Although, to be perfectly honest, I do not entirely agree with the Ghibli comparison many have done. The similarities stop after a magical land, equally magical creatures and character designs that, with some small adjustments, could have come from any of Hayao Miyazaki’s flicks. The rest is characteristic Shinkai flair, albeit this time muddled with a severe identity crisis.
On a first glance Children Who Chase Lost Voices does not sound too bad. A girl named Asuna is about to be killed by a magical beast when a mysterious boy pops up and saves her. One thing leads to another and soon she is thrown into Agartha; a land unknown to mankind.
This is a good set-up and it also tries to tackle subjects such as death and bonding. But the lacklustre execution leaves extremely much to be desired. It is hard to understand how Shinkai, who at least were somewhat coherent in the past, could end up doing this mess.
The story never really makes any sense and Asuna’s drive, a character she had known for ten minutes disappearing for reasons unbeknownst me, is a really bad excuse for starting it. Every ten minutes, sometimes even less, we have drama cranked up to eleven even by Shinkai standard. In most cases these moments are variations of Asuna needing to be saved which does not help making the drama less tiresome after the tenth overblown scene.
There is no room to for Children Who Chase Lost Voices to actually breathe and explore its own setting. Agartha itself is never properly established and neither are the people nor the creatures that inhabit it. There is some conflict, a large kingdom and so on… but these do not matter at all. This becomes almost pathetic when none of the main characters even question or act surprised at what they are witnessing. This is because they are only there to move the already non-existent story forward.
As if to rub salt in the already fatal wound, Children Who Chase Lost Voices also suffers from a directing that I never would have guessed would come from Shinkai who is an experienced person. The movie has a lot of scene transitions and cuts which results in a very fragmented story. In one second there is a chase scene, another second it has ended and then all of a sudden we are in a town. This hurts the already unexplored setting even more! Add in the tedious drama I spoke of earlier and it simply does not mesh that well.
And this leads me to the movie suffering from an identity crisis. It does not know what it wants to focus on. The setting is not important, the story is poor and the characters are shallow. Yet Children Who Chase Lost Voices incorporates them all in a hope of achieving something. But that something never shows itself throughout the movie. Even the themes, death and bonding, are thrown out of the window towards the end as a way to squeeze out a tiny bit more drama instead of something believable.
Whether or not Children Who Chase Lost Voices was an experiment by Shinkai to try out something new or an attempt to emulate someone else’s success does not change the fact that this is a disaster.
An utter disaster that makes me skeptical of his future works.
