Review: The Ribbon Hero gets lost in the anime sauce

To survive, we must endure pain. So we're told during The Ribbon Hero, the new anime movie that premiered on Netflix over the weekend. The film's hero, Princess Sapphire, has learned this lesson the hard way. She and her attendant Zirco are the only survivors of Silverland, a kingdom that was wiped out by the nefarious Nergal, hulking rocky-like titans that emerge from another world once in a while to feed on the crystals of the world. If crystals aren't to be found, they move on to chowing down on human souls. Some factions have gone so far as to prepare ritual sacrifices. The weak and poor are just fodder to keep the powerful and wealthy plushly ensconced in their comfortable lifestyles. It's the way of the world, the order of things. Resistance is futile, both against the threat of the Nergal and, for the lower classes, against the ruling class.

Seven years after the fall of Silverland, Princess Sapphire and Zirco are starting to get back on their feet in Goldland. They befriend a girl named Pine, get a job working in the crystal mines and, oh yeah, Princess Sapphire unlocks a latent power in her ribbon that transforms her into the badass Princess Knight, a hero who is able to go toe-to-toe with the Nergal and brings hope to the populace that maybe the ritual sacrifices can stop. 

Of course, the higher-ups aren't happy about this development. They want to preserve the status quo, stay in their ivory towers, and keep the poor people living on the fringes right where they are.

When it comes down to it, The Ribbon Hero doesn't have that much going on. It pushes up against an almost two-hour runtime, and by the time the credits roll, I found myself thinking, What was that all for? It's not an unpleasant watch, or a bad one. It's just that it's almost actively forgettable, a movie that sometimes feels like it's just going through the paces to fill out a feature-length runtime, dotting its is and crossing its ts to make sure there's some semblance of a coherent story, and then wiping its hands and calling it a day.

A year from now, I'll struggle to remember anything about this movie.

But it's really pretty! The animation is so gorgeous, with a charming, lived-in storybook feel to its environs, and lots of great character designs (I especially loved the look of Velvet, an antagonist-turned ally whose design is dripping in vampiric androgyny). The soundtrack is killer, especially the song that plays over the credits. This is a movie that has a lot of the pieces in place, lots of things you can tick off a list to be like, yup, it did that, too, but it doesn't all click together into a package that's particularly satisfying. There's nothing special here.

And when the film moves into its very strange third act, it all but lost me. At that point, Princess Sapphire moves into an alternate dimension where she does battle with an anthropomorphized donkey knight and his cadre of soldiers in a realm where things can change and shift on a dime. So much of what I enjoyed about The Ribbon Hero is the interpersonal dynamics between the characters, especially the scenes Sapphire shares with Zirco (who is easily the highlight of the film -- an adorable tiny old woman in a hovercraft and a cute voice) and Pine. Once Sapphire leaves them behind to do her hero thing in this strange new world, the movie gets lost in the anime sauce, becoming a chaotic jumble as it hurtles toward the happily ever after ending. It was, for me, a bit much. Maybe more than a bit.

You could argue that the greatest sin a movie can commit is being boring and forgettable, that that's a worse outcome than a movie being actively bad in an interesting way. I certainly feel that way sometimes, and have probably made such an argument on this very blog. But today, I'm feeling a little generous, maybe because we're in the midst of hot, lazy summer days. Sometimes, on days like these, watching something that's easy and kind of bland and not-so-bad does the trick. I didn't mind my time with The Ribbon Hero, even if it's ultimately a movie that made no meaningful impression on me at all. You can take it or leave it, the outcome's all the same.