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| Princess Mononoke | 29 Oct 99 |
Engaging and original but a tad slow, too long and not quite as fulfilling as the best stuff Hollywood (or, in the animation department, just Disney) manages to pull off. The dubbing is excellent but I would rather not have had celebrity voices pulling me out of Japan of a thousand years ago. The animation is lush and even beautiful but not quite as inventive and risky as more modern anime stories tend to be. That may have been in line with feeling like an epic, which in spite of some almost glaring story weirdnesses and overly obvious politics, this film approaches in scope and wonder. Flawed magic is better than no magic at all. B