a review of 侧耳倾听

2021 Cult Movie Challenge Week 9: Anime Week This was my first time revisiting this one after seeing a bootleg fansubbed version in the early '00s, before most of the Ghibli oeuvre had gotten a legit US release. Perhaps my memories were tainted by having seen "The Cat Returns" a bit more recently, but I'd honestly forgotten that the fantasy elements teased on the poster are an extremely minor element of the actual film, with most of it being a pleasantly low-stakes slice-of-life story. From that standpoint, one of the things that I like about this is that there's a number of scenes that flirt with portal-fantasy tropes similar to those in other Ghibli films, but with a very different sort of payoff. Specifically, we get this Alice in Wonderland-esque image of a girl chasing a cat through the city, with the implication that it's leading her to another world, like the protagonists of Spirited Away or My Neighbor Totoro. Instead we get something more grounded, the idea that she's discovering new places by making connections with new people and learning all about them.