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I'll try to watch 12 anime movies this year. #1: Mary and the Witch's Flower. It's very pretty! It's also got a pretty simple story. Ordinary girl gains magical powers, is taken to an obviously shady magical school, and there's a bunch of action after the people running the school reveal their evil plot. Most of the characters are fun or endearing, but it's probably not worth seeing except for the visuals, which are really nice.
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Jan 26, 2018 04:54
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I saw Lu Over the Wall on Friday. I really enjoyed it for the first half-ish, where it was Kai meeting Lu and walking around town and stuff (occasionally featuring Kai's friends). There are a lot of fun scenes; all of the dancing scenes and the scene where Lu's father shows up are probably the highlights. Unfortunately the climax seemed unnecessary and kind of random. Visually it's pretty great, as one would expect from a Yuasa film. There's some stuff where I got the impression someone just thought it would be fun to draw, say, dogs growing fish-tails so they added a scene where that happened. There are some neat shifts in style, too, like whenever the "camera" goes below water. List: 1. Mary and the Witch's Flower 2. Lu Over the Wall
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Feb 25, 2018 21:35
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Erg posted:I watched The Cat Returns and wasn’t super into it. It had this weird meandering feeling despite half the movie being dedicated to getting out of the Cat Kingdom. Fat cat owned though and there were a couple sequences I really liked (cat processional at night and saving the prince from the truck). I also saw this recently (part of the GKids Ghibli festival thing). I agree with everything you said, the story seemed to get a lot worse once they entered the Cat Kingdom. I liked it quite a bit up until that point. The main character didn't seem to do much growth either. The Baron has his repeated line about how she should believe in herself, but all she ever does along those lines is yell at the king at the end. Then in the denouement she's a lot more confident or something, but I didn't really see how that came about. The Baron's hands also bothered me although I'd forgotten about them until seeing this post... Also as part of the GKids thing I saw Ponyo last month. I didn't like it that much. The main character kid is not really that interesting and I didn't understand the part of the plot where the world was apparently endangered and Ponyo was key to saving it. (Though I wonder if I just missed some exposition when wizard guy was talking about the magic potion.) Also the ending's being about a five year old declaring his eternal love for a girl/goldfish he met a day before was just weird. I liked some stuff, like the big storm and the flooded city. And the mom was great. 1. Mary and the Witch's Flower 2. Lu Over the Wall 3. Ponyo 4. The Cat Returns
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Apr 29, 2018 22:58
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I've been watching movies and not posting about them. I'm a bad man. But I have been keeping to one new film a month, so yay for that. 5. Mind Game: that sure is a movie. I can see why people like it but it didn't appeal much to me. Too much weird stuff in the second half, and the beginning (prior to the whole death thing) I found kind of gross and unpleasant to watch. The car chase was the only part I really enjoyed, but that was great. 6. Haikara-san, part 1: cute romantic movie. I'm not a huge fan of romances but the lead couple is charming, and Saori Hayami is always good. It's pretty funny, too, especially drunk Benio. Towards the end it seemed like they were stuffing too much in, though; the plot points start going by oddly quickly. Also the screening I went to at a real movie theater just played a Blu-Ray, wtf. 7. Maquia: really great, but I may just be a sucker for overly emotional stuff like this. Beyond its dramatic qualities, it actually sets up an interesting fantasy setting and it looks very nice as well. If I have any criticisms, they're that the plot with the other elves seemed less fleshed out than I would have liked and there are like three points where I thought the movie was about to end but it didn't, which irritates me. The actual ending is incredibly  .8. The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl: lots of fun, but not as much substance as I'd hoped for a Tatami Galaxy-related film. TG has some excellent themes connecting all of its stories whereas I didn't pick up on anything similar in TNISWOG. That's more of a problem with my expectations than with the actual movie, though. The stories are really fun, taking place in the same surreal Kyoto as TG and featuring similar art. The third arc was probably my favorite, partly because of the musical numbers. The titular girl carries the show, which is fine because she's great. Unfortunately the other lead character (a guy with a crush on her) isn't nearly as good. He's not terrible, but he doesn't do much to make him seem like a good romantic interest for her and has little personality aside from his crush. Most of the side characters are better. I also found the dreary fourth arc kind of disappointing compared to the other three.
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Sep 10, 2018 02:59
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I completed the challenge to watch 12 new (to me, though most of them were actually new) movies this year.  9. My Hero Academia: Two Heroes. I don't think I've seen a side film for a long-running series before, and now I know not to watch them! Actually the stuff before the serious plot started was mostly fine, although I rolled my eyes at the magic glove that was going to let Deku use One For All at full power. A lot of the comedy was pretty good too. I think I laughed out loud at Hagakure playing rock-paper-scissors (though in retrospect... shouldn't she just wear gloves? Like, all the time?). At a certain point the movie becomes the main characters fighting boring robots + boring Magneto and I sort of zoned out. 10. Liz and the Bluebird. People probably know this is good already, but just to reiterate, it's good. I did get the impression that the main conflict could have been resolved by the main characters' talking to each other instead of assuming they knew what the other was thinking, but whatever. Assuming you can put that out of your mind the drama's compelling, and the visuals and music are top tier. 11. Love, Chunibyo, and Other Delusions: Take On Me. A nice conclusion (I assume?) to the story. I admit I mostly forgot what happened during season 2, but from what I could pick up from the movie it wasn't much (apparently Rikka and Yuta have still only kissed once as of the start of the movie, jeez). Rikka and Yuta run around Japan and come to appreciate each other more fully, Dekomori and Nibutani bumble after them hilariously and may or may not fall in love, and Kumin only does one thing but it's amazing. There's only one [BV]anishment This World scene, oh well. A song called Take On Me plays, but it isn't the song called Take On Me. 12. Mirai. Not Hosoda's best work, but I'd lowered my expectations after The Boy and the Beast, so this ended up being better than I'd expected. It's a series of four stories about a little boy (four years old, I think) who travels through time, except in one where he turns into a dog instead (?). I don't think there was much of a common theme to the stories though maybe I just didn't notice one. Anyway, it's a pleasant film with a cute family and a cool house. I will say that the main character can be as irritating as an actual four-year-old, though, which is a bit off-putting. 13. Haikara-san, part 2. Bonus film #13! Not as good as the first part, though it does start with Benio beating up a gang of train robbers so she can talk to their boss, then drinking a bunch of vodka with him, so it's definitely not all bad. The premise of this second part is... weird. Benio's fiance gets amnesia, is convinced he's married to someone else, and eventually regains his memory but thinks it would be rude to abandon his fake wife, so he instead abandons his actual fiancee. So instead we follow another romantic interest for Benio, except it's kind of obvious that the original couple will get back together and the whole thing feels like a waste of time. Then Tokyo explodes at the end. There's a lot of quality side stuff I'm glossing over, and the movie is really good every time it decides to be funny, but the main plot was kind of a dud. Well that was a fun year for anime movies. I probably would have missed some real gems (Maquia and Liz) if I hadn't been motivated by this thread to keep an eye out for anime movies, so thanks for that.
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Dec 21, 2018 04:28
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