a review of 沃特希普高地

2022 Criterion Challenge Week 1/Category 40: Animation Before The 2000s I'm not sure what I would have made of this as a child or teen, but I'm glad I'm seeing it now as an adult. It breaks so many of the "rules" of animated features, even ones that had not yet been fully codified for maximum merchandising potential. Just the fact that most of the character designs look very similar, only being differentiated by either slight differences in the animation or vocal performance, sets this apart as a cartoon that wasn't designed with toyetic ambitions in mind. The surrounding mythology and the pro-environmental/anti-militaristic message are somehow both of their time and well ahead of it; While we started getting similar socially-conscious (if still essentially conservative) messages in kids' cartoons in the early '90s, it always felt like something that was tacked on to appease parents' groups. Whereas here the messages are the absolute point of the film, which points up the difference between something ultimately created to sell a product, and something that is fully whole in and of itself.