I'd known about the existence of Chibi Maruko-chan for over a decade, but had never seen any of it, so this movie was my first exposure. I believe the draw of this movie to anyone watching it post 2020 would be the Masaki Yuasa directed music segments, which do display his early charms and are fun. Not all of the musical segments are directed by Yuasa and not all of them are good, but they are all interesting enough in their own right, and mix in nicely with the calm, warm, almost nostalgic tone the movie adopts. This is where the film shines in myopinion. Some may say that it's an inferior version of a Takahata (My Neighbor's the Yamada's, Only Yesterday) film, and while I can't really disagree, I think it's not a greatly inferior product and delivers that nice, wholesome family content well.

With that said, towards the end of the movie there is a turn that is laughably regressive in its gender politics. This would be easy enough to ignore if they moved past it, but the entire remainder of the film is devoted to this turn and it really tanked my enjoyment immediately.

Spoilers: A man who has proposed to his girlfriend tells her that he has decided he wants to move back to the countryside to be a farmer. He says that she should join him. She declines, reminding him both that'd they'd already previously agreed to stay in Tokyo, and that being in the big city is very valuable for her art career.

People can change their plans and break up, that's fair. No one needs to be a villain in this scenario, it's perfectly fine. But the man has the audacity to state that she was putting her career before their love (mind you, *he* was the one who *abruptly* changed their plans and decided to move away) and the narrative of the movie has the further audacity to act as if the woman is wrong! Maruko convinces her that she is being selfish so she relents and they get married. This is the central story of the last 20 - 30 minutes of the film. It's inexcusably regressive even for 90s Japan, and I promise I would be willing to look past it if the movie would just *stop focusing on it*. But it refuses to, so I do too.

This movie would have been an 8/10 but the sheer maddening, prolonged stupidity it made me endure towards the end drops it to a 5/10 in my book.