Monday, March 11, 2019

Napping Princess

Days before the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, young Kokone Morikawa finds herself dreaming of a magical world where technology and magic struggle to help each other in daily life.  One day, Kokone’s father is kidnapped, accused of stealing a piece of crucial, game changing technology.  A long buried secret of Kokone’s family history lies in the world Kokone has been dreaming of.  In order to save two worlds, Kokone must walk between them and bring the dream to reality.
 
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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