It's hard to describe this, maybe because it's difficult to describe what breathing looks like - your body doesn't move at all, and yet everything about it moves your grow around the midsection, but shrink in the shoulders. Miyazaki is an unqualified genius, and his 2-D animation breathes with life - in some group shots, you can actually see people in the background inhaling and exhaling, so precise is the master's attention to detail. Both films come from creators with a genuine house style that's completely singular. "Princess Mononoke" is an epic masterwork, and "The Last Unicorn" is a bizarro curiosity. Because both films are many things, but one thing they decidedly are not is even remotely Disneylike.
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Thus, I suspect it's much easier for Americans to appreciate a movie like "The Last Unicorn" (from the very early 80s) and "Princess Mononoke" (from the late 90s) for what they are, as opposed to what they are not. Now, of course, animation is practically more common than real-life, and there are so many different legitimately beautiful artistic options - "South Park," "Frisky Dingo," and the magnificent opening of "Kung Fu Panda" are just a few examples of how seemingly stripped down, unbeautiful animation can dazzle just as much as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves," and with lots of funny, to boot. So, if you were to go back and read the vast majority of reviews written about animated movies before this decade, you'll invariably find some reference to Disney - how the movies are different, how they are more violent, how they are less beautiful, how they are decidedly un-Disneylike. How many times does Daffy betray Bugs, only to be himself betrayed? There's something dark and weird in the Warner Bros cartoons - morality is regularly undercut, laws of physics are betrayed, and characters run off the film strip with shocking regularity, a trick Bergman would borrow for "Persona." They were never a family - in nearly every Looney Toon, one character is actively trying to kill another one, and sometimes the cross-currents of backstabbing wrap themselves into spirals towards madness. It was the only game in town - sure, the Looney Toons over at Warners were much liked, but there was always something fundamentally unlovable about Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd. It's difficult to believe that for practically the entire 20th century you couldn't mention animation without mentioning Disney.