to pull us along that way, nor is it scary or inventive enough to be satisfying as a horror movie. The short film that is the last act of this movie, though, is probably a Grade-A affair. Grade: C
I was tracking with this for a while—an Italian, UPA-style parody of American westerns, heavy on the slapstick/surrealism and with a keen eye for making a virtue out of its uber-cheap animation (though with a considerably less keen eye for mitigating the horrible anti-native racism of westerns—it's arguably worse here). But this just drags by the end, once again establishing that this kind of animation isn't really suited for anything that goes beyond a typical half-hour TV slot. I do think it's hilarious that the director claims that he invented the Spaghetti Western with this movie, a claim that may be be technically correct (as we all know, the best kind of correct) but is so far removed from anything resembling what that genre came to be known for that it just feels like a dude trying to drum up historical hype for his mediocre movie. Grade: C
Not a ton to recommend about the first color anime film other than the historical significance of being the first color anime film, unfortunately. Pretty ordinary animation, thin characters, and some incredibly wooden English dubbing (though I realize this isn't strictly the fault of the Japanese filmmakers themselves). I do appreciate that the last 30 minutes are so incredibly strange, though. I'm not familiar with the folktale this is based on, so maybe this is just baked into the concept, but after a somewhat generic "ancient China" setting, it's super wild that this movie starts sending characters to outer space and the bottom of the ocean without so much as batting an eye. Grade: C-
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