Mimi wo Sumaseba

I have no idea why people enjoyed this movie. I have never been a very big appreciator of these Miyazaki stamped films, although I don't necessarily dislike them all, but this film is the worst of them I've seen. Lets go through the details.

The animation is in constant conflict. While the backgrounds have some fairly impressive detail, the moving parts of the animation are inconsistent and often poorly done and all movement is extremely choppy. The backgrounds and characters also don't seem to work very well together in some situations as if they exist on different layers. Another example of ... this disconnect between background and the moving pieces is Scooby Doo, where it seems as if they locked the animators for the characters and those for the background in different rooms and never showed each other the other's work.

The sound is downright annoying some of the time. I dislike the use of Take Me Home Country Roads as essentially the theme song of the movie and each time characters sang in the movie it proved more annoying than impactful in any way, and the rewrites the main character made were pretty terrible. Also this film takes one from many other Japanese films and employs the "roaring ambiance," the obnoxious cicada and other such random noises. Aside from that the miscellaneous background music is not noteworthy, although sometimes not very very well selected, and the voice actors are generally fine.

Finally, the story and characters have basically nothing going for them. The characters are generally not believable and flat, the randomness of dialogue is off-putting, the story is slow and boring.
First off, the "romantic element" of this movie feels artificial and forced. The initial romantic triangle doesn't make any sense because we don't even know the character's relationships with each other in the first place. When the female lead says she was friends forever with the dude, I didn't even know they talked. It's also extremely awkward and all the characters fill stereotypical roles, the shy girl, the mediator (main character) and the idiot guy.
As for the main romance of the movie, the proposal at the end was extremely annoying and I couldn't take it seriously at all. Checking out books to get someone's attention is the absolute dumbest thing I've heard, the most hilarious line of the movie being Shizuku wondering if he was handsome just seeing his name in the books.
Oh it's also a great romance when the girl doesn't even know who the guy is and he just inexplicably likes her.

So yes, in the end, all of these elements mix together to form a sub-par community "classic" that I wouldn't recommend to anyone.

I'm not really sure what happened here. I'm a massive fan of Ghibli, particularly of their more human stories (When Marnie Was There, From Up On Poppy Hill, Totoro, Ocean Waves, etc.). I read the manga this movie is based on and absolutely loved it. And yet... I hated this. Like, really hated it. I guess I better dive into why.

Story:
You already get a general description, so I won't go into it here, but the story here diverges a good bit from what is seen in the original manga. And most of it actually makes very little sense in context. It feels like they ... filled in the details, like they do so well in other Ghibli movies, but here they failed to take any care in HOW they filled those details in.

Important events are missing or entirely changed to remove their original meanings. Important details about characters are changed or removed, leaving far less of an impact and causing the relationships to feel far less believable. Some characters are even missing outright, like one of the cats or Seiji's older brother, both of which were very major parts of why the original story worked so well. The tone from the original is also quite different, putting a weird focus on the bustling city for some reason, which muddies the message a bit imo. And finally, the antique shop doesn't even look to be a shop at all for some reason, which really kills a lot of the awe there.

Frankly put, they really failed here somehow. I don't know what happened, but it was very disappointing, unfortunately.

Art:
This review won't be all negative, though. If Ghibli manages anything well, it's usually the art. And this movie is no exception. In fact, it might be the best example of their work from a realistic setting. The backgrounds in particular are just absolutely gorgeous and it makes me want to go to this city. If I have one gripe, it's that many of the locations changed how they look compared to the original story, sometimes in ways that don't make as much sense, but the art is still drawn well either way.

Sound:
On the other hand, this is the worst OST in a Ghibli movie, by far. I didn't realize an OST could be bad in a Ghibli movie until watching this and I'm still in awe a bit. The big problem here is the abysmal and repetitive use of the god-awful song "Country Roads" throughout the movie. This song has nothing to do with the source material at all (in fact, there was no topic of music in the manga at all), but it's EVERYWHERE here. You hear renditions of this song 3 times in a row in the first 10 minutes. And it just keeps bringing it back over and over and over. The 7th or 8th time I'd heard it was my breaking point and I stopped watching. I was only halfway through the movie...

This would be a lot less bad if the other music was any good, but outside of one scene at night, I can't say I enjoyed any of the other music in the OST either. It really feels like the composer just couldn't be arsed to make a proper theme and the director had some really bad ideas for the story, so they came together to make a special kind of shitshow. To be clear, they rewrote key details about the main characters just to shoehorn this song in as much as possible. Seiji is supposed to be an artist, not a musician. And Shizuka is supposed to be convinced to write from Seiji, not because of this shitty song. I hate it.

Character:
Since much of my complaints with the characters are intertwined with portions of what I've said already, I won't restate much here. But the combination of removing major characters, changing key details of characters, and changing character relationships to make them get along less makes the characters far less enjoyable than any Ghibli movie should be able to manage. Beyond what I've mentioned already, I think my biggest disappointment here was how they managed to change "Moon" from the type of cat in Cat Returns (which was also how this cat was designed in the original manga) to some ugly fat one instead. Not only is this change arbitrary, but it also just ends up making quite a few things make a lot less sense in the end...

Enjoyment/Overall:
Needless to say, I didn't enjoy this much. I did appreciate the art, but as a movie and a story, it's just not good at all. I would recommend reading the original manga, but stay well clear of this unless you really need to. And definitely don't try it if you can't stomach listening to "Country Roads" like 20 times within a couple hours, ugh.

In the end, it was great source material absolutely destroyed by bad execution, unfortunately.