My Neighbors the Yamadas
I would love to say that I prefer slice of life Ghibli films, but then again that is not entirely true. It’s just that Ghibli has made a lot of shitty fantasy films (but so is Ocean Waves, their only slice of life for awhile) and so I am always happy to see a slice of life. I think “Grave of the Fireflies” has weaknesses (although it did make me cry), and I dislike “Mimi wa Sumaseba” whose original manga is also excrutiatingly stupid. In fact, amongst all the Ghibli films I have seen, I would say that only half of them were actually good movies, and amongst those good ones, only the best 5 were excellent (with Totoro having the problem of having an extremely, extremely long introduction). When we know perfectly that Ghibli can do smart scripts, it is a bummer when they chose not to.
The “Yamadas” are something in between. Since all of the film is composed of small episodes of life, some are amazingly good and some are just not that great. In general, the first half of the film seemed to be much better than the second half (I wonder why?) I thought that some of the stories, like the one with Nonoko getting lost, was extremely witty and then there were other episodes which just downright bored me. All in all, however, the Yamadas are living a fairly normal life, and their life problems are fairly reminiscent of ours. Many of the stories feature incidents beautifully picked out of life, and that is something your typical escapist Ghibli movie tends to ignore.
The art of the film is very unusual, but it suits the yonkoma-style stories very well. My favorite scene was the fantasy one in which the whole family travels under the sea – that was true Ghibli creativity for you! Oh yeah, another thing I noticed is that the older females in the film say “Ookini” but apart from that do not appear to speak kansai-ben. I thought this not-really-dialect-speaking makes the family even more realistic.
Style-wise and story-wise, I think “My neighbors the Yamadas” is definitely the Ghibli film which stands out the most. It doesn’t look nor feel like any of their other films, and so I wouldn’t recommend it based on its Ghibliness. But if you are into Japanese culture enough, you’ll probably come to like this film like I did.