Princess Arete (ARITE Hime) (2001)

Princess Arete

“Positively lovely to look at, blissfully quiet for long stretches, and wonderfully feminist, Princess Arete should have been a slam dunk, an underrated classic just waiting for rediscovery. It was not to be, as the pacing drags all over the place, like a theme park ride that comes to a screaming halt before whiplashing you this way and that along the track before coming to a slightly unsatisfying end.   For a long stretch in the opening, Princess Arete is arresting in its slow unraveling. We meet the young princess, held captive in the castle by a neurotic father after her mother’s death. His overprotective nature has made his daughter an inadvertent prisoner, and she feels like she’s slowly suffocating with her lone escape being in the books she cherishes. The princess becomes the ” read more