I borrowed this off my Japanese friend who had the entire Ghibli box set. I was already a huge fan of Ghibli, having seen all of Miyazaki's films, and two other Takahata films, Grave of the Fireflies and Only Yesterday, both of which I loved. As you can imagine, I was looking forward to this.
It starts off well enough, a large community of metamorphic raccoons try and stop an urban development scheme that is destroying their forest. One group wants to start a war to drive the humans out, while another, led by the 'Elders' who want to stop urban development, but not necessarily kill any humans. What follows is a random and utterly boring sequences of raccoons knocking bulldozers off roads or pretending to be ghosts to scare away builders. This goes on for TWO HOURS. It's boring, pointless, and I didn't understand what was going on most of the time. Then the raccoons merge with another forest, or something, and then new raccoons turn up, who apparently we're supposed to know, and more random scaring happens, which culminates in a giant 'Poltergeist Parade' which is undoubtedly imaginative and nice to look at, but merit-less and of no consequence.
The animation is nice and detailed as usual, but that's hardly worth watching this film. But does the film have a deeper meaning? It tries to squeeze in a kind of Animal Farm type communism analogy (Red Army, Five-Year Plans), but lacks the subtlety and is strangely abandoned a half way into the movie and never heard of again. The attempted love story between two raccoons is also awfully handled, and is ostensibly pointless around the rest of the story.
People will say I didn't like it because I didn't understand it, maybe I need to know more about the culture, but I seriously doubt knowing what a white fox symbolises at a shrine will in any way increase my enjoyment of this poorly done film.
It starts off well enough, a large community of metamorphic raccoons try and stop an urban development scheme that is destroying their forest. One group wants to start a war to drive the humans out, while another, led by the 'Elders' who want to stop urban development, but not necessarily kill any humans. What follows is a random and utterly boring sequences of raccoons knocking bulldozers off roads or pretending to be ghosts to scare away builders. This goes on for TWO HOURS. It's boring, pointless, and I didn't understand what was going on most of the time. Then the raccoons merge with another forest, or something, and then new raccoons turn up, who apparently we're supposed to know, and more random scaring happens, which culminates in a giant 'Poltergeist Parade' which is undoubtedly imaginative and nice to look at, but merit-less and of no consequence.
The animation is nice and detailed as usual, but that's hardly worth watching this film. But does the film have a deeper meaning? It tries to squeeze in a kind of Animal Farm type communism analogy (Red Army, Five-Year Plans), but lacks the subtlety and is strangely abandoned a half way into the movie and never heard of again. The attempted love story between two raccoons is also awfully handled, and is ostensibly pointless around the rest of the story.
People will say I didn't like it because I didn't understand it, maybe I need to know more about the culture, but I seriously doubt knowing what a white fox symbolises at a shrine will in any way increase my enjoyment of this poorly done film.