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I don't know how to write movie reviews for readers, but I think I can help writers:

Superficially, the movie is a sob story about one's ancestors. It is really more like Herman Melville.

It starts "100 years ago, in the North of Japan". It is not about Japan. It is about humanity in our normal state.

The unusual thing about it is that people had gone from primitive survival agriculture to making sophisticated movies about it, almost within the memory of individuals. It is a movie about how life is when there is not an industrial revolution. Many people in the world are still equally poor and technically primitive, but they are, no longer, so well adjusted to it, and they will never have a chance to make movies about it. We can hope that, when things stop changing so quickly, human life will return to being similar to that in this movie, rather than ending. David R. Ingham 06:45, 29 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]