A hard one to judge... Now an almost forgotten project of Isao Takahata before co-founding Ghibli, it's now burried way beneath the pile of masterpieces that have brought art anime to glory. This medium-length animation (only one fairly stretched hour) is strange: it starts as a dramatic parable, turns into an uninspired & bland fairy tale for kids, before getting a Hollywood happy ending... while being sprinkled throughout with off-mark & exasperating moments or reactions (ridiculous dialogues, out-of-nowhere explosions of laughter, unexpected changes of tone...). The result is a fluctuation between the absolutely magnificent (music & images) and the embarrassingly out of tune.
jzp321
2008-01-29 23:37:39