Children Who Chase Lost Voices [Blu-ray]

When she hears a strange song from a crystal radio, Asuna tunes into more than just a magical stream of music. Soon, she is transported to a mysterious world where mythical beasts roam and brave warriors fight for their lives. Agartha is a land of breathtaking beauty and unimaginable danger-a place where, it is believed, even the dead can be brought back to life. But at what cost? Children Who Chase Lost Voices is a spellbinding new work from Japanese visionary Makoto Shinkai, who amazed audiences the world over with Voices of A Distant Star and 5 Centimeters per Second. Now, with Children, Shinkai affirms his place as one of animation's most original voices. Writer-director Makoto Shinkai's handsome adventure-fantasy Children Who Chase Lost Voices (2011) has won several awards on the international festival circuit. Asuna is a model middle school girl: she's not only the top student in her class, she cheerfully does all of the household chores while her widowed mother is at work. She deals with her loneliness by experimenting with a crystal radio set she's stashed in a nearby mountain hideaway. After she hears a mysterious song, Asuna is thrust into a supernatural adventure that involves weird, hybrid monsters; the dashing, heroic Shun; her substitute teacher Mr. Morisaki; and the legendary underground realm of Agartha. Devastated by his wife's death 10 years earlier, Morisaki is on a quest to restore her to life using the powers of Agartha. Children Who Chase Lost Voices boasts beautifully painted backgrounds, but the film borrows heavily and obviously from the work of Hayao Miyazaki. Asuna recalls Chihiro in Spirited Away and other young Miyazaki heroines; Shun looks like the Wizard from Howl's Moving Castle, while his younger brother Shin bears more than a passing resemblance to Ashitaka in Princess Mononoke. The storyline, which uses elements from both the Western legend of Orpheus and Eurydice and the Japanese Kojiki chronicles, rambles along for almost two hours before reaching a hasty and unsatisfying conclusion. Otaku know Shinkai from 5 Centimeters per Second (2007) and The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004), which also rambled and borrowed from Miyazaki. He's clearly a talented director with a powerful visual sense, but his films would be stronger if he collaborated with an equally gifted writer. (Rated TV PG: violence, grotesque imagery, brief nudity, alcohol and tobacco use) --Charles Solomon