MovieChat Forums > Bakemono no ko (2015) Discussion > Disappointing last third, and distractin...

Disappointing last third, and distracting female voices for boys

posted 8 years ago by dsliquid
6 replies | jump to latest

First of all, I have to say that I love The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and ESPECIALLY Wolf Children, which is one of my all-time favorite films, all categories. I keep wondering why it's so very unknown, when to me, it even beats most of the Studio Ghibli classics.

I had pretty high expectations for The Boy and the Beast (although they were lowered when I saw it "only" had 7.7/10 here on imdb), and although I did enjoy it, I have two problems with it:

1. As others have mentioned, the last third just didn't work too well. It turned into a generic good vs evil battle, and those are tired and uninteresting. I hoped for something more. Maybe they felt they needed this to appeal to kids?

2. Am I the only one who thoughts all the boys were girls? WHY were they played by girls?! Even when I realized they were boys, I still couldn't help but imagine women doing the acting. It was very distracting.
Luckily they grew up half-way into the movie...

What do I want to say with this post? I don't know, I think it's the first one I make! There are just so little activity for this movie, and I wanted there to be more to read for future viewers. :D

All in all, I liked it quite a bit, the opening had that classic Ghibli feeling of "what the heck will happen next?!" as you get drawn into this strange world. And it must be one of the most good-looking animated films ever! They should just have spent more focus on the traveling (I had to pause to have a better look of those amazing cities surrounded by nature!) and developing the characters, rather than the Tokyo battle.

[–] PreachCaleb 8 years ago

For a lot of animation, girls do the voices for boys. It's not just this movie.

You are sin.

[–] dsliquid 8 years ago

I know, but I don't think it's ever been as obvious as in this one.

[–] IMDB_Vits 8 years ago

I did think ICHIROUHIKO was a girl. Not just the voice, but also the design.

[–] masuka-fan 8 years ago

I thought that Iozen's kids were girls until they started calling each other "brother." It wasn't the voices so much as the designs for me, though.

[–] tuomas_gimli 8 years ago

I enjoyed the film overall, but I feel its first act is its strongest. When it suddenly went back to the human world it started to sag for me. It felt inconsistent and poorly balanced: on one hand there was the fantasy story of the boy becoming a warrior in the beast world, and on the other the story of an orphaned school dropout getting his life back together. It was like watching two different movies with completely different tones on two different channels, and they connected rather little in the end.

I'll take what little 2D animated offerings one can get these days, especially from a director of Hosoda's caliber, but after the sweetness of both The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Wolf Children this felt rather schizophrenic and unbalanced in comparison. Both his previous movies had some odd tonal shifts, especially TGWLTT, but nothing like this.

[–] Anubislair 7 years ago

yeah i aggree the human world part made no sense and should have been cut out altogether. maybe they should have focused more on the darkness aspect and fleshing out the other evil kids chracter.