Months ago, being very fond of animated movies, I started a thread called:
“Shaun the Sheep, etc: animated shows in Netflix to watch while self-isolating.”
The comments in that thread can be found here:
https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/shawn-the-sheep-etc-animated-shows-in-netflix-to-watch-while-self-isolating/
But, being that thread about streaming from Netflix, while that was probably sufficient at the time, it is no longer so, as several big companies besides Netflix are also streaming animated movies and shows these days: HBO, Amazon, Disney Pus, to mention the main ones at this time that are also familiar to me. And some of their animated content is not just for kids, but includes great works of cinematography as well, of a kind that can be enjoyed, as the name of this thread indicates, for about anyone able to appreciate good movies and shows, from ten years and up, both young and old.
HBO:
All of Ghiblis Studio’s movies directed by Hoyao Miyazaky, Isao Takahata, and the other greats of animation working for decades at this Japanese studio that has produced, (along with Disney and Pixar), some of the greatest animated movies of all time.
Amazon Prime:
“Ronja, The Robber’s Daughter”, a 2014 coproduction of Ghibli and other studios, directed by Goro Miyazaki, son of Hoyao, and now available for free with an Amazon Prime subscription.
As many of Ghibli’s movies, this series of 26 episodes of some 24 minutes each, is based on an European’s writer novel, in this case the late Swedish children’s book writer Astrid Lindgren, the creator of the Pippin Longstokings stories, among many others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronja%2C_the_Robber’s_Daughter_(TV_series)
“Ronja, the only child of a bandit chief, grows up among a clan of robbers living in a castle in the woodlands of early-Medieval Scandinavia. When Ronja grows old enough she ventures into the forest, exploring and discovering its wonders and dangers like the mystical creatures that dwell there. She learns to live in the forest through her own strength, with the occasional rescue by her parents. Ronja’s life begins to change, however, when she happens upon a boy her own age named Birk, who turns out to be the son of the rival clan chief.”
Ronja’s family (her father, the bragging and violently emotional robbers’ chief and her mother, a remarkable woman) and the members of the father’s gang, live in a large, heavily fortified castle that has been home for the chief’s family for generations of robber chiefs and their men. One night, the night when Ronja is born, there is a terrible electric storm and a lightning strike splits the castle in two, creating a wide and very deep gap later known as “Hell’s Gap” in between the now separate parts. The smaller one, and not the one with the main entrance, but accessible only by climbing a very steep cliff, comes to be occupied by the members of a rival gang, that have escaped from their own place, somewhere down in the forest, to avoid capture by the now very numerous patrols by soldiers prowling the woods, sent there by the local Sheriff that is intent in stopping the numerous combined robberies by the two rival bands. They find it very difficult to bring provisions by climbing the cliff, and when winter comes and that becomes impossible, they start to run short of food.
The presence of these unfriendly and hungry interlopers is discovered by Ronja, who also discovers a boy of her same age called Birk, the son of the rival band’s chief. They eventually become self-declared “brother” and “sister” after both make at first an uneasy alliance that grows deeper, as helping each other through various difficulties they become closer, and saving each other’s lives more than once helps too. Finally, circumstances make it difficult for both to continue living with their families and they run away, to live in a cave on a hill above the forest. As spring comes and then summer, they are happy this way, but with autumn and the approach of winter, for all they would like to ignore this fact, things come relentlessly nearer to a probably painful death from cold and starvation for both. There is a happy ending, but one has to keep watching to earn it.
This a slow-to-develop story and the series has been given demerits by some movie critics for this reason, but this is, I believe, because those critics simple have missed the real point of it.
What is this series point then?
This show is, as I see it, a profound mediation on childhood, where time is not measured in minutes or hours or days, but in events that reveal, now and then, here and there, the wider world and the inner self to the budding person. And, beyond the mystery that is to be a child, are the bigger mysteries of ordinary human life and in it, of love and of death. All of which come to play their roles, in their own good time, in the story that is much more meaningful and deeper than it seems. There is adventure both in the doings of the highwaymen’s band, who all live in a castle keep high in the hills overlooking a forest populated by wild life as wonderfully depicted as is varied, wild horses in particular, as well as mythical beings, either indifferent or inimical to humans. Among the latter, the wild harpies, part bird of pray and part women with beautiful, scary faces and cries as sharp and cruel as their talons.
The animation is flawless, the images of the forest are classical Ghibli, and that means they are beautifully imagined and rendered: a feast for the eyes. And the main characters are fully realized, credible as people, and the scenes of their daily lives in those now so very distant years, recognizable still because these are things people have always done, are presented in a completely natural way: they ring true in their smallest detail.
Here is a trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IuQs_Fl-dE&
And here an extended clip that is a good sample of how the forest and its natural and supernatural beings are depicted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWRcul0hHX0&ab_channel=Wizz
I hope you can watch the 26 episodes of this series and like them.
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
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