Ronia the Robber's Daughter

It's a little slow to get going and probably a little more geared towards kids than what I typically enjoy, but the animation is so beautiful and story so sweet and touching, I couldn't help, but fall in love with it.

I watched this show during quarantine with my then 6 year old daughter and we both were charmed. The fact that it was technically a Ghibli production made it even better. It was a thoroughly enjoyable show, like Romeo and Juliet minus all the adult elements, age gap and romance.

It is extremely hard to find refreshing kids content that prioritizes nature and good lessons these days. That is why me and my daughter are constantly rewatching Totoro. This show fits that perfectly though. So when I randomly remembered this show the other day, I thought it was a perfect fall show and invited my now eight year old to watch it with me. So we sat down on the couch, queued up Amazon Prime (the streaming service it used to be on) and searched for it. But when we clicked on it, we got a nasty surprise! It says watch free with Prime, but when you click on that it only takes you to the trailer. So I scrolled down and saw that you can't play any of the episodes, only the freaking bonus trailer.

Apparently you have to pay 30 dollars to buy the complete season on Amazon and also 30 dollars if you want the DVD!

Amazon Prime has disappointed me by removing most of the enjoyable, educational children's content on there (the Long Long Holiday was another one we thoroughly enjoyed, then went to rewatch and it was gone). First HBO Max and Netflix screwed over animation by removing and canceling a batch of animated shows, and now Amazon Prime is repeating that! Take your money to Hulu or Disney+, or buy DVDs instead.

I and my kiddos (8 year old girl, 5 year old boy) watched this during summer 2020. We all got really into it and watched 2 or 3 episodes each night, which probably qualifies as binging for this age rage. The series features beautiful if fairly simple animation, a catchy introductory song, and an exciting storyline that manages to be slow-paced and episodic, with the narrative focused mostly on Ronya growing up. The beautiful forest is the spiritual focus of the series, and Ronya loves to explore it. Yet danger lurks not only through natural hazards, but also the evil harpies and other spirits, as well as the violent life of Ronya's robber family. Especially their feud with the rival robber clan that has moved into the other side of their castle, and its young prince "Birk," Ronya's love interest. The generally tranquil (despite the dangers) and joyful feel of the series contrasts uncomfortably with the fact that most of the people whose lives are empathetically chronicled are hardened criminals, despite the fact that they don't seem ever to kill anyone. But the series is redeemed by Ronya and Birk, who reject their parents' feud and their lifestyle, as well as Ronya's strong relationship with her father Mattis, who ultimately is convinced to give up his family's traditional "profession" because of her. Also, my kids loved calling Mattis a "man-baby" and calling out his various "meltdowns"!

What would otherwise have been a beautiful animation series has been completely ruined by the miscasting of the lead voice in English. Ronja is supposed to be 11 years old - My daughter (8) has been constantly mocking the voice of Ronja as she says she sounds like a toddler. The voice is so gratingly irritating it has completely destroyed any enjoyment of the series there might otherwise have been.

I sympathise with the other comments of the music and voice dubbing in English which seems disjointed but all of this might have been forgiven as the animation, characters and creatures would be engaging in themselves.

I expect that the original in Japanese would not suffer from these drawbacks. So it is down to me and my children to study Japanese, or perhaps we could beg the production company to re-voice Ronja, then I might shell out the £25 for the DVD box set for a second time!

The computer generated 3D animation used in Ronja does take getting used to. My husband and I, both aged 70, and huge Ghibli fans over the years, felt that this would definitely have been a best seller had Goro Miyasaki made it as a film rather than a TV series involving Polygon Pictures. The scenery and the attention to detail are brilliant and the main characters very well depicted. However, it is the mythical creatures that steal the show, particularly the Harpies, worth looking out for every appearance they make. Goro Miyasaki's other films, 'Tales From Earthsea' and 'From Up on Poppy Hill' showed a very different style from his father, Haiao Miyasaki, and it took us a while to really appreciate how good they were. We are experiencing the same with Ronja. Having got to about episode four the pace picks up and we watched the whole series before reading Astrid Lindgren's book on which it is based. Unlike other reviewers, we actually felt that Miyasaki had stuck pretty close to the original; which prompted us to view the series again…and we were not disappointed.