Porco Rosso, Whisper of the Heart, Kiki’s Delivery Service

- Porco Rosso [1992] - 50

Heavily featuring one of my least favorite anime tropes, Porco Rosso is another Studio Ghibli snore/ yuck fest that has just enough saving graces to keep it from being entirely unwatchable. The film literally opens with a scene of our title character being bribed into a mission because he’ll be “saving young school girls”… 🤮. There must be a cultural thing in anime that causes this trope to be so ubiquitous, but I really hate it and it gets worse the further back in time you go. Porco is rescued from its terrible tropes by very fun aviation scenes and a gang of pirates that are fun and funny enough to merit an entire film of their own… and I wish that was what I got to watch. Instead, this is a nonsense movie about a guy who’s a pig for no reason [which would be fine if the film didn’t specifically draw attention to it more than once and then never resolve it] that takes WAY too long to say nothing and make nothing happen. The only thing that keeps this from being bottom-bottom of the Miyazaki list is the pirates… they were great.

- Whisper of the Heart [1995] - 20 DNF… Sort of

If a movie about seafaring mercenaries placing bets on who gets to take home a 16-year old girl gets a 50 and this gets a 20… that’s definitely saying something. Whisper of the Heart is, quite possibly, the most boring movie I’ve watched all year. “Mundane” and “banal” don’t even begin to describe what this movie is like and “suffering from sever apoplexy” only gets close. Like most of the things I’ve whinged about lately, many of the base issues in Whisper are anime-centered problems, but the largest ones here are pacing and general lack of content. I suffered through the first 40-minutes after having checked how much time was left a total of three separate times before skipping 20-minutes ahead to see if anything happened, watching about 5 more, then skipping to the last 3. Turns out, I missed absolutely nothing and understood the ending resolutions perfectly without any of the absent context. Weird. This film is absolutely miserable unless you find yourself wishing you could be invested in a boring middle-school relationship… I’m genuinely shocked this is so high up in the online ratings.

- Kiki’s Delivery Service [1989] - 58

Oh Kiki’s Delivery Service… the darling of the internet and young witches alike… Why are you the way you are? This movie starts with all the charm and wonder anyone could ask for… and then proceeds to be almost entirely vapid, nonsensical, and uninteresting. We’re tossed into a world full of exciting questions that are never answered, developed, or utilized in almost any way. The first other witch we see has a lantern on her broom and claims to do “love fortunes”, Kiki has a radio on her broom and is setting out to learn her own skill. Does it matter? Is the lantern some sort of charm? Eh, who cares. Never mentioned again. Kiki is looking for a town to accept her as their witch so she can train. Does every town have a witch? Can they have more than one? Eh, who cares. Never explored. Does Kiki have magic powers or covet those of others? Maybe she’s a witch without magic and has to find the wonder inside herself instead… Nope 🙃, literally nothing matters or is ever expanded upon or investigated here either. There’s many-several plot elements [or lack of them] during Kiki’s runtime, and they all drag what could have been a magical experience down into the mundane and almost entirely boring. Of all the movies that are going to make the bottom of my rankings for Miyazaki’s films, this is the only one that hurts a little. Kiki’s Delivery Service is several very small steps away from true greatness and, instead, decides to be worse than mediocre. You can make meaningful and good kids movies, that’s not an excuse.