"Don't overdo it"


At one point later in the film, Nonoko's teacher Ms. Fujiwara checks her own annoyance with a bratty insult by one of the kids in the class, then shares her "motto" on a poster: "Don't overdo it." She writes it rather than saying it.

If anyone knows Japanese well and can offer an alternate translation or clarification on the significance of this, I'd appreciate it. That is, if there's anything to clarify. There's potentially a lot of meaning right there on the surface, even just literally with regard to style: beautiful, quirky, fantastic, crude animations always with the white of the page surrounding them, sometimes threatening to swallow them up....or maybe a more optimistic way of saying it: those figures bursting up out of the white of the "page". An approach taken almost to an extreme in the gorgeous PRINCESS KAGUYA many years later. It seems like a gentle renunciation of the "more is more" ethos of the "anything is possible so why not do it all" era of digital animated filmmaking (not just "animated" features but so much other CGI-mediated filmmaking as well). And also so much other anime.

I liked but didn't entirely love YAMADAS, but in addition to the appropriate goofiness of the story and characters, there was so much else to like....so much that seemed really strikingly grown-up. All the more so [?] PRINCESS KAGUYA, which I _did_ love.

But I am talking out of my neck. The suggestive little motto was so lacking in punchline quality or aromatic deep wisdom, it keeps coming back to me. I wondered if there was something specific that it might mean, available for example to a Japanese audience more easily than to others?

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