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Reviews
Le roi et l'oiseau (1980)
Distressing for kids
My older brother and I watched this film, I think in a Hebrew dub, when we were younger than 8. I have not watched the movie since, although I have looked up the trailer and it does not look as bad as I remember it.
However, both my brother and I remember the film as being monumentally disturbing, perhaps because of the almost arcane form of animation and a deep eerie quality. I seem to remember that, as a child, I was able to recognize the king as a villain but that the alignment of other characters was rather ambiguous. Put simply, this movie thoroughly creeped me out.
I would wager that this is simply not a movie for children and that it somehow managed to sneak past parental controls. This would be understandable because many people assume that all animation is for children.
P.S. I have scoured the net looking for this movie with no memory of it's name or origin and thanks to IMDb I managed to find it. Although my memories of this movie are negative I am glad to be able to track down a powerful childhood experience (to the movie's credit?).
Witch Hunter Robin (2002)
True Horror
Witch Hunter Robin is one of the worst Anime titles I have ever had the agony of sitting through. I watched the English version on Cartoon Network. Of multiple weak points, the worst must be the storyline. Beginning with a dull introduction of the characters in a string of generic action 'witch hunts' the series gets of to a horrendously slow start. I found myself waiting 20 minutes through the shallow development of pseudo-detective work, and clichéd and cryptic dialogue leading up to only 5 minutes of mediocre action. Most of the story development happens in the last 3 episodes and even this development is far too shallow and predictable to serve as a reward for watching the entire series. The show uses an unacceptably high amount of stills, composed of 'Cowboy Bebop' style drawings and effects. These would be quite nice, if only they were not presented in such a static and non-stimulating manner. The characters mostly conform to the normal Anime stereotypes: The quiet heroine with a hidden past, the stoic fighter dude, the angry boss, the bad guy with a master plan. it goes on. To top it all off, the series soundtrack suffers from a serious lack of diversity. It consists of probably 3 main themes, the first of which you will know off-by-heart by the middle of the second episode. It seems to me that in Witch Hunter Robin, some well learned Anime techniques from previous titles fell into some very bad hands and were misused to create this muted, repressed, and wholly dull series.