Too focused on physical beauty and age-ism

Rating: 6/10 (21 December 2009)

Like most of Miyazaki's work, this is a visually stunning world with lots of inventiveness displayed in character design, architecture, and back-story.
The physical layout is annoyingly trapped in clichés that don't work on a logical level: we're asked to accept the legitimacy of a KINGdom (have we all forgotten that our forefathers worked hard to drag us out from under kings into democracy???), war for war's sake, steam-punk aircraft that wouldn't work in a real world, and pseudo-victorianism.
The most painful pills to swallow, though, are the sexism, and the revolting tie-ins between youth, physical beauty, and beauty of the spirit. Anyone less than physically perfect and young will be outraged by Miyazaki's indefensible tying together of youth, beauty, and kindness. In Miyazaki's world, as in most Japanese anime, goodhearted characters are not permitted to be ugly, and vice versa. Old age is ridiculed nonstop throughout the film.
The film is sexist in the sense that women's chief preoccupation is romance, housekeeping, frilly hats, and child-rearing, while men are portrayed as warmongering metrosexual tin soldiers.
The dubbing into English goes fairly well, though the original Japanese is so curt that the voice actors clearly struggle to say their lines rapidly, thereby losing much of the emotional inflection that the lines deserve.
There's also an embarrassing oversight in the voice casting: one character magically becomes old and young versions of itself (without time travel), and when the age alters, the accent stupidly switches from British to American. The voice casting was sloppy-- it should have kept the accent uniform.