ladulaser

Having only seen Tales from Earthsea from Goro Miyazaki earlier, I didn't get my hopes up much for this film to hold the nostalgia and love that has become Studio Ghiblis trademark. Boy was I wrong. I didn't like Spirited Away too much since it involved supernatural phenomena which gave the writers a lot of "creative freedom", and Princess Mononoke was just too violent. With Hayao doing the script and Goro directing this time, father and son have made movie history together.

Being a member of my hometown's constructional board myself, I can relate to how Tokyo's counterpart must have been in a hurry to clean up the city from old buildings before the 1964 olympics, and how student opinion tends to lean towards preserving what has been at their school since they started. Characters are very believable and follow some patterns that make us think "ah, I know someone just like that!". Animation is beautiful of course. Not the lush greenery of Arietty, but everything feels like a very realistic depiction of what 1964 Tokyo suburbs must have looked like. I'm going all in and give this movie a 10 out of 10, because it's the best animated movie I have seen in a lot of years.

I happened to read the more negative review further down, and thought I had to post some input. If you live in Scandinavia and a "youth movie" comes out in your own language, you're bound to think the pace is wrong, the acting is poor and that the story isn't believable.

As I live in Sweden I couldn't sense anything wrong with the dialog, thought the acting was good and nothing sounded unnatural. I bet if Espen down here went and saw a similar Swedish movie like Lina's Kvällsbok or Sandor Slash Ida, he wouldn't find them as awkward as I did.

So maybe Norwegian and Swedish scriptwriters should just start sending their scripts across the border, shoot their movies in the other country with foreign actors/actresses, and then market it through local media as the new hot movie from the neighbor country :) Personally, I read about the film in Ottar, the member newspaper for RFSU (the Swedish "National Association for Sexual Enlightenment").

The movie was a little short though, only 72 minutes. I think they could've thrown in more of those embarrassing comic relief scenes, you'll understand what I mean if you go and see it!

This movie really opened up my eyes as to how we are trapped in a system that will inevitably fail. The only reason I haven't spent more of my spare time fighting it has been that I didn't know how to make the world function in a different way.

Ever since I was a little kid I have always believed that a) People should work together on agreed goals instead of competing with one another, and that b) Every necessity of life should be handed out to every single person - clean water, food, clothes, shelter, health care, education, electricity and means of traveling the Earth. Without anything demanded from them in return. When that is taken care of, luxury items can be produced out of whatever is left of the Earths resources and bought by those who choose/volunteer to educate themselves and work despite having all they really need at hand for free. Then I saw this movie, and got hooked on its ideas!