Genre: Slice-of-life/Comedy
Studio/Creator: Studio Ghibli/Hisaichi Ishii (creator of Nono-chan)
Director: Isao Takahata
Distributor: GKids, streams on Max.
Running Time: 1 hour, 44 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG
My Rating: 2/10 (F)
Summary: A series of shorts about a family called the Yamadas and their children. The anime is based on the comic strip Nono-chan.
Review: To be honest, I forgot this movie existed. I recently decided to watch the entire Studio Ghibli catalog in preparation for its newest release, The Boy and the Heron, so that meant I now had to finally get around to this.
My first problem is the animation style. I assume this is being drawn this way to emulate the manga it’s based on. While the style might work for a comic strip, I don’t think it works as well animated. (Then again, I found it worked better on The Tale of Princess Kaguya.
I also didn’t much care for the lack of depth the characters had. Since this is a collection of vignettes with nothing to connect them, there’s nothing to make me like or dislike any of the characters. They are so flat that I was constantly checking the runtime to see how much longer I had left.
I was frustrated with this one. I normally don’t dislike Takahata’s anime, but this one just didn’t work for me. Maybe it would’ve worked better if I was more familiar with the manga.
Dub: I should note that the children in the anime are voiced by actual children (reminiscent of the cartoons based on Peanuts, interestingly enough).
Violence: There’s some occasional slapstick.
Language: Very little cursing, if any.
Religion: We just see normal Shintoistic practices.
Nudity: One of the children is naked as a baby in one scene.
Lobster Quadrille 