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Mahô shôjo tai Arusu (2004)
Believe in yourself
Tweeny Witches is clearly meant for children, probably for eight to ten years old - and in that aspect its story is very well crafted and uses the hero's way trope, effectively adapted for a child protagonist.
Alice wants to be a magician and one day she ends up in a twisted magical land where warlocks and witches are fighting a never ending battle - until their whole world seems to fall apart. Only Alice and her friends can save the realm. The magical journey is a typical setup (from Magic Knight Rayearth and Escaflowne to Twelve Kingdoms and many others), but this time the message is clearly aimed at children.
The young heroine must deal with an unknown world (initiation) and has to save this magical world in order to be able to return to the human realm (so her childhood self must be protected and integrated in order to face adolescence); eventually she will have to save her family (offsprings outgrowing their parents) with the help of friendship and wit. The answers are genuinely universal and to my greatest amusement the whole setup is not very typical to Japanese animation.
The animation and the artwork is beautiful - neither typical japanimation, nor the the American school; when it's not trying to cut corners (with lackluster transitions or weird camera angles) then with its flat coloring and strong curves it resembles Art Nouveau posters and drawings. It is understandable why this TV series is not very popular, but it's coherent and well crafted, probably children can enjoy it much more than grown up reviewers.
Johanna (2005)
Surreal opera
Mundruczo has strong theatrical roots and Johanna, like most of his works, is closer to theater, than film - in fact, to classical opera. The libretto has been written by Janos Terey, a Hungarian poet and writer and it just further clarifies the fact that Johanna is an opera adopted to the big screen.
It may or may not work very well, but to treat it as a conventional movie may not be the best approach - the whole set is indeed very surreal: Johanna, a young morphine addict ends up in a dark and moody hospital, where a young doctor falls in love with her and convinces the rest of the doctors to give her a chance and let her work at the hospital as a nurse. The woman starts to treat the terminally ill men in an unusual manner which is not received well by the doctors ending the whole situation in the sacrifice of Johanna (with a chorus reciting the moral of the story).
The set is a real hospital, called the "Hospital in the Rock" and was built under the Buda castle in the thirties - it is terrifying and marvelous in the same time and can work very well as an opera set (also note that Terey and Mundruczo already used it for theatrical plays before). Johanna as a character is a profane saint: what she does is obscene, but does work - curing with sexuality, like in Breaking the Waves (Trier). The camera work and the degradation of the film material is also similar to Trier's (think of Medeia for example), and has similar conclusions: both saints are discarded while their powers defeat rationality.
In an age of technology the deeply maternal and spiritual rituals are banished from our life, the fall of Johanna is inevitable from the very moment she decides to stay among the terminally ill. The paternalistic hospital, with all the male patients (who will not save the girl in the end) and the male doctors aided by their superiority and academic knowledge destroy the unknown female power: they kill her, discard her and burn her, banishing her from this world. Unlike with Trier, no church bells this time, but the similarity is still very clear.