I stumbled upon a list of the "best anime movies" to watch. It of course had a lot of Miyazaki films but it had some other lesser known films that I have been meaning to see for a while. So the past two days I sat down to watch some "classics" and some other random movies that have been on my radar for a while.
I watched three movies from Madhouse : Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.
Then today I watched one from Makoto Shinkai "The Place Promised in our Early days"
The Madhouse movies were all excellent, I enjoyed them all very much. The animation was well done, the voice acting was fantastic, and the stories were really well made. Tokyo Godfathers was my favorite of the three based on the great character development and how charming it was for something that came out of Satoshi Kon's twisted mind.
Shinkai's film was long. I have seen 5 centimeters per second and I enjoyed it a bit but it left me feeling empty and didn't make me want to revisit it. "The place promised in our early days" seemed to really follow 5 centimeter's depressing formula, but as always its so visually stunning you almost don't mind.
Honestly, this movie felt a bit long for me and got too much into the technical jargon without explaining thoroughly what this war was...I got confused by the end. But Shinkai is excellent at making me weep like a little girl and I still managed to shed a little tear by the end.
So after all this movie watching I decided to look up each film and see how it was received by critics and others around the world. My favorite of the movies, Tokyo Godfathers, had recieved some small award recognitions which was nice. But the one that really surprised me with how lauded it was was "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time".
Don't get me wrong, I loved this movie. But if I were to score it I'd give it an 8/10 because of pacing issues. I felt like they could have foreshadowed a bit more, or explained the painting a bit more. I felt like they had this great build up of Makoto doing all these leaps without a care and creating silly chaos at school, but after an hour of this they tried to build up this really dramatic deep plot with Chiyaiki that was crammed into the last twenty minutes. It was hard for me to get into it by this late point in the film. That was really my only problem with it. Otherwise the art was lovely, the voice acting (especially on the english dub) was phenomenal, and the characters were all interesting and unique.
So I want to know what other people thought of these films. Was I the only one who really felt that "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" was paced oddly? What are some other great anime films that you enjoy that aren't perhaps the really obvious ones (Miyazaki most notably, even though I adore the man). And what makes for great anime films? Just a general anime film discussion!