Subtle and beautiful

Rating: 10/10 (7 October 2003)

This is one of the most beautifully crafted movies I know of. It's mostly cute and heartwarming -- funny forest spirits, kids, the Japanese countryside, happy family -- but underlying that are fears far more real and frightening than any bad guy Disney ever concocted: the ill mother, the endangered child. The main characters are two of the most believable kids I know of in cinema, and we see the world through their eyes: not only the magical worlds of imagination and nature, but also the presence of death and the fragility of happiness. Don't get me wrong -- it's a very, very happy movie -- but in spite of the wildly imaginative fantasy element, it's a believable happiness because of the other things it acknowledges. I don't know of another movie than manages to be so incredibly cute and kid-friendly and without compromising an ounce of artistic integrity.
NOTE: I highly recommend AGAINST the dubbed version. The children in English are whinier and more stereotypical Hollywood kids; they lose some of the intelligence and depth that makes the kids so wonderful in Japanese. In some movies as visual as this one, the dub is preferable since it lets you focus on those visuals ... but not this one.