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Crappy film

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Mushi-shi starts out good with plot that's intriguing, but the story goes nowhere and ends incomplete. There are several good characters that show up all having potential to enhance the story, but they just fizzle out and do nothing spectacular.The scenery is beautiful, and the movie is worth the watch if you like nature. Jo Odagiri does good job as the title character.Is this movie worth a watch ? Story wise, I didn't think so. Visuals is beautiful at the start but as the movie progresses, both the story, and the visual loses luster. It's as though the director got tired and didn't have the stamina to continue the good work that was started.

I am incredibly happy that Mushishi was made the way it was - calm, beautiful, moody and seemingly almost timeless. That it doesn't get a higher score is just because I'm exceptionally stingy with my 9:s and 10:s, and I feel Mushishi could've been even more subtle than it was, for example with the music and sounds: instead of using those to provoke dramatic effect, sometimes simple silence is best. I also feel that there was a little too much of forced narrative coherence towards the end, and would rather it had kept just flowing along - which it otherwise succeeded quite well at. Like the mushi themselves, for big parts, the film just is.And of course, I'm incredibly happy that things were kept mysterious, without superfluous explanation. It's interesting to read the comments of people who haven't read the manga or seen the anime though, as many seem to think that Ginko is a manipulator of mystic energies. He isn't. He just knows a little more about certain aspects of nature than most people. But that really doesn't matter, I think it's nice it's actually vague enough to allow for such interpretation.I love the final shot. Simple, suggestive and beautiful. And I love the dampness and dirt. Wandering hills and forests can be muddy.

I have noticed that the positive comments so far have mostly said 1. "I'm a big fan of the original manga" and 2. "It was beautifully shot". Together, these phrases sum up exactly what's wrong with Mushishi. It is a high production value film that is content to appeal solely to a relatively small subset of its potential audience.I was terribly disappointed by this film. It's not that it was simply slow, leaden, plodding, etc. I can fully enjoy a film that does all those things if there's a payoff, if it ultimately makes sense and gives you a sense of there being a complete wholeness to the underlying concepts. This did not happen. Clearly I don't live up to point #1 - I am not a manga fan.OK, so let me say something positive - point #2 is true. It was beautifully shot and the production values are excellent. A very nice film to look at. My ultimate impression - if you are not already a fan of the manga, avoid, avoid, avoid.

Otomo Katsuhiro's "Akira" (88) was truly a landmark film in Japanese animation and helped to bring cyperpunk animation to the forefront of sci-fi cinema. Unfortunately Otomo's numerous other projects thereafter (World Apartment, Memories, Steamboy) haven't really been able to match nor capture the excitement and wonder of that film. Which brings us to Otomo's current film "Mushishi", a truly bizarre and confusing film and one that is likely to test a viewer's patience."Mushishi" is based on Urushibara Yuki's long running manga of the same name published by Kodansha starting in 1999. It told the story of a young, white-haired shaman/mystic by the name of Ginko who had the unique ability to see ghostly and supernatural insects ("mushi") who would inhabit and afflict their human hosts with a number of mysterious ailments and sicknesses (some bordering on the grotesque). Using his supernatural abilities along with his medical/mystical knowledge, Ginko would travel feudal Japan to cure and treat those afflicted by the strange "Mushi".It's one part the "Ghost Whisperer" mixed in with Tezuka Osamu's classic medical thriller "Black Jack".The movie is visually very stunning with beautiful locations showcasing the colorful, lush and rustic Japanese countryside. The CGI effects for "Mushi" in particular are convincingly creepy and unnerving. The medical ailments range from the uninteresting (ear infections) to the painful (massive infections, protrusions) to the very bizarre (irratic behavior, tissue degeneration).Yet as with his anime projects like "Memories" and "Steamboy" Otomo seems to get too caught up in the visual styling that the storytelling suffers from it. The story is told in a deliberately slow and methodical pace that may try the patience of modern audiences and the MTV crowd already accustomed to more frantic and faster pacing.I'm not familiar with the source material, so it was very hard at times to follow the crux of the story. We never are told where these "mushi" come from and/or why they they do what they do which was a bit frustrating.At two hours, the movie is overly long and I often found myself struggling to keep awake, hoping for some sort of exciting and climactic event that will hopefully shed light on all of these proceedings. That unfortunately never materialized.Odagiri Joe doesn't really do much in his portrayal of Ginko rather playing the character as a atypical, stoic, silent hero who deals with the fantastical events he encounters with a disengaged almost bored manner.Manga/comic adaptations are becoming all the rage now with "Death Note", "Dororo", "Nana" and the recent "Ge Ge Ge No Kitaro" having had much success on the big screen. "Mushishi" may be a case-in-point to producers that not all manga were meant to be adapted and that perhaps some stories are better kept to the confines of print publication or anime.