Looks amazing. At least it has that.

Rating: 6/10 (22 March 2019)

I like to imagine, 10 year old me, in an alternative reality where the manga style of drawing didn't totally freak me out, catching this movie during some flight to a far away land and being swept away by its strange rhythms and formidable tone.
In practice though, I saw this at 16 when I was a lot more jaded. This movie is a stunning clash of positive and negative aspects. It's basically blockbuster syndrome where the whole thing looks and sounds stunning but upon closer examination is pretty shallow.
Basically everything about this movie is amazing but its script. Visually stunning with its lush setting coming up against the forces of modernity. The sparing but startling usage of CGI to represent the unholy. The mood, switching from epic battle of man and crazed demon to quite reflection as a stone gets speckled in rain. It ebbs and flows from peaceful to fiery that is hypnotic and compelling. The score will be your new guilty pleasure too.
I've seen both the original and English dub. It was back at a time where I struggled to rarely take notice of voice performance when I was reading, but the English dub is fine. It's a mix of tolerable performances (like Mononoke and the main guy) plus some rather enchanting ones (the lascivious guy with the wart plusthe sultry english leader of the human forces).
Now for the script: it's sort of different to have a protagonist caught between two sides, neither of which is fully in the wrong but this grey-lighter grey-white morality gets pretty sickly very quickly. I liked the apes and the Kodamas, they were all cool. But the message about the poisonous quality of hate was naive.
The protagonist is a one dimensional mouth piece for the writer. He experiences no character development and barely expresses any emotion. He just stoically accepts that he's been banished and does so. He gets a little passionate when he gives grand sanctimonious lectures but they have little nuance beyond "war is bad, environment is good". I can totally get behind this on principle but it gives me nothing on how to put this into practice.
The title character doesn't really do much. You know that kid in school that chastized you for eating meat? She's that. They try to sort of make them romantic interests but...I don't care about either of them.
It ends more satisfyingly that its writers movies usually do. I got real sense of high stakes and conflict that wasn't resolved by easy answers.
Frozen is a movie for all ages. This was a kids' movie.
See it, but but expect a movie by a master animator, not a master storyteller.