Change Your Image
craig-884
Reviews
The Plague Dogs (1982)
Not for children
There are some horrific animated scenes in this movie, such as a graphic drowning of a dog while two cold-hearted humans look on making comments. No child should be subjected to such images; their ability to distinguish between that and objective reality is too undeveloped.
If, as an adult, you enjoy watching animations of animal torment, that's on you. But what others who commented here called "affecting" may give your children nightmares. I'm no animal rights fanatic or moralist (though my wife and I do take part in an animal rescue network out of simple compassion). Even so, we did not find this movie an enjoyable escape and would not watch it again.
So by all means, teach your children that animal torment, medically unnecessary animal testing, drowning kittens and the like are wrong. See if they can imagine how such things would feel if they were in the animals' position. Teach them that animals are self-aware and that adopting one means making a contract to care for them in return for the trust and affection they offer so freely, and that dishonoring such a contract would tell the world awful things about them.
Teach them. But don't subject them to graphic images of the suffering that too many animals endure at the hands of humans who happen to have power over them.
By analogy, don't take them to snuff movies either. It doesn't matter if the intended lesson is "don't do that," putting such images graphically inside their minds may disturb them and will not help them.
There's a reason this movie is not generally well regarded. It's full of emotional sinkholes and graphic imagery not suitable for children. Or for adults who take such animal abuse seriously.
One star for the hand coloring. It's not enough to salvage this movie.
Crying Freeman (1995)
Beautiful, spare, and not at all kung-fool typical
I keep seeing this movie compared to anime or martial arts movies, and while I can see its roots in both genres, Crying Freeman is not really either. It might be a genre to itself.
Years ago I read a book named "The Painted Bird" that I thought deserved to be taught as a classic because its clean, spare style deserved study. But what really set it apart for me was that it was permeated with violence - it was about WWII and life under the brutal rule of Nazi invaders - but its treatment was so spare and clean it somehow rose above its subject matter into the mythic and poetic.
That's how this movie struck me. It is violent without being blood-soaked, has some highly charged eroticism without sinking into porn, and says more with the star's silence than could ever be told with dialog. The filming style is as spare and beautiful as I remember the text in "The Painted Bird" and can't be separated from the overall mythic impact of the movie.
I'm not saying this is a world-changing movie. It didn't give me some sort of epiphany, and at my age I'm no big fan of martial arts movies or anime cartoons. I'm just saying there is something quite beautiful about the way this movie fits together that elevates it above a subject matter that could have been cheapened into a spatter flick or bloated into a pure CG actioner. It's worth watching if only to sink your mind into the elusive, mythic quality that sets this movie apart.