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Comment by Isamu | Hacker News Reader

This article also mentions somebody's reaction to Princess Kaguya as looking "unfinished" - I saw the the same comment elsewhere (on HN maybe?)

I am really taken aback by this - the watercolor/ink style may be a little bit unusual these days, but it's not as though animation has never been done in this style before, nor that artwork of this style is completely alien. There is a ton of this stuff.

Nor is this film extremely minimalist, and minimalism been done before too.

I'm starting to feel that the overly-detailed, extremely complicated CG animation and action scenes in most movies are having an adverse affect on our expectations, so we are becoming less able to appreciate something simple.

I could tie this back to software - so much of what we deal with evolves over time to be rather complicated, with a million features, and we beg for more.

Geez, things can be simple. It's not "unfinished" to be simple.

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Couldn't agree more. I recently saw Princess Kaguya after being essentially dragged to the movie theatre by a friend. I've never really developed a taste for Japanese animation, and went in with no expectations.

Frankly, it's the most emotionally engaging movie I've seen in half a decade. It blew me away. At no point either did the animation ever look unfinished. That's just a weird characterization, and I'm kind of annoyed at the implication that the audience expects a certain baseline of eye candy on the screen at a given time.

Anyhow, the movie's the bomb. Sad to hear that this studio is going on an extended hiatus. I hope someone else fills the void, because I would definitely be in the market to throw money at my screen for anything of this caliber.

After the comments I've seen here I'm tempted to see it. But it was a big budget flop in Japan (cost 50MUSD, (compared to 6MUSD for Kiki's deliver service) and took 25MUSD at the box office).

I think this may partly be because other recent Ghibli films have been quite poor, and expectations are low.

> I've never really developed a taste for Japanese animation, and went in with no expectations.

To be fair, the vast majority of it is crap. (In much the same way the majority of American entertainment content is also crap)

But there's also fantastic stuff out there, like Miyazaki films.

Makoto Shinkai has some excellent films.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makoto_Shinkai

Garden of Words, 5 Centimeters Per Second, Children Who Chase Lost Voices, The Place Promised in our Early Days, and Voices of a Distant Star are all excellent.

Mamoru Hosoda's recent works have all been quite good as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamoru_Hosoda

I'm not really a fan of his earlier works, but everything he's done since The Girl Who Leapt Through Time has been very high caliber.

I wouldn't say either is quite at the level of Miyazaki and Ghibli, but they're both quite good, and some of the better examples of the medium at it's best.

Wolf Children is another great non-Miyazaki film done in a similar style: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Children

Yep! That's one of Hosada's works

Sturgeon's Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

"I repeat [Sturgeon’s Law], which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud.

Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. is crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other art forms."

Check out the post the OP was referring to[1]. The author was reacting to a teaser trailer with footage of the most expressionistic part, without really any context at all. He is clearly very excited by the movie. I think his description is entirely reasonable and not in the least shallow or philistine. (I myself quite liked the movie myself and loved this particular scene.)

[1] http://www.firstshowing.net/2013/watch-first-unique-teaser-f...

From same director, the comedy My Neighbors the Yamadas has been done in the same style. Didn't read westerners reviews (and won't :) but it would be genuinely more difficult to enjoy because of the Japanese wordplays/culture related humor. I still enjoyed it a lot with limited knowledge of the culture.

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