Torturous -- over-rated

Rating: 2/10 (24 April 2018)

I don't write many reviews but I felt compelled to say something about this one. I have seen this ranked high on IMDB for years and I could not bring myself to watch a Japanese animated film. But I ran out of things to watch and thought, "heck -- it's very highly rated so how bad can it be." Well -- famous last words. I got about 1 hour into this mess and I had to stop and read some reviews to see if I was missing something, or if I could find out how the ratings were so high. I saw several strong reviews which seemed legitimate, and so I forwarded about 40 minutes toward the end to see if something cool happened in the last 20 minutes to justify the preceding two hours. (Sorry -- I would not normally review a movie I did not watch in toto, but I saw 75% of this and that was enough of a sample size...) Basically this was bad. The plot was bad, the lines were bad, the characters were weird. I understand that people see a lot of symbolism in this movie and that it speaks to deeper themes. But any message is so buried in this bizarre plot and these incomprehensible characters that it is lost through all the muck. I'm not quite sure why this fails where things like Alice in Wonderland or the Wizard of Oz work. Those movies (stories) arguably have bizarre plots, characters etc., but somehow those work and this does not. (Perhaps the animation is a part of it.) I was tempted to say that this is just a children's movie; but then I realized that I would not even put a child through this. Even if this entertained a child, I don't know that it would be good for their development to sit through this nonsense. They might as well watch four episodes of Scooby Doo; at least that has a plot and some semi-logical resolution. Part of this could be cultural too; perhaps this plot and symbolism work better in the Orient; not sure. But now I'm regretting that I did not stay with my gut feeling and dodge this one. I was inclined to give it a 1/10 just to counter-balance some of the high ratings here, but I don't want to go that far; 3/10 seems right. Maybe I'll try this again in 20 years and see if I perceive it differently; but for the next two decades this one is on the shelf...