You may never find it necessary to translate "Ni no Kuni". It's fun even if you don't speak Japanese: a series of intermittent sounds brings the series closer to its creators at Level-5 and Studio Ghibli. However, if you were to run it through Google, you would find that it meant "another world" or literally "second country". It is a fantasy place defined by our relationship. Events in one country seem to affect another country, where opposing people share souls. You can't help asking, what is the function of the parallel device while sitting on the keyboard or train?
The Ni Ni Kuni movie, which was released in Japan last year, has now been released in English via Netflix, grabbing that idea. It turned out that the idea was strong enough to allow viewers to spend an unbalanced 106 minutes.
No wonder, really: The parallel world has been lingering since at least 1950s CS CS created Narnia novels. The passage of time in Narnia is different, so the child protagonists grow up in the blink of an eye during the reading process: nasty teens come back humble and resourceful; bullied boarding school kids come back to chase those Torture their torturers. These are sudden changes in adolescence. In your teens, the real world feels too ordinary to accommodate your immense emotions, while another world offers you the space to try new outfits, make serious mistakes, and resolve internal struggles on the actual battlefield.
Ni no Kuni will do all these things, but it will bring sadness to the blade. In the first game to evoke the feeling of mid-century through a postcard-perfect American environment, Motorville, 13-year-old Oliver was testing a friend's motorcycle when the car hit a river. His mother saved him from drowning, but the move saved him from a heart attack. Until then, Oliver was transported to a world in which a woman who looked like his mother needed savings. Those who have played Ni no Kuni are really not sure whether the land they are exploring really exists, or whether a child cannot accept unimaginable ideas.
In the movie, another world has reached terrible tragedy. When the two girls they loved were stabbed in the street, school friends Yuu and Haru were sent to the royal city, and the local princesses were very similar to the princesses they had just left-it happened to require a fatal curse. The film walks back and forth from one country to another, bringing the real-world feel of the character to a stage of fantasy.
Mercifully, the pain of waking up in a foreign country alleviates the pain. In the easy middle third, the Ni no Kuni movie has become a comedy on the water as Yuu and Haru get used to playing the new roles of "folks A and B". They drink in the tavern, their parents will never let them approach them, they stare lazily at the towering man, facing the dog's face, and then they lose their way and ask the city's monarch and his daughter Pet. Soon after, they entered the arena and discovered professional swordsmanship geniuses. They were not the first adolescents, and their developing bodies surprised them, but they were most happy about it.
To adapt to the adaptation of the game, the tension of the story depends on rules of contention: Both friends agree that people have a connection with a soul mate in another world, but only one considers the connection to be healthy. Fundamentally, this may be your dispute over the D & D manual, but it has life and death consequences.
The film benefits from the script of Akihiro Hino, the founder of Level-5 and the author of the game "Ni no Kuni". But unlike Wrath of the White Witch, this is not the work of Studio Ghibli. It does not have Hayao Miyazaki's budget or temperance. It's hard to imagine his camera wandering around the princess's bare belly like here, or resorting to cheap CG wide lenses to sell siege and invasion scenes.
Ni no Kuni may lose a foothold while succumbing to the twists of plot twists and boss wars, but it is ultimately saved by its commitment to real-world concerns. This is a movie about the path that each of us has taken to stop the pain of our loved ones. However, rather than letting you play by the hospital bed, give Yuu and Haru the opportunity to wield swords on the castle walls to overcome their denial and frustration. If we can all enter the second country when needed.