Good Bye Lenin!

Today I saw Good Bye Lenin!, which has earned a spot among my favorite recent German films (a list topped without question by The Lives of Others), despite its imperfections.

The premise: A East German young man's mother falls into a coma shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany. She wakes up eight months later, but is too fragile to handle the news that her country doesn't exist anymore, so her son, Alex, and his compatriots recreate it in a rapidly changing world.

The movie was not perfect, with a sort of lack of polish in places, but the brilliance of the idea was enough to make an audience fall in love with it. The passion of Alex and his excitement at finding a box of peas or a pickle jar draws you in, amid the larger cultural upheaval in the background.

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I will not go on at length; see it if you like. I was considering contrasting it with Pedro Almodovar's Habla con Ella (Talk to Her), another coma movie, but found that aside from that connection, they were simply too different.

I also saw Princess Mononoke recently, but it was a mild disappointment compared with Spirited Away, which was great. Perhaps still worth seeing, though; the moral ambiguity was promising for anime, even if I found the overexcited voices grating. Maybe that was just a bad English dub, though; subtitled Japanese might be better, though I usually find animation dubs much more tolerable than live action ones.

Does anyone know any other anime movies worth seeing? I was considering Howl's Moving Castle, but there's got to be some good ones beyond Hayao Miyazaki.