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Reviews
Brother Bear (2003)
Was good, should have been great
Brother Bear was good, but it should have been great. The basic story is wrapped around some beautiful, powerful messages, but the movie seems at times like it is apologizing for that when it should be trumpeting it.
There are several characters (including two featured heavily in the trailers) that bring nothing to the film. To give credit where it is due, these characters delivered a few good jokes. But this is a story that deserves to be powerfully roared, and the comic relief is only distracting.
And with all due respect to Phil Collins, the music in this movie is overdone. The songs are good, and for the most part they are relevant. But not every dialog-free moment needs to be filled with music. Silence can have a much greater impact when it is used to force an audience to feel a moment. The music could have been blended to the film much better, as in most of Ghibli's films.
Event without cutting some of the unnecessary scenes, at less than 90 minutes there was plenty of room in this movie for some much needed character development. It seems like Disney tried to use the music to tell parts of the story that might have been more powerfully told had they been simply shown.
The artwork gets a bit better grade than the rest of the movie. The Pacific Northwest is breathtaking, and Disney have done a fairly good job of doing it justice. It's not quite up to the standards of Mononoke Hime, for example, but--particularly at a time when it seems like all animation is headed for the 3d computer style--I think it's worth complementing some well done, warm and expressive animation. The animation of expressions, in particular, is top-notch; quite a lot in this film is communicated very well by that alone.
Many of you with children will undoubtedly go see this because it is Disney. A few more like me will see it because we want the great story underneath so badly we'll suffer through the rest to get it. But please, Disney, next time don't tell a story calculated to appeal to the broadest audience or to offend the least possible number of people. Tell a story that needs to be told, and tell it well and loudly for the sheer joy of doing so.
Hoshi no koe (2002)
Sensationally beautiful work from an independent filmmaker
Warning: mild spoilers within.
Hoshi no koe is a short (25 min) but sensationally beautiful work. Set against backgrounds of modern Japan, space, and alien worlds, it is a story of love and separation and hope played out between young mecha pilot Mikako Nagamine and her boyfriend Noboru Terau.
The art is spellbinding. Rainy sunsets on earth, mecha battles in space, and the sun breaking through the clouds after a rainstorm on another planet are all rendered so exquisitely that they capture your imagination. While much of the animation consists of slow pans over stills, the effect only serves to emphasize the quiet beauty of the world that surrounds the lovers. The mech designs are fantastic, but the mecha combat is kept in the background lest it interfere with the main love story.
The dialog is minimal, but well-chosen and effective. As the separation between Mikako and Noboru increases, every line delivers heart-wrenching emotional impact.
What makes all of this even more impressive, though, is that Makoto Shinkai animated all of it on his personal computer without the help of an animation studio. The DVD version of this film even carries an original version where Mr. Shinkai and his fiancée voice acted Noboru and Mikako.
This film stands alone as a great example of an independent short. After seeing this, I'll be waiting on tenterhooks for Mr. Shinkai's Kumo no mukou, yakusoko no basho.