Emilie's Media Diary

I don't know why but I just can't seem to enjoy Makoto Shinkai's movies. I find the art absolutely stunning but end up hating the character and their actions each time. The movies have this feel that is both realistic but surreal. Everything feels soft and it somehow makes me uncomfortable. One of Shinkai's newer films Kimi no Na wa. (Your name.) was a huge success. It was everything people were talking about in the anime community. And I didn't enjoy the movie... it was just very boring to me. I had to keep myself awake while watching it by snacking. I'd been eyeing The Garden of Words for a while. The art just looked so nice in all the posters and clips I saw of this movie that I just had to give it a chance. I thought the movie might be good or at least better than his other work. That was a mistake. A big mistake! I definitely wasted 45 minutes of my life watching this movie. This movie also has the mushy and soft feeling that I hate! I can'

A movie that's not about dogs? Yes! And this is one of my favorite movies as well! I could talk about the plot of this movie but it's actually quite unimportant! The movie tells a story of  Tetsuko "Alice" Arisugawa and a girl she befriends called Hana Arai. The genre of this movie is marked as a drama, which I can understand but I'd personally call it a comedy. Both Hana and Alice are dumb teenagers that get themselves into dumb situations. ESPECIALLY when they try to be serious. Hana has love troubles and is dealing with a broken heart while Alice is trying to come to terms with the fact that her parents are divorced and tries to find a new father figure. But instead of choosing better ways to deal with their problems, Hana stops going to school and Alice starts hanging out with elderly men.  What makes this movie really different tho is the fact that the whole movie is rotoscoped. And for those who didn't know, rotoscoping is whe

This movie has a really weird place in my heart.  It's not my favorite movie. I found this 2011 Chinese/Japanese animated film while searching animated movies featuring animals (because what else would I be searching??). The story, how should I say it, feel very basic but at the same time very different. It's like I can't form an opinion about this movie outside the fact that I like watching movies about dogs! I've seen this movie multiple times before, but I rewatched it again to make this blog post. Before I'd only watched it in Chinese but this time I watched the Japanese version... It took me a while to get used to the different voice actors. I'd say the main part of the story is about a boy named Tenzing who has to move from the city to the prairies to live with his father after his mother's death. He has a difficult time blending in and he doesn't necessarily even want to. He is not close with his father and has a hard time understanding

At this point, anyone reading this blog might wonder how many violent animated movies about animals I know... Well, let's just say the movies I have linked here are but a small fraction!  This movie, a 1982 adaption of White Fang -book, is very dear to me and not only because of the story. I first saw this movie when I was a brat and old movies like this one were VERY VEEEERYYYY hard to find online. Of course, they never had subtitles either! This movie never had a western release and wasn't really that big of a deal in Japan either.  I found the movie while watching anime from youtube when I was around 10. The title was in Japanese so for years I had no idea what the movie was called! At the time, all anime movies and episodes were cut in parts on youtube... I think this movie was cut on what.. 12 parts?? You can't understand how sad I was when the movie parts were at some point deleted from youtube and I had no way to search for it elsewhere. But then it was

Chirin no Suzu (Chirin's Bell) is a short animated movie adaption of a picture book from 1978. It's a bittersweet story about a sheep named Chirin and how he gets consumed by his own negative thoughts. I can't remember when I first saw this movie, but I can say I have loved it for a loooong time! Maybe it's because I'm such a pessimist myself? The story starts relatively happy. Chirin is a young lamb living with his mother and other sheep on a pasture. His mother worries for him since Chirin has a tendency to wander off. That's why he was given a bell so that he could be found easier because of the sound. Chirin's mother explains to him, that the sheep cannot go beyond the fence because a wolf named Woe is living on the nearby mountain. Chirin is naive and doesn't really take his mother's warning to the heart, but promises to obey anyway. Months go by and one autumn night the wolf attacks the sheep that are sleeping in the barn

Underdog is a movie by the same director that made Leafie, Hen into the Wild. After hearing the same people were working on another movie, I couldn't wait to see it. I probably still like Leafie more, but this movie is also great! The story follows Moongchi, a pet dog that gets abandoned by his owner. Because his owner told him to "wait", Moongchi is at first in denial about the fact that his owner is not coming back. Soon he is however forced to face the truth after he meets and befriends other dogs that have been thrown away by their masters. The protagonist also runs into a small dog pack living in the nearby mountains, but very much to his shock, he doesn't get a warm reception. After one of the dogs gets captured by a dog hunter, their hideout gets destroyed and some of the dogs get thrown into a puppy mill, both the city strays and the mountain dogs decide to band together to search for a new home. A german shepherd, a former military dog,