Spirited Away was a... movie. I'm going to be completely honest and say that this movie did not meet my expectations at all. I have heard countless times that this movie is up there for the best animated movie of all time, but I find it hard to put it in my top 5-10. This movie does have it's nice moments, but with the astronomically high bar that was set it unfortunately brought down my opinion of the movie.
Even though my expectations were not met story wise, I thought that the film stood out very well in the visual department. The colors of everything were very well used and extremely beautiful. This also translates to shot selection as well and the wide, outside shots were very well done and extremely detailed. Not only were the shots very pretty, but the character designs were very creative and interesting. The frog people were interesting, and the humans also looked very interesting, but the other spirits looked especially odd, but in a good way. There were some designs I hated though. The witch was extremely uncomfortable to look at, and while that might be the point of the design, it wasn't just uncomfortable to me it also wasn't good in my opinion. Haku's design wasn't bad, but for some reason I felt odd whenever he showed up. He just looked out of place with the other characters. Yeah he was a human, but he didn't fit in to me. I also hated the baby. I didn't need to see the baby. With an extension of the character design is the actual characters and their personalities. I did watch this in dub so that might have had some effect on my opinion. Chihiro was a nice protagonist even though she was a little whiny for a little while. I did watch this in dub so that might have had some effect on my opinion. As I mentioned about Haku earlier his personality didn't really fit in my opinion. He was very flat and not interesting, I didn't really see the connection between him and Chihiro and I didn't even feel bad when he was injured. Yubaba's appearance wasn't fun, but her character was a nice antagonist. I also liked the split between her and her sister being opposites. The No-Face was an interesting character, but after it joined Chihiro on the train I almost forgot about them. If I were to say my favorite character it would probably be either Kamaji the boiler guy or Lin who helped Chihiro. They both had great personalities and really fit into the setting. The mom and dad sucked, but that was because they didn't do anything. We don't talk about that stupid baby either. Another absolutely great thing with the movie is the star studded cast. The amount of voices I recognized was insane. The ones that I recognized were Lilo from Lilo and Stitch, Meg from Hercules, The abominable snowman from Monsters Inc, Grandpa Tennyson from Ben Ten, I know that there are a whole lot more, but hearing those iconic voices was a very big surprise. Now onto the part that I was dreading to talk about. With the amount of good things I've seen about this movie, I was expecting a massive and insane story, but I didn't get that. Now with how much I've seen I also had no idea how the story was going to progress in the slightest. When Chihiro's parents turned into pigs I was very surprised because I had no clue what was going on or what was going to happen. I also thought that No-Face was going to be the main antagonist of the movie with their design. That also didn't happen. Now without all of the surprises I had I felt that the story was a little lackluster with the expectations set. The movie was 2 hours long and although I don't think that it was necessarily slow paced for the whole time, but when the movie ended I found myself thinking "that's it?" I wouldn't say that I 100% agree with this, but it almost felt like nothing happened at times. It's hard to back up this point, but it did feel like the story didn't really amount to anything in my opinion. I wish I enjoyed this movie more. I think now that I now what the movie is about and what happens in the end a rewatch would probably have me like the movie more. Expectations 10/10 Actual Rating 8/10
1 Comment
|
AuthorMonkey Archives
April 2022
Categories |