Over the past few months, my wife and I have been slowly working through a list of some of the more notable Japanese animated films. Among the recurring names is that of director Makoto Shinkai. After watching a few of his works, I have to say that he isn’t one of my favourites. His works do tend to have absolutely gorgeous animation but are light on plot. They seem meant more to convey a specific mindset or emotional state than telling a story. They also seem overly fond of some of the most common tropes in Japanese animation without enough original ideas or perspectives. There’s a certain poetical beauty in his works but for the most part, they’re not to my taste.

Children Who Chase Lost Voices represents a very significant departure from the rest of this director’s oeuvre. For one thing, it’s much longer, clocking in at nearly two hours. For another, as an action adventure film, this one has a very substantial plot indeed. Unfortunately, this film fails to endear me to this director and if anything I find it to be inferior to any of his other works that I’ve seen so far.

The film is about a young girl, Asuna, who lost her father at a young age and is brought up by a frequently absent mother. She learns of the existence of Agartha, the so-called Land of the Dead, from one its denizens who has travelled to the surface. Naturally, many others seek this mysterious land for their own purposes, either to plunder its riches or to contact the dead, and inevitably Asuna must undertake this epic journey herself.

Despite not being terribly original, there’s nothing wrong with this premise. And I quite like how the film tries to tie this mysterious land with existing myths and legends, even implying that would-be conquerors of the world have throughout the ages have made it a target. But this film’s perennial flaw is that it never follows through on anything. For example, the film presents the quetzalcoatls as the guardians of the pathway between the surface world and the underworld and imply that they play an important role in the ecocycle of Argatha. But subsequent events raise more questions than answer them.

This goes for pretty much all of the fantastical elements too. The film shows us a monster or some aspect of life in Argatha and then never expands on it or explains how everything fits together. There’s just no unity of purpose so the entire thing feels like the adventures of a young girl travelling through a strange land encountering all manner of random things. The film is also startlingly incompetent about handling plotlines. One would imagine that Asuna’s deceased father would play into her journey somehow, but he never does.

Combine this with male characters who are annoyingly close to shonen stereotypes, monsters that are in the end not terribly interesting (they remind me most of all of the Hollows in Bleach) and I think a quality of animation that is markedly inferior to that of the director’s other works, the end result simply fails to impress. Plus it doesn’t even have decent action scenes to redeem itself. Give this one a miss.