Mamoru Hosoda's "Wolf Children"

So I just watched Mamoru Hosoda's "Wolf Children" and I was struck by two things. Firstly, how incredibly beautiful a movie it is. I mean really, in all aspects. I'm a very emotional person so it's easy for a movie to provoke strong emotions like anger or sadness but this film in particular triggered a lot of emotions that I don't really even have names for. It seemed I was always trembling on the edge of something but never quite toppling down into it: an eloquent waltz of emotional balance.

Secondly, now this is kind of sad. I know people personally, grown men and women, who would have taken one look at the preview, specifically the part where Ookami reveals his half-wolf form to Hana, and said "Oh that's weird, you like watching stuff like this?" and then given me a funny look and laughed uncomfortably, as if I were suddenly strange in their eyes and they needed to cover the awkward moment somehow. How sad that people can get hung up on silly insecurities like that when there's such a wonderful, thought-inspiring story being told...

I was always taught as a child "You'll hurt yourself jumping to conclusions" and only recently have I really come to know what that truly means. When we judge people or things without truly knowing them first, we perform an injustice to that person or to the people who made that thing. I remember, as a teenager, offering to lend my copy of Jim Carrey's "The Majestic" to an adult friend who refused simply because he was in it and because she didn't like his earlier work. I was confused, being younger, and puzzled. After all...I'd watched the movie. I knew it was NOTHING like his crazy comedy films and I wanted to share that with her because I knew that she would like it. But she wouldn't watch it. Not because of a bad review, but because she had judged Carrey's whole worth as an actor by a few silly films he had made earlier in his career, never giving him a chance to show he could do anything else.

TS