Review - The Tale of Princess Kaguya

Guess what: Today is Isao Takahata's birthday! What better day to review his latest film.

Apart from his 1988 masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies, the works of animator Isao Takahata have never had much exposure in North America. They may have less crossover appeal than other outputs from Studio Ghibli – the revered and beloved Tokyo-based anime company that brought us My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away, among others – because his are less dazzling in a fantastical sense.

Nevertheless, Takahata has built a superb resume over the last thirty years at Ghibli. So what a rare and special treat it is then, to be able to see his latest (and possibly last) feature in theatres: The somewhat slow but visually splendid The Tale of Princess Kaguya. The narrative itself is a simple one (perhaps too much so to justify this film's leisurely 140-minute runtime), but Takahata gleans from it several adult themes about the pursuit of happiness, truth and artifice, and the cyclic yet finite nature of life.

Review - Hugo

A lonely orphan who winds the clocks from within the walls of a Parisian train station attempts to decipher the mystery of a mechanical man in Hugo, Martin Scorsese's courageous foray into 3D family entertainment.

Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), for that is his name, used to love fixing things with his clockmaker father before his untimely death. A rusty old automaton designed to write on paper is all he has to member his dad, and repairing the robot has become a project on which the boy has become dependent. He often pilfers parts from a sad old toymaker, Papa George (Ben Kingsley), who seems somehow connected to the machine, but reluctant to divulge. Hugo finds an ally in the toymaker's goddaughter (Chloe Moretz), an avid reader who yearns for adventure beyond her leather-bound tomes. Together, they attempt to discover the secret concealed within the automaton's intricate clockwork and seek a window into Papa George's past.