>>282059258 (OP)
A lot of the most iconic old anime movies are in major ways badly written as movies. They adapt so much of a given well liked source material in such a short run-time that they're barely adaptations. More like "we animated a bunch of scenes from x and stitched them together with a great soundtrack so it feels like a movie", without doing enough to explain what's going on to a viewer who isn't already familiar. Even when they do explain things, the general pacing is usually too fast
Theyre well animated and have cool moments and directing, but as stand alone movies they rarely work the way the source material was meant to. Its like they still only exist as an elaboration on the source material. People are bowled over by the animation and what's good about them and try to turn the disjointed vagueness and rushed awkward pacing into a virtue, acting like it was totally artistically deliberate to craft a certain effect. Almost invariably they could have had the same vibe and themes if they made the plot and worldbuilding more clear
I'm talking about like Ghost in the Shel, Akira, to a lesser extent something like Char's Counterattack. Theres so much good in them that people don't register how much they're missing the first time they watch and before they've looked anything up-not stuff thats meant to be subtext, not extra layers, the basic surface level plot. Char's counterattack is freshest in my mind here. Its an adaptation of 3novels, and I think it starts at like the start of novel 2 so there's just suddenly all these brand new characters out of nowhere that the movie is treating as though you already know and give a shit about them, because again, they're trying to adapt so much so fast, making things disjointed and impossible to ground yourself in. Things just keep happening almost with indifference to the audience and the idea of trying to both keep them in the loop and sell them on why they should care until the movie ends
