I can't wait for my parents to use the painfully blunt dramatisation that sees three identical dudes standing in for the malevolent AI used in social media radicalise a teenager as a cautionary tale for me and my use of twitter. (I also love how he gets himself and his older sister arrested at a protest organised against the "extreme center" but only kind of by accident and hope you forget they kind of cut the little sister into a sequence about high rates of suicide among young girls because she never appears again)

I love it. The world on display in this film held my attention with an iron grip, but I think the film's greatest strength is found in its use of contrast. The gentle forest against the (surprisingly) violent battles, the typically quiet sounds of the countryside against the sharp crack of a gun going off, the film uses this to propel the story and I couldn't look away.

Also, it is just gorgeous animation and I love Ghibli art design so much.

The movie made me nostalgic for a Singapore I've never seen, while also appreciating just how far we've come since they shot Shirkers. The women front and centre of this movie inspired an itch that I haven't felt this bad in a while, but I just want to go out and create SOMETHING. For all of this, I am immensely grateful that I got to watch this.