Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below — Review

The other film I saw at the Leeds Film Fest­ival this year, after In the Forest of Fire­fly Lights, was Makoto Shinkai’s new film with the incred­ibly long and con­vo­luted title: Chil­dren Who Case Lost Voices from Deep Below. Here is where I admit that I don’t really like Shinkai’s films (under­state­ment much). They have been char­ac­ter­ised as being long dull con­ver­sa­tions between two people with no per­son­al­it­ies talk­ing about the weather while the cam­era focuses on clouds. Hence I was wary going into this film, but was cau­tiously hope­ful as I’d heard this was Shinkai attempt­ing to do a Ghibli film. And that’s exactly what this is. Asides from his con­tinu­ous fas­cin­a­tion with clouds, Shinkai’s new film is a Ghibli pre­tender through and through, and does a sur­pris­ingly good job at it too.

The story is about Asuna, basic­ally the female lead from every single Ghibli movie ever, a bit of a loner girl who spends her time sit­ting on rocky out­crops listen­ing to her make­shift crys­tal radio. One day she is attacked by a mon­ster, who got lost on his way to a Prin­cess Mononoke audi­tion, but is saved by Shun, who is basic­ally the pretty boy male lead from half of every single Ghibli movie ever (don’t worry, the other half of the pretty boy male lead is role is taken up by Shun’s younger brother). But then Stuff Hap­pens that I don’t want to spoil, so Asuna has to travel to the magical land of Agartha with her mys­ter­i­ous sub­sti­tute teacher, who is basic­ally the vil­lain from every single Ghibli movie…wait, actu­ally he’s not. He’s more nuanced than that, and was far and away my favour­ite char­ac­ter of the movie.

I’m sure the clever ones amongst you must have caught on by now that this movie is rather deriv­itave. Yes the movie takes many cues from Ghibli flicks, par­tic­u­larly Laputa which Shinkai has admit­ted to being a big fan of, but it plays around with the for­mula in enough new and inter­est­ing ways to stand out from the pack. Asuna, our female lead, does start out as rather irrit­at­ingly per­fect, but as the movie goes on her loneli­ness and fears begin to come more to the sur­face. Plus it does this without ever being in your face about it. Yes, the char­ac­ters some­times have to point out the dir­ec­tion their character’s devel­op­ment is going in, such as when Asuna admits to her sub­sti­tute teacher act­ing a bit like her father, but it flows well with the dia­logue and doesn’t feel the need to retread these same points over and over again.

Then there’s the sub­sti­tute teacher, Mor­i­saki, who I’ve already eluded to as being my favour­ite char­acte. He starts off appear­ing like he’s going to be the stand­ard deluded vil­lain, intent on des­troy­ing all in his path to get to his goal. This is sort of what he is, but his reas­on­ing is sym­path­etic and he doesn’t act point­lessly evil for the sake of things. He’s quick to draw his gun, but it’s for his own safety and not because he just likes shoot­ing things. His reas­on­ing for going into Agartha makes him sym­path­etic too, rather than just being power-hungry or driven by sheer greed. But what makes him great is he also brings out the best in Asuna, elev­at­ing her to an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter in their own right. As the two travel through Agartha, they strike up a rap­port like that of father and daugh­ter, which was very fit­ting given what the two of them had lost in their lives. They became the fam­ily neither of them ever had and, while he was often harsh to Asuna, there was still the strong sense that Mor­i­saki grew to care for her immensely. He’s a human char­ac­ter with real flaws, as was Asuna, and their rela­tion­ship was the real high­light of the movie.

Animation-wise, the movie is stun­ning. OK, this is still Shinkai, and his tend­ency to focus on clouds remains com­pletely baff­ling, but the world of Agartha is beau­ti­ful. It’s essen­tially the same as earth, but there’s enough touches here and there to make it seem alien. Mor­i­saki and Asuna trav­el­ling through the coun­tryside had this almost Lord of the Rings feel to it. The world can feel a bit bar­ren at times, lack­ing magical towers and sparkles at every turn, but it fit the feel of the world. It was sup­posed to feel empty and dying. The other thing this movie nailed was the sheer scale of some of the set pieces. Where Ghibli films excel is in the fine detail, which I don’t think Shinkai got quite as well in this film, but the scopes of some of the set pieces were jaw-dropping. Par­tic­u­larly I have to men­tion the giant hole in the world that book-ended the film and that multi-eyed mon­stros­ity that was meant to rep­res­ent the god of this world. And hey, since we’re talk­ing about mon­sters, spe­cial men­tion has to go to those skeleton-like creatures that swam on the ground like sharks of the shad­ows. They were flat out creepy.

It’s far from a per­fect film though, and I par­tic­u­larly have a bone to pick with the music. The sweep­ing orches­tral score has all the sub­tlety of a child smash­ing a span­ner on a table to get atten­tion. Because the same score is used for almost every single slightly dra­matic scene, it robs the music the intense effect it’s sup­posed to have on the more dra­matic scenes. It’s also a bloody long film, about 2 hours long, and takes a while to get going. It doesn’t really pick up until the char­ac­ters visit Agartha, and that takes almost an hour. This is partly down to Shinkai spend­ing far too much time set­ting the scene, show­ing off the land­scape of Asuna’s home town. Which is fair enough, high­light­ing the ordin­ary world so it makes the con­trast with Agartha that much stronger, but he really spends too much time on it. I really didn’t need that shot of dragon­flies hav­ing sex Shinkai, and could you please stop it with the bloody clouds? Yes, these scenes are incred­ibly import­ant to estab­lish­ing Asuna’s char­ac­ter for the devel­op­ment that occurs later on, but it doesn’t stop the scenes from being bor­ing. And no, stick­ing in the fox-cat from Nau­s­icca won’t make these scenes that much more tol­er­able. That’s just cheating.

Plus since it’s basic­ally Ghibli, it car­ries over not only the strong points of magical worlds and amaz­ing atten­tion to detail that these films have, but also car­ries over the warts too. Towards the end it really starts to get a bit silly, espe­cially when the giant mon­ster thing swal­lows the main char­ac­ter and jumps down a biz­il­lion foot drop in order to trans­port her, look­ing rather like a preg­nant woman crossed with those robot things from Laputa. It even brings over the forced in envir­on­mental mes­sage that Miyazaki works into his films with the grace and sub­tlety of a hippo doing bal­let. It did only got a passing men­tion and, while clunky, wasn’t any­where near as bad as Miyazaki’s tend to be. Besides, the movie earns so many points by adding the much needed nuance to the main char­ac­ter and the sorta vil­lain that I can for­give most of the mis­takes it makes. Asides from the clouds. Please stop with the damn clouds.

There is one final prob­lem I’d like to high­light. There was some­thing off about the pacing. The story was very well told and wove the themes of loneli­ness and loss in extremely well, but the trans­ition from set piece to set piece was clunky, as though it was adapt­ing a TV series and these were the gaps between epis­odes. As I said, it’s a two hour movie which is really a touch too long, but I also wouldn’t want to cut much out of it (asides from all the clouds). I think it may have suited a short Noit­am­ina length TV series or OVA instead. You could have delved into some of the char­ac­ters pasts a bit more, or told us more about Agartha. That was one thing I was a bit miffed about. There was an inter­est­ing con­flict between Mor­i­saki and the people of Agartha where he accused them of accept­ing their decay and being lazy, which tied quite well in with his own story, but it didn’t really tackle the Agartha side of the story once he’d left.

While there are plenty of flaws with the movie, I did end up enjoy­ing it a lot. Not sure how fans of pre­vi­ous Shinkai films will take this, as it’s a drastic change from them. I sup­pose the themes are kind of sim­ilar (or at least I’m told the themes are sim­ilar, I was too busy gnaw­ing my arm off in an attempt  to stay awake to notice the themes of his pre­vi­ous films). But if you like Miyazaki’s films, you’ll like this. It’s too long, take a while to get going, gets a bit silly at times, and someone needs to bop the com­poser over the head and tell him to lay off the full orches­tral sweeps every once in a while, but it’s a genu­inely enter­tain­ing film with a well told story. And clouds.