Japanese Animated Movies

So I took the Wee Guy to see Howl's Moving Castle at the weekend - remember he is three and a half and it's two hours long - and he enjoyed it immensely. He really loved Spirtited Away too, when we watched it at home on DVD awhile back.

But I'm afraid I just don't get japanese animated films. They seem to be entirely made up of middle, and the opening scenes and denouement are really just there to bookend the random linear narrative structure. So I just think "Is that it?" Or is it supposed to be simply about the skill and beauty of the drawings?

I know there are films that very famously only have a middle - Reservoir Dogs for instance - and I'm not saying I like them any the less for it, but I find it hard to take that kind of spin on animation. Give me Belleville Rendezvous anyday - and it's about cycling too.

I'm also struck that both Howls Moving Castle and Spirited Away are concerned with the central character struggling to regain something that has been stolen from them - youth or their name - and so seem to me to be about situations and our reactions to them. Whereas we in the west are much more likely to see dramatic resolution in terms of the moral learning of the characters - Finding Nemo anyone?

Or maybe - like science fiction literature- its about these very ideas. I really enjoyed the play on the four parallel universes in Howls Moving Castle, the hero physically melting with depressive angst, the continuous interspecietal shapeshifting in both movies. But I felt let down by the almost Pythonesque denouements; the momentary realisation that one character was the same person who rescued another from drowning ten years ago, or is a long disappeared prince from a country that hasn't made a prior appearance in the movie. It just seemed trite, and Thomas Hardy, frankly, did it better.

Somehow I come to the conclusion that it's not about anything other than what the Wee Guy gets from it - some popcorn and two hours of superhero shenanigans; so I feel almost guilty that I have been looking too hard. I can't deny that I enjoyed both films a lot.

By the way the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton is one of the best picture houses in London, and regularly wins awards confirming this, but don't ask for a latte before lunchtime - unless you want it for lunch, in which case you'll be well sorted. How hard can it be? And when I asked if I would be quicker going across the road the girl said "yes probably". Try "yes definitely" honey!

Andrew Mishmash