For a while now, I've been looking for a review of Spirited Away that matched my own thoughts on the film: that there are many interesting things to see in it, but I didn't find Chihiro/Sen to be all that compelling a Ghibli heorine compared to Satsuki, Shizuku or, especially, Kiki, in that I never really got emotionally involved with her beyond just hoping that she'd find her parents and get out of the weird bathhouse/spirite world. I find most of the positive reviews to be just so much excessive hyperbole, but I find the few bad reviews of the movie I've seen to be much too negative. I've been looking for a review by someone that liked it overall, but whose reaction is relatively lukewarm compared to the adulations we've been hearing... preferably by someone who has seen most, if not all, Ghibli films and, as such, can evaluate it in a Ghibli context. So far, the only review I've seen that comes close to expressing my own opinion of the film is, surprisingly, Chris Beveridge's review of Spirited Away on AnimeOnDVD.com... I had expected that, eventually, an "alternate angle reviewer" would buck the trend and give it a less than overly enthusiastic review, since I'm sure there are some other anime fans out there that don't quite get what all the fuss is about regarding this specific film, or just didn't quite care for it quite as much as "everyone else" did, but I didn't expect to see such a review from the site master himself.
Maybe I'll write my own review and submit it somewhere, probably the Deadly Critic (still haven't finished the review of Yokohama Shopping Log I've been writing for the longest time). I'm am intending on doing a review of Kiki's Delivery Service, still my favourite Ghibli film and a film that I feel is given extremely "short shrift" by a lot of the "Ghibli superfans" (not that I'm not a fan of the majority of Ghibli films as well, I just personally prefer not to put any anime creator or studio on a pedestal).
posted by Steve Brandon @ 10:08 PM
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