Sanzoku no Musume Ronja

After arduously slogging through the first several episodes on people's promises that this gets good later, I can say that they were right and it gets good later.

Ronja remains an insufferable brat through MOST of the story, but you come to care about the other characters enough to make up for it.
Overall it's a very good story (would be better without the painfully dull slog in the beginning), and worth putting up with the beginning in order to appreciate the end.

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My old review below because it's still completely valid for the first several episodes:

The CGI is really bad looking, the character movement and expressions are ... awkward and the lip syncing (even in the Japanese) is really badly off.

The characters themselves are all over-the-top, and the protagonist is utterly devoid of personality and could easily be replaced with a happy puppy instead and you'd barely notice, and she laughs WAY too much at EVERYTHING. It wouldn't be so bad except that they can't just have her laughing as she does things, they constantly cut away to show you a close-up shot of her stopping to laugh at every single thing.

The story starts out looking promising, but there's major flaws as soon as you get into the end of the 2nd episode and into the 3rd.

*MINOR spoilers ahead*

Ronja is sent into the woods ALONE with virtually no guidance, as her first EVER trip outside the safety of her home, and yet somehow, despite running around entirely aimlessly in the heavily wooded forest where she's never learned to navigate, she magically doesn't get completely lost, and her parents are SHOCKED when it even appears to them that she might have gotten lost. She's never SEEN a river before but knows it when she sees it, she's never SEEN a lake before, but knows it when she sees it.
It's only AFTER being rescued from danger that she was told how to avoid the danger. Peek parenting skills...

The pacing is SO insufferably slow that the ENTIRE 3rd episode could have been done effectively in 5 minutes. But no, let's have 25 extra minutes of close ups of Ronja giggling.

I'm not even surprised how not that many people have watched this Ghibli's TV series. I'll just say objectively the good and the bad aspects I found and try to explain why this has happened.

(+) Let's see... The nice thing may be that the characters are goodies, the ambientation is positive... that you may actually cry if you're sensitive enough. It's okay for a relatively young kid that doesn't have anything to watch at the time. And, of course, because this is an adaptation from Pippi Longstocking's Swedish author: Astrid Lingdren.

(+) The characters design were okay, I liked them and reminded me of Ghibli's. ... Some music was nice like the 'Wolf's song'.

(-) Well, I noticed from the start that its pace is way too slow even for a 26-episode TV series. It doesn't offer anything exciting until episode 6 more or less. But then again, it slows down again. I'm not saying this is like a rollercoaster plot, because it isn't anything like that. It's just a dead plain straight line from a cardiograph that somewhat increases its pulse a little bit from time to time. Maybe a shorter tv series would have been more delighting.

(-) The 3D tech wasn't still great at the time. Even today is still hard to accept it apart from some few exceptions. The modelling in characters, such as baby Ronja has exactly the same body model as baby Mattis (her father, if you already forgot). The hair looks weird, etc. I liked Lovis characterization, by the way. She's like Pippi being a strong mum but still I needed her to get on a horse.

So why not many people have seen this? This didn't get that much advertisement, it wasn't directed by Miyazaki the father but his son and maybe because, as I said earlier, is too long. Ghibli is best for film and short tv series (I know that Miyazaki has done tv series in the past, but the rest of the studio isn't accustomed to do that and his son is not that good, sorry). And, the most important thing was, that some friend of mine that is a real Ghibli fan had to drop out this in the first chapter... It didn't appeal to him at all and I guess I was chill enough to be able to watch it till the end.

I found out there's actually a live-action movie adaptation for Ronja so find out about that and enjoy it. I think it's slightly better.

Ronja the Robber’s Daughter is a show that I will be the first to admit that I’m severely biased against. The main reason is that as a swede I grew up watching the live-action version of this story, based from the children’s book by Astrid Lindgren. So rather than fight the inevitable, I wish to dedicate this review to comparing the two adaptions.

The animation is what one notices first as it is far from the usual. With a 3D-style that looks like it came straight out of a video-game, Ronja the Robber’s Daughter has a very different look, which may or may not scare some ... people off, though I would say that one gets used to the 3D rather quick.

Nature plays a large role in the series, to the point that one could almost call it its own character. Thanks to its amazing backgrounds you can’t help but admire the atmosphere. If you ever need to convince someone to go out camping, show them an episode or two of this. The one aspect that it lacks though is variety, while the live-action version portrays nature both as something beautiful and something that could easily kill you with its overwhelming power, the anime has a tendency to go for nothing but cuteness.

The story is intact and when it arrives at the more memorable scenes it manages to portray them well. The main problem comes from how stretched out it is. This series told a story in 26 episodes that could have been told in 12. Many episodes can literally be skipped as they involve nothing but pointless filler. While it is a Ghibli-production and one should go in expecting a lot of slice-of-life elements, I can’t help but feel that it worked against it more than in its favor this time.

When comparing the characters in each adaption I found the live-action version to be better. The dialogue in the anime tends to come off robotic and unnatural, which is a consequence of translating the story a bit too literally. The way that Ronja smiles and giggles constantly at the slightest thing nearly drove me nuts at times, and her father Mattis was portrayed as far less of an unstable and dangerous man, and more like a screaming drama-queen. Where I will say it caught me off guard was toward the end, where the characters start to reflect on what has been done and what their future holds. The father-daughter relationship comes to a good climax, and Ronja’s make-believe brother Birk in particular was developed in a way that gave me chills.

Overall, Ronja the Robber’s Daughter is a dragged out and cutesified version of the original story. Fans of Ronja are better off rewatching the live-action version or reading the book. It does however offer great art, a decent ending, and a few great scenes in between. If you are a big fan of slice-of-life or Ghibli this will be an okay watch.