February 21 movie: The Castle of Cagliostro. It's interesting to see how Miyazaki approaches movies for different age groups. We speculated that this one was aimed at teenage boys: the hero is a happy-go-lucky crook, and a female spy shows up who mentions having had a sexual relationship with the hero. The plot is a bit romancey -- he rescues a princess from a forced marriage to an evil count -- but the romance is downplayed in favor of the ripping adventure story. We enjoyed it quite a bit, though (like Cowboy Bebop) it suffered a bit from clearly belonging to a series that we hadn't seen. Not that the movie was hard to follow. Just that I could tell I would have enjoyed the interactions better if I'd been following the characters.
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