I’ve got many TV series under my belt, but relatively few films, so in the last few days I’ve decided to catch up on some movies I’d missed.

Children of the Sea – it might be the best animated gibberish I’ve ever watched, when it comes to quality of production. The art is absolutely gorgeous, but the plot is chaotic, nonsensical, attempting to be deep, but ultimately ends up sounding like a teenager on weed trying to be profound, yet making no sense whatsoever. IMO it’s only worth watching for the visuals, or if you like to watch movies while being wasted. 4/10

Maquia – it starts with a wonderful concept, and the first half is very good, but in the second part the movie becomes extremely emotionally manipulative, and quite chaotic when trying to deliver on its premise. The film unnecessarily raises the stakes, and the elements introduced in this section hinder rather than help in conveying the point the authors intended to make. Overall, it wasn’t a bad film, but the second half caused my rating to drop from 9/10 to 7/10.

A Kite – it was a weird mix of stupid, laughable, and disgusting. Mostly stupid and disgusting. It’s certainly an experience one of its kind. Never again. I hope the director grew out of his rape fantasies, because Virgin Punk, despite sharing a lot of similarities, is pretty good so far. As for Kite – 2/10

Grave of the Fireflies – I admit that, objectively speaking, it was a good film. However, for some reason this particular style of directing doesn’t resonate with me, and I dislike the fact that Studio Ghibli casts folks from outside the professional voice-acting industry in their films. In my view, the voice acting, much like in Princess Mononoke, was the weakest aspect of the entire movie. I even had to take off my headphones a few times when Setsuko was crying again and again, because my head was starting to hurt. It seems to me that this was one of the factors that significantly contributed to my inability to become fully immersed in the story. This and Princess Mononoke are the only Ghibli movies I’ve seen so far, but if others have similar vibes to these, I might turn out pretty indifferent to studio Ghibli creations in general. 7/10

As for TV series, I decided to drop Overgeared after episode 4. But I watched it subbed, and after that I heard that English dub makes it much better, and oh boy, it really does. I rewatched it dubbed from the start, and it felt like a different show. English cast leans more into comedy, Grid’s VA is having so much fun, and even the dialogue is better (it has slight differences compared to Japanese subs). It lifted my rating from 5/10 to 8/10. It made me start wondering how many times I could have missed a fun dub like this, because I almost always default to watching subbed