❚ Winter 2025
Yes I didn't f up on the title, i haven't watched anything new until now.
Mononoke the Movie: Phantom in the Rain (劇場版「モノノ怪 唐傘」)
After *checks notes* 17 years... (spoiler free review because I don't feel like discussing plot points, I just watched this stuff last night.)
I saw Mononoke the bandai animation show somewhere in 2018, and I was impressed, it dug deep into my soul and lingered in my brain for years. I vibed with the music, the story, the visuals and (at that time) the main protagonist and their voice actor, a mystery show with a supernatural background. A travelling medicine seller hangs around the corner when shit hits the fan, a corpse appears and the assassin lurks in another plane of existence. The medicine seller is a mere spectator, a medium through we observe the story behind the case, who asks the whodunit of the narrative, but here is split in 3, the shape of the assassin (who is the spirit tainted with human emotion), the origin of these emotions (who was this human), and the thruth of the heart (why these emotions came to be, why they are so intense they corrupted this spirit). The formula hasn't changed from the original 3 episode story from the 2006 Samurai horror tales release, which for context was a compilation of storied realized with different teams and animator for each, and "bakeneko" being the last on the comp., this seem to garnered enough traction to become a whole series on it's own the next year.
So far my impression is that it's a decent anime, both the original and this new movie, now, after 15 years (the movie was announced in 2022) they still got it (kinda) to make another piece of narrative from this universe, the charm is still there, visually there was no constraints, it was gorgeous as ever, even more now to be honest with this almost blindly, saturated, gold sprinkled palette, the redesign of the medicne seller checks out with the overall art direction of the movie, and I consider it a one up from their original show.
Narrative wise it got a little more predictable, mid-way into the story I kinda figured why the things were happening, now on the original show there was plots who you could see where it was going from far away, but the big majority of these you were just watching the story unfold and had no idea where it was gonna end. But I don't want to deemed this movie a disappointment because the story wasn't done yet by the end of it's playtime and a second film is being made at the time of this writing, "Ashes of rage"
Overall I enjoyed this movie, specially with the fact they kicked out the last voice actor for the medicine seller (Takahiro Sakurai) from the production, as he is a pos who has been cheating on his wife for 10+ years and the twin engines people behind the show said in a post "we ain't hiring this motherfucker, our movie talks about the pain and struggles on woman, this guy ain't helping". I don't know what to tell you, that is super based.