Intriguing animation from Japan

Rating: Null/10 (19 May 2001)

This film is beautifully drawn and animated; the motion is not as smooth as some American films, but it's very good compared to some anime I've seen. It seemed extremely imaginative and inventive to me, although some of this might simply be a lack of familiarity with some of the Japanese mythology being employed.
The most impressive part to me, though, was the moral ambiguity. Rather than painting nature as always pure and beautiful and humans as evil and ugly -- had this film been made by the usual lot of heavy-handed American eco-propagandists, it would have been very different. Instead the film demonstrated that the noble beasts could be just as stupid and insane as humans, and that even someone who is ravaging the forest can have the best of reasons. A character you initially assumed to be comic relief turns out to be as much of a bad guy as anyone else. The young hero's goal is, of course, to establish balance and harmony, a common theme in Eastern philosophy. If the film was weakened by its translation to English, I can only imagine how much more awe-insprining it must have been in its original English. While a few of the voices in the dubbed English version jarred (there is absolutely no reason for these Japanese characters to have British, Southern, or Black accents) and some of the character design reminded me why I don't generally like anime, overall I enjoyed this much more than most other anime I've seen, and I recommend it to anyone who is willing to work a little to extract meaning from this ambiguous artifact of a different culture.