My Neighbors the Yamadas

The new Ghibli Studio production, Tonari no Yamadakun, is two years after "Mononoke" a new masterpiece of animation. The story... Well, there is no story. Just a superposition of sequences, each being more hilarating than the preceding. Director Takahata, using computers generated "hand-like" drawings, wanted the result to be as close as possible to the original newspapers comic, and he fully suceeded. In spite of the apparent graphic simplicity, the astounding quality of the animation makes the characters so lively that it seems sometimes more "real" than conventional cell animation.

The yamadas are a typical japanese family, living in the Kansai area (Osaka). They do not speak standard japanese, especially the Granma, so as almost all of the gags are not visual, so if you plan to see it in Japanese, you should have very strong basis of the language. This is one of the most inventive animation movies I've seen since a very long time...