I never really understood why people compared Makoto Shinkai to Miyazaki until I saw this film. Prior to watching this my whole experience with his work was sadboi cuck shit (5 centimeters per second), sadboi foot shit (The Garden of Words) and Freaky Friday (I forget which movie this one was…it probably isn’t important), none of which seemed even close to anything Miyazaki had ever done, yet within the first 10 minutes of this film I understood that this was a Miyazaki clone. I’m not going to say too much on this point as Digibro (fuck…it’s Digi-Nee) already did that in her (or should I say his video since Digi identified as male when he made that video) Makoto Shinkai video but it feels wrong to not address it at all.
That being said, the film is surprisingly morbid for a Ghibli clone, especially considering how the early tone, while still a bit dark didn’t seem too bad. The girl met a jumpy boy and they just had a gay old time together. Then about half an hour later some spoopy boys are coming to fuck her up. Seriously. What happened.
Well, an old guy in glasses’ wife died and he’s still not over it so he’s taking it out on this innocent child. Pretty much immediately you can tell what the message of the film is going to be, which I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing. This is a Ghibli cone after all, and I don’t think thematic subtlety has ever been a strong point when it comes to Ghibli films. And despite Digi’s insistence that there is nothing more to the theme’s in Shinkai’s film, I would beg to differ.
Birth is a far more subtle element of The Children Who Chase Lost Voices than death is within the narrative, yet this juxtaposition does wonders for the overall thematic placing. It’s especially notable towards the end where this Quetzalcoatl swallows the two kids and lovingly strokes it’s belly like a pregnant mother before bringing them down the cliff that Gendo almost died trying to climb down. If Gendo wasn’t so eager to bring the dead back to life, he would have had a much easier trip down the mountain, and considering how he seemed to have just barely entered the portal thingy, it’s not like he saved that much time in the process. Choosing life over death is clearly the message that Shinkai was trying to present to his viewers, and despite how bluntly he portrays this message, I find the overall result to be a relatively charming film.
Despite all this, it’s not like I don’t understand why you might not like it. The initial portion of the film, setting up Agartha seems unnecessarily slow, and while I find that once they reach the fantastical land the film immediately livens up, you shouldn’t have to wait half an hour for your film to start.
Furthermore, the relationship between Asuna and Shun never really felt that engaging, so the idea that I should care about her entering Agartha because of this always felt kind of forced.
This Review is actually the script to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRoWQs6lIfk
Check that out and subscribe to the channel if you want to see more reviews like it.
