Arco might be the most Studio Ghibli movie that Studio Ghibli never made. Certainly, it’s among the more successful attempts to imitate that peculiar magic of Ghibli in a non-Japanese culture, in both the look and the general quaint spirit of the piece. But it is also a movie that Ghibli has never made; much as it fits their mold, it does not come off as any direct derivation. And in fact, a few of its choices do genuinely stand on their own, with a degree of maturity and severity distinct even from the poetic notes of Miyazaki’s best films, up to and including the bittersweet nature of the ending. The movie is French and directed by Ugo Bienvenu, though it comes to North America with an English dub courtesy of Natalie Portman, one of its producers. The dub is fine -very much like those latter Ghibli films- but it is sad to lose the likes of Swann Arlaud and Louis Garrel to Mark Ruffalo and America Fererra. The two children however seem to retain much of their original innocence with u...
Everybody knows that the Disney versions of fairy tales -in most cases the most popular versions in the general consciousness- are sanitized heavily from their original forms. Stories like Cinderella , which has been around for several centuries, were intended as morality tales not family entertainments. Taken in that context, as well as in the context of history and from an alternate perspective, the stories can actually be quite horrifying. There actually isn’t a lot that Emilie Blichfeldt invented out of whole cloth for The Ugly Stepsister . The Norwegian body horror film that essentially just tells the Cinderella story from the point-of-view of one of the stepsisters of the titular character, changing the story little but amplifying its tonal extremes and adapting them in visceral ways, is one of the more revealing illustrations of how bizarre and deranged those fairy tales could really be. It also opines to critique the moral coding of such tales as they relate to conventional sta...