A great masterpiece for The Master

Rating: 10/10 (1 December 2014)

This film is a project that comes from far away. Designed by Miyazaki already at the end of the Seventies, he prefer to it the also wonderful The Castle in the Sky. It returns in his hands at the beginning of the Nineties and he decides to make it, also facing a period of writer's block caused by too many similarities to films released in the twenty years in the middle, finally he decides to give the story an almost mythological cut, while inserted in a historical setting. Miyazaki starts the production, for the most part of it in traditional 2D animation with computer use in only two occasions: for five minutes of scenes particularly complex and 10% in the making of the color, the rest is all strictly made by hand. The Master has approved personally each of the 144,000 frames in the film, as well as he made the storyboard and the character design. Therefore from this great job it follows an impressive fantastic tale, one of the most ambitious works of the director, of strong moral rigor, that touches all of his big issues, all dear and always present in his filmography, lowered into the fascinating backdrop of medieval Japan (The Muromachi Period, ranging from 1336 to 1573 approximately). The film features the usual magical and indescribable aura that hovers over every work of The Master of Japan animation, capable like no one else to excite with a genre unfairly undervalued and often mistreated. Focuses on the struggle between humans and spirits of the forest, is the symbolic fantastic expression through which to pass a wanted ecologist message, so fundamental in every works of Miyazaki, in a fairy tale instructive, not boring or verbose despite the length, strongly influenced by Shintoism. The message, however, is not its only strength, as always also the backgrounds are of an unparalleled beauty, the characters have complex and multifaceted personality, there is no clear distinction between good and evil, the one is reflected in the other and vice versa, no one is innocent, nor among humans or among animals. All are fighting for a cause, right or wrong. Everyone has weaknesses. Are vital characters, some of the most beautiful characters in the filmography of Miyazaki. And the film is a very wonderful masterpiece for the animation, but for the cinema in general.