A Letter to Momo [Momo E No Tegami] (Okiura, 2011)

[shariqq]

A Letter to Momo (Momo E No Tegami)
Hiroyuki Okiura | Japan | 2011
120 min

Clearly inspired by the imaginative visuals of Studio Gibli, A Letter to Momo is a beautifully drawn tale of a little girl who is coming to terms with the loss of her father. Relocated to an island town with her mother, the girl starts seeing three spirits that accompany her for a few days. Although the movie's animation is fantastic, it loses out on content. The story is a string of episodic fragments that amount to little. Unnecessary sequences and forced inanity limits the wonderful animation. The movie could do with a shorter running time and better characters for the spirits. A Letter to Momo remains a pale comparison to Miyazaki's wondrous imagination.

My Ratng --> 2 of 5

[fizz]

A Letter to Momo, which features richly detailed animation and aspires to be a sort of Hayao Miyazaki lite, is let down by a script that sways between spiritual fantasy and juvenile humour. In trying to balance the subject of coming to terms with death, it also tries to be accessible to children which leads to long, pointless subplot about three goblins and the time they spend during their exile to Earth.

Young Momo moves from Tokyo to the islands with her mother after her father passes away. She possesses an unfinished letter from him, apparently written the day he died after his daughter got angry at him for being too involved with his work, and she longs to know what he would have written had it been completed. While discovering her new surroundings, which she dislikes being the prototypical city girl, she comes across a book of drawings that belonged to her great grandfather, which contains strange, fascinating images of ghouls and goblins. Soon thereafter, she feels she is being followed by invisible beings, who turn out to be goblin spirits, freed when she opened the book. Fearful at first, she befriends them eventually and together they spend the bulk of the film fooling around - stealing food from the nearby lands, getting in ruckus with other kids etc, till the letter from her father, much to the frustration of viewers, becomes all but forgotten.

Charming at first, with its clean, crisp visuals (the director is a renown animator having worked on some of the greatest films from the country) the aimless plot soon starts to take its toll. At two hours in length, the films purpose becomes more muddled as it goes along. Changing tracks from being about a girls quest to move on after her father's death, it is content with less weighty issues that don't do the potential of the original intent any justice to its fantastic animation (consisting of stunning painted background artwork). By its last act, Momo not only becomes frustrating to watch, but keeping up with the wayward plot becomes a chore, which is a shame given how spellbinding and energetic it remains visually.

Rating: 2/5