[Movie Review] Pokémon: Detective Pikachu

A children’s live-action comedy-mystery starring a talking mouse with a caffeine addiction, a searing wit that narrowly remains age-appropriate, and a heavy case of amnesia shouldn’t be such a successful combination, but it works well. Pokémon: Detective Pikachu is first and foremost a tech-demonstration movie whose splendid special effects take precedence above story complexity or character development, but despite some severe acting issues, some stellar casting choices and standout performances adeptly keep the film from feeling like a “graphics vehicle” and make it a strong recommendation for fans who are intimately familiar with the setting.

Dedicated Review: Wolf Children

This review is dedicated to my longtime best friend–a lover of wolves, a conservationist, and an anime fan. And, very recently, the birthday girl!

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Director and co-writer Mamoru Hosoda delivers in Wolf Children a gem of an ode to the heartrending challenges and unimaginable joys of parenthood. Hana is a university student who falls in love with a kindhearted man who gives her a daughter and son–and also happens to be a wolf–but is taken from her all too soon. Enduring through her tears, Hana gathers every ounce of her strength and determines to make a life for her unusual family, and to raise her children into wonderful people who would make their father very proud, wherever they may go and whatever they may be.

Movie Review: The Wind Rises

There is more to be said about Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of the prestigious Studio Ghibli, than could ever be put into reviews of all of his movies, let alone of one, and never mind his last. The Wind Rises, a dramatized but elegant biography of aircraft designer Jiro Horikoshi, is an artistically gorgeous send-off with some notable writing and pacing issues; despite feeling thematically divided and in some places unpolished, the film for the most part does prove itself worthy of Miyazaki’s name and of a place in his decades-spanning animated canon.

Movie Review: Princess Mononoke

It’s probably been a decade since I last watched director Hayao Miyazaki’s classic, but the film’s at-long-last release on Blu-ray is more than enough excuse to revisit this grand story. Set in a Japan taking its first violent, polluted, and uncertain steps toward industry, Princess Mononoke is a complex and ambitious story of humans, beasts, and nature that avoids easy answers and straightforward moral dichotomies, making it an important milestone in animation history.

Movie Review: From Up on Poppy Hill

Studio Ghibli continues to overwhelm. From Up on Poppy Hill is a masterpiece of animation from director Goro Miyazaki, and it gives me great confidence that he will someday be able to carry on the legacy of his famous father Hayao, who co-wrote this Tetsurō Sayama-adapted screenplay with Keiko Niwa and was responsible for films such as Kiki’s Delivery Service and Porco Rosso.

An artistically and emotionally beautiful period piece set in an early-1960s Yokohama, the film is incredibly moving both as a love story and as an ode to historical preservation and is easily one of the most spectacular successes I’ve witnessed in years.

Movie Review: Pokémon – The First Movie

There are some monsters you just don’t mess with.

Take Mewtwo, for instance, who is spoken to be the most powerful of all of the diverse species of creatures known as Pokémon. Mewtwo is brought into the world as an artificial being, a clone of an especially rare species known as Mew. This clone, an “animal” with superhuman intelligence and devastating psychic abilities, begins its life by questioning that life’s purpose–and then by destroying the lab that created it.

Pokémon is not a franchise I immediately associate with mass destruction and existential crises (neither of which I consider especially appropriate for children, despite this movie’s rating), but both are on display in the series’ first feature film. This movie is well aware of what it wants to accomplish, and even as it doesn’t always know how to reach that goal, it’s a fun film with plenty of exciting moments.

Movie Review: Howl’s Moving Castle (mild spoilers)

A wonderful fairy-tale adaptation from Studio Ghibli, Howl’s Moving Castle is a visually amazing film that deals in themes of love, war, and trust in a setting where magic and technology sometimes go hand in hand. The storytelling sometimes tries to do too much and doesn’t always juggle its various plot threads well, but even with the film’s many oddities, it’s more than gorgeous enough to make up for its narrative shortcomings.

Movie Review: Castle in the Sky (mild spoilers)

This is how you make an action movie that’s smart and exciting while remaining appropriate for older children.

Studio Ghibli’s Castle in the Sky is an epic and dangerous race to find the legendary floating island of Laputa, and it’s a journey defined as much by its remarkable amount of chaos as by its wonderfully established ties of friendship and its somewhat restrained environmental message. This is an amazing film that throws the simpler pacing of Ghibli films like My Neighbor Totoro or Grave of the Fireflies completely out the window and instead opts to almost relentlessly surprise the viewer with new sights and events from start to finish.

Movie Review: My Neighbor Totoro

What would your childhood look like if you made friends with nature spirits and a giant cat, all of which were invisible to adults?

Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbor Totoro, for the most part a delight, is a movie that loves to play around with this premise, even as the concept’s rich potential doesn’t quite get the attention it deserves. The film’s numerous issues merit serious discussion about how much they hold the movie back, but viewers willing and able to navigate those hurdles will find a lot to like in what is otherwise a fun and adorable story.

Movie Review: Akira (mild spoilers)

Akira is a deeply unusual and downright disturbing yet highly compelling action film, and it shows intensely the potential evils of chasing after power and treating it as an end in itself. The story’s bold intentions are sometimes more interesting than the way they are executed, but even these narrative issues don’t stop the movie from being highly recommended–to a very specific audience.