when it really hit me as a great movie though was when it had time to mull in my brain. i was thinking about particular scenes, and it formed some nostalgia up in my mind. i then bought the dvd with the soundtrack. soundtracks are pretty hit and miss with me, and i wasn’t particularly drawn to this one while watching the movie. on listening, it didn’t stand out much either. but there was a time in my life when i didn’t really feel like listening to /anything,/ especially any normal music that i normally listen to, so i always just had this turned down low while i drove. after a while it grew on me, and i’ve probably listened to it for a total now of over 24 hours.

nowadays, on weekends when i’m writing or relaxing or painting or daydreaming or talking on the phone late at nite, i’ll have a few drinks with this on in the background. it’s so soothing and beautiful. the music makes me smile now as well now.

it could be that i’m rather attracted to wwi stylization and this is chock full of it. enough people have already debated the “meaning” of the movie, so i won’t reitterate what has been said; but it’s nice to notice new things each viewing.

this is my hands down favourite animation, but you have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy it, i believe.

What I also found interesting, again from an inexperienced perspective, was what I perceived to be three different visual styles that were often overlayed. The most obvious is the anime level, which we are drawn to because that is how the characters and much of the background are visualized.

The second is was I would call “three-dimensional” animation, which can be seen in many Pixar or Disney films. By this I mean, the perspective, depth, and shading are all completely accurate as the camera “moves” through the scene, but there is no obvious attempt at photo-realism.

The third, and most impressive in my opinion, was the “near” photo-realism of the flight sequences. Oshii’s decision (which I assume was one based upon realizing a concept as opposed to budget or technology constraints) to avoid actual, tack-sharp, realistic images gives the impression that we are viewing a painting that is “moving”. Yes, I realize that movies are “moving pictures”, but what I meaning is that Oshii has a achieved a look that has the depth of a beautiful painting, but dynamicism of a motion picture.

I did find the character animation rather flat, but I sort of expected that given the genre’. The only thing that bothered me as when characters were walking and we could see their feet in relationship to the ground. There was often obvious “floating” of the character (i.e., the compositing processing that combines the various images to produce the final scene, didn’t adequately “ground” the moving character animation to the relatively static background).

The English language soundtrack was excellent and did not sound like they just grabbed some English speakers and asked them to read a translation, despite the fact it doesn’t match the sub-titles.

A final observation on the film’s theme and pacing. While this seems to be a film targeted at a “youth” audience (which I assume would be the majority of anime fans), the character and plot development was more suited to a mature audience (which I would be considered). The characters had real depth, and as Oshii explains in one of the featurettes, was the starting point of his conceptualization for the film. He started with characters and how they would feel, then built the visual elements around them.

This is film is a magnificent example of the genre. I hope it gets a wider audience interested in Oshii and other’s works.

i noticed the inconsistancies of the animation.

though innocence was outsourced, i felt the quality of animation for the most part were pretty high.