Review of A Whisker Away

It's a cute date movie, I suppose. I didn't think they did enough with the boy's character to make me root for their relationship seriously, but I did like the breadth of emotion that the girl got to display. The main thing it made me think of is something my friend John Ohno was spitballing about one day, about how to define anime. I think there's valid clarification reasons for saying it means "Japanese animation," but even half-hearted exploration of that idea will reveal it to be a jingoistic oversimplification. One example it is oversimplified (minor among those examples) is the kind of anime that goesout of its way to reject "anime" memes. Hayao Miyazaki's movies frequently do this, and can fairly be described as "less" anime than others. But as I'm watching "A Whisker Away" (aha, "Spirited Away", I get it), I'm noticing a lot of repeated and similar ideas that were used in movies like "Kimi no Namae wa" or "Koe no Katachi". For example, the extremely (exaggeratedly?) plain character designs for the main characters. Or the way the scarecrows in this are reminiscent of the X marks in "Koe no Katachi". To be clear, I am all for this. I love reusing ideas as much as possible, and it's part of the reason I like anime so much. It's interesting to me that such "less" anime, this breed of Japanese date movies that happen to be animated and reject fantastical ideas that are peculiarities of the "anime aesthetic," have developed their own parallel memeplex.