[Anime][Fansub][Sub] Oblivion Island

[Buugipopuu]

Full Title: Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror

Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror is a by-the-book summer blockbuster computer animated movie with a visual style that seems to be what one gets if you slap together Pixar, Square Enix and Studio Ghibli into one giant mess. The plot is that standard plot with the girl who's got a problem in the real world who gets sucked into a magical world and is forced to recover a MacGuffin and save said magical world from a generic evil villain and in the process of this solve her personal problems and make some new friends, and in the end it could all have been a dream, except for the single item she managed to bring back from the magical world. If it weren't for the cliche storm, it would be completely nonsensical. If you're looking for a deep plot, you won't find it here. It's also Totally Not Spirited Away.

Graphically, it's good-looking, if not impressive. The quirkily motion-captured walking radiosity maps that make up the animated characters would have been amazing about five years ago, but nowadays look rather run-of the mill. The backgrounds are equal parts CG in a similar style to the animation and rather nice oil paintings. I like the latter more because the combination of busy painted backgrounds and crisp CG characters makes me feel like I'm playing a PSX-era Final Fantasy game again (this effect is helped by the fact that the more-asian-looking-than-most-anime-characters facial design is rather reminiscent of earlier shots from Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children). In both cases they're pretty good, as while a colourful magical land full of weird creatures and houses made from oddly-scaled junk isn't innovative any more, it's still a competent implementation of the style.

The pacing is very much that of an action movie with a few angsty scenes interposed. It plays out like a lot of set pieces strung together, due to the issue with the plot being a mess mentioned earlier. Lots of things blow up, there are a number of fight scenes, and everything is very sparkly. The characters are nothing special, but none of them get annoying or fall flat. I did like the fact that due to the short stature and sheltered nature of the inhabitants of this film's magical land, even though Haruka is a 16-year old Japanese schoolgirl, she's both smarter and physically stronger than the majority of inhabitants, and she knows this, and reacts accordingly with a surprising amount of verisimilitude. None of the other characters are worth mentioning, except a small stuffed lamb called Cotton, who rides into battle on a tiny plush horse at one point in a way that was pretty neat. Plush lambs are always good characters. Last Exile showed this.

Soundwise it's nothing special, none of the voice acting or music really stood out, except the use of "You are my Sunshine" in what is easily the worst scene in the entire film.

Overall, while not a bad film, Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror took what must have been a rather large amount of money and put it together to make something merely average. There's a better 2009 summer anime movie out (Summer Wars), and you should probably watch that instead.