Steve Reviews: Spirited Away

Serious and emotional anime have become the staple of anime. A majority of the most universally acclaimed pieces of the medium have been made to make you feel something. Now you may be thinking, Scam, what about this shitty, repetitive shounen that I can't let go of because I grew up with it? Well, 26 years ago, Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro captured all the whimsical elements of a child's imagination. Watching as a kid, I can still remember being filled with joy, on occasion gloom, and pure excitement whenever Totoro was on screen. To this day, the soundtrack alone manages to elicit all those same feelings. Through its perfectly scored music and curious world, Totoro managed to do something that shounen has only been able to replicate to a lesser degree, make me feel something. In an era saturated with mecha and shounen and little mecha shounen boys wearing panties, Totoro helps cement Japanese animation as a serious art form right alongside live-action movies, and also fill every Vietnamese and Filipino girl's car with merch. Ever since, a lot of the most high-performing anime movies have been designed to have an impact on you. Seeing sweaty, buff, 40-year-old men grunt at each other in CGI was really fun, but there's one scene that I remember more than any scene in the Brawley movie, Ash being turned to stone right in front of Pikachu, which is coincidentally in the highest-selling Pokemon movie, because people like to feel something. We equate emotional impact with quality so much so that even though your name is horribly littered with plot holes and inconsistencies, I loved it, you loved it, and it became the second-highest-grossing anime film of all time. So then I noticed something. It feels like there's anime made just for the purpose of having you cry. When Plastic Memories came out, I remember thinking, this enemy ******* sucks, but I also wanna cry, so I'm gonna finish it. I noticed that tear-baiting can drive an otherwise mediocre anime extremely far. Would any of us remember Angel Beats if it wasn't notoriously sad? No, **** Angel Beats. But these anime are successful because touching people is the easiest way to reach success, and also the fastest way to lose it. Now, there are tear-jerking anime that are incredible the whole way throughout, like it's Steins Gate, Your Lie in April, or Anahana. I can remember all sorts of things from these shows, can't recall a thing about Angel Beats aside from it being sad, but, you know, it made me cry, therefore it was good. So with this new mindset, I became invincible. I'm not gonna cry from tear-bait anymore. Clearly, I Wanna Eat Your Pancreas is just another story conveniently set up to make you cry. Guess what I did at 4am? Definitely not turning off the lights because I could see myself ugly crying in the reflection of my laptop. Ka-chow. By chance, a boy picks up a book while waiting in the hospital. While reading, he finds out that it belongs to a girl in his class with a fatal illness. Tied together by chance, this is a story about a boy and a girl with a time limit. My attachment to the characters directly paralleled that of the main character. Even he was a bit boring initially, which is exactly how he sees himself. But midway through, I thought of this Miyamoto quote. He said that the reason Link doesn't speak is that he wants the player to feel more or less like they are Link, and having a speaking protagonist would break this illusion. To me, The Boy is a blank canvas that allowed me to imprint my own emotions and feelings on the story. Where other characters would usually self-analyze themselves and spell things out for you, when The Boy hesitates or does something odd, I feel like I know exactly why. Because in this hour and a half, in a weird way, I was The Boy. And if The Boy is a blank canvas, then The Girl is this jovial and bright paint that slowly adds color to The Boy. At first, I thought, who is this happy-ass bitch following me around just like him? But the longer they spend time together, the more cracks begin to form in his stoic demeanor. Just like you, who initially didn't have any reason to care. The Girl initially comes off as choreographed and fake, but the more you get to know her, the more you see she's actually just as scared as anyone else would be. And it kind of becomes this compound effect. The more invested you are, the more reality bounces around your head. You think to yourself, maybe she won't die. Maybe the beginning was misleading. It's not. The once-unlikable caricatures of humans gradually became people to me. The plans they make months in advance fill you with anxiety. Their ups and downs become your ups and downs. You can feel the value in every second they spend together, and it's a really, really nice experience. And while I struggled to find myself immersed in the first 30 minutes, the last 30 demanded every ounce of my attention, and I was absolutely glad to deliver it. Despite me bawling like a bitch, the ending was extremely satisfying and uplifting. The music is guaranteed to make your dingly dangler both hard and soft. Your cooter wet, then bone dry. I love those disjointed yet cohesive piano riffs that remind me of Breath of the Wild, and that's a huge compliment. You can hear it in the background if I didn't **** up the mixing again. The anime scored fantastically. That's one thing that stood out to me without even having to pay attention. The sad moments are super sad, and the cheerful moments are really exciting. They absolutely set the mood, and listening to some of these after the movie still gets me. I'd have to rate the music just below S-tier, though, because I wouldn't listen to any of these outside of anime. But in the right context, it's some amazing music. The art is just not a good reflection of the amazing soundtrack, nor the beautiful story. As you can tell, the anime looks really good. During some of the more emotional parts of the movie, the quality jumps up to absolutely gorgeous. And there's some really nice aesthetic choices that give the anime a warm atmosphere. Another thing is that some of the movements are eerily realistic, making me wonder if they were mo-cap. Things like how the girl browses through her phone, or how she circles around him looked really good. But compared to some of the movie's contemporaries, like Your Name, the animation just doesn't hold up. Look at these dated-ass character designs. Is that guy this guy? I don't know. But this is the hot, new, fresh, new design in anime. And this is a problem, because instead of thinking of the characters as people, I think of them as anime characters for a good third of the movie. Look at Your Name. The main characters look at least a little different from Standard. Their appearances almost tell the story. If Your Name's character design is Jennifer Aniston, then Pancreas is more of a Kylie Jenner. No, I don't want that mass-produced shit. Do you know what happens when those things get old? I need me a Jennifer Aniston. Mm. Mm. Mm. Anyway, that's not the only problem I have. In higher-quality animation, you have more lively worlds. Make me feel like I'm there, have the background characters moving, let me hear the shopkeepers yelling and shit. Little stuff like that was pretty much omitted. Don't get me wrong, the movie looks good, a lot of the landscapes are amazing and all that, but it's the smaller things that could use some work. I want to feel like I'm a part of the world, but random dumb shit blocks me out. Like her nose being ginormous. Earlier, I implied that there's two types of anime. Ones that tune into your emotions as a consequence of telling a story, and ones that try their damnedest to make you cry for money. And while I do think that you need to connect to the story emotionally to enjoy it, I Wanna Eat Your Pancreas has something that a simple cash-grab doesn't. A message. Often you hear, make every second count, shit like that, but I've never really felt it before, and I've especially never actually taken a lesson from an anime. Tomorrow could be my last, my time is valuable. So what the hell am I doing? Well, I'm gonna be stuck in the house making videos for the rest of the month, but it was a nice sentiment. I Wanna Eat Your Pancreas was a slow burn that really made me feel like I lost and gained something. And when the end came around, I cried and cried, and laid back in my bed for a bit. Then I jacked off and went to sleep.