Review of A Whisker Away

While the movie starts off calm and slow doing both a great job of character development and world building, the longer it continues the story becomes more forced. A good romance has to make the viewer feel connected to the main characters on some level and they really don't go past the face level in showing us the main characters feelings and hardships. As a child of divorce personally I don't feel any relation to Muge at all. Truthfully the character with the most impact is the Mask Seller,and he doesn't even have a name. I think this anime could have spent more time developing and building on the relationships between more of the characters such as; her mom, dad, Koaru. Rather than spending time on longer scenes of Muge just running around. Also, they rush through the ending as well, so this movie could have used better plot and time management as well.

All that being said, this has a great story and it gives me classic studio Ghibli vibes, however, that is as far as it goes. If a child were watching this it might be a ten, but for me everything seems so elementary.

Props to the art, props to the story, props to the soundtrack, however, this movie needed more emotional impact.