Anyone else think the characters seemed a little...

...Flanderized? For those who don't know what that is, see here:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization

I'm thinking in particular of Inuyasha and Miroku. I felt like their personalities seemed really exaggerated here. Miroku was always a perv and Inuyasha was always gruff, but it seemed like both of them really took it to the next level in the first two Inuyasha movies. It was actually a bit irritating. Inuyasha normally balances out his roughness with some kindness, but in this movie he seemed to be being a lot ruder, especially to Kagome, than he usually is. He also seemed a bit less smart in battle, the way he just blindly charged at Kaguya and threw all caution and all advice from his friends to the wind. He's always a little like that, but again, it felt like these aspects of his personality were exaggerated in the movie.

I guess it's harder to write a movie than a TV series, especially when the movie is standalone and not based on the manga as the series is. You have less time to flesh things out, you have to kind of squeeze everything together and rush things a bit. Which is why movies based on books almost never live up to the original material. Perhaps they should have made the Inuyasha movies a bit longer (say, 2 hours instead of an hour and a half) to slightly mitigate this inevitable shortcoming. Pacing is sometimes good, especially in cases like Inuyasha.

Also, I wonder, was Rumiko Takahashi in any way involved in making the movies? If not, I think that could also help explain why the movies seem to have a bit less charm than the TV series.

I like the movies so far, but they're definitely missing something. They don't have quite the same feel as the TV series. In addition to the aforementioned issues, the animation is just slightly different, just enough to be noticeable. Not a big problem, but it's a bit distracting to me because i'm so accustomed to the look from the TV series.

Still, it's all Inuyasha so I enjoy it. And Kagome finally kissing Inuyasha was a great unexpected thing; nice to see one of them finally do something instead of just dancing around it all the time.