Kenji Kamiyama is the director of two of my favorite
Anime series from the 2000’s: Ghost in the Shell SAC (and it’s sequel 2nd
Gig) and Eden of the East (as well as it’s movie continuations). Both of those shows were high on action,
intrigue and do or die levels of intensity.
So I was excited to see him working on another Anime project and
wondered what sort of cool he would bring to it. Sadly, Napping Princess isn’t even on the
same level as Eden of the East or Stand Alone Complex. Here, Kamiyama tries to bring Ghibli like
fairy tale magic into his usual bag of social economical commentaries…and it
just comes out a huge mess.
Most of this mess has to deal with trying to merge the
dream world of Heartland and the real world together. There have been movies in the past where two
distinct but similar stories have taken place on two separate worlds and their
climactic points might converge at one point.
But when you try to cross them over without a true explanation as to
how, that’s when things go off the rails and the subsequent train wreck isn’t
pretty. It isn’t helped that there is no
real likeable characters in the cast to make up for this slack. Kokone comes off as annoying, the villains
try hard to be Kamiyama big corporation baddies but come off as lame clichés,
and the Heartland characters are nothing we haven’t seen from a Ghibli world
before. Plus, everyone acts some level
of stupid at one point: from Kokone not even bothering to guess someones
hijacked her Dads phone and has been communicating with her; or the big bad guy
(whose name I don’t care to remember) losing his important briefcase to a
thieving Kokone…and the flight desk attendants don’t even notice its being
stolen right in front of them. It’s
just…ugh so dumb overall and I was sad to utter the words “why isn’t this
over?” well before the one hour mark of the film.
I feel like Kamiyama could have just axed out the fantasy
elements all together and done an “Eden of the East” style techno thriller
about a new technology that some might not want the world to see and it’s up to
one girl to expose it. He tries to do
things different from Eden though and I want to believe he knew what he was
doing (he wrote as well as directed as he does for his other projects). But somewhere in the creation, it feels like
he got lost and it kind of shows in the final Napping Princess product. The film doesn’t really know what it wants to
be: fantasy dreamscape; thriller; political commentary. Honestly, I guess the fairy tale aspect could
have been used as a way to show Kokone coping with the world around her, even
when the world was just fine enough. But
it isn’t helped that things are barely clarified or explained; like how Mori
can somehow show up in Kokone’s dream, or why everything starts becoming one
giant blur during the last act when fantasy and reality clash. Even when things were left ambiguous in Stand
Alone Complex and Eden of the East, we had enough to chew on to make our own
sensible conclusions. Napping Princess
offers none of that because it has way too much going on to even comprehend any
semblance of sense…ugh watching it was a chore at times.
Napping Princess was a film I took a chance on just on
the directors name alone. Kenji Kamiyama
has done some great work in Anime and I know he can do better (even his not as
good Eden of the East sequel films are much better than this one). I’d like to see him try straight up fantasy
at some point but I feel like his true place is in the scifi/thriller genre
where he helped reinvigorate Ghost in the Shell for a new age (he’s even
working on a new GitS project with Shinji Aramaki from Appleseed). While some of the mechanical designs are neat
and the animation has some stand out moments, Napping Princess is a boring film
you could easily sleep through and wake up without having really missed a
thing. Shame, I really wanted this one
to be good.
3/10
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