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Well, going back in time a bit actually….

Saw Howl’s Moving Castle in the theater. Twice. Given my current finances, and the fact that I sprung for two other people and all the snacks the second time, that should say a lot about what I think of the movie.

It’s not Miyazaki’s best movie. That still leaves quite a bit of room for general excellence, however. It has the worst plot-holes of any of his movies, and elements of the ending sort of just suddenly resolve themselves. Considering that I consider plot to be the most important element of a story, that should take it down a peg or two, but doesn’t in this case. The main plot works very well, and as usual, Miyazaki’s storytelling is so accomplished that I didn’t even notice the problems until I really started thinking about the film later.

Anyway, I walked out of the theater with the magical uplifted feeling that is one of his hallmarks.

I should also mention that we saw it in the Cine Arts 6 in San Jose. It’s a brand new theater owned by a chain just for showing specialty films. I’m very impressed with the place, and hope to give them some more business, the place deserves it.

Recently, Smudge got a hold of the new DVD release of Giant Robo. This has been a long anticipated moment for us as we adored it when it came out on VHS, and the road to DVD has been long and rocky, involving a change in companies and a new dub. The original dub is actually on the new disks as well, hidden away in the extras. The new dub overall has better and more appropriate voice actors, but the original had a better voice director. So the new dub has better voices, but the old one has better performances, putting the two about on par with each other. However, the new dub does feature a better translation, so in general stick with that.

Anyway, we started Giant Robo at Thursday-night anime, partly because we wanted to see it on a nice big screen on a real sound system, and partly to introduce it to our fellow anime watchers. Man-oh-man, it was like seeing it for the first time all over again with the Warsaw Philharmonic flowing out of those speakers. I looked over at one point during the first disk to see Paul slack-jawed and with a white-knuckle grip on the armrests. I’d say he enjoyed it. ~_^