Board 8 Watches and Ranks Animated Movies 4 - The Results Topic 2: Top Five

Well The Girl Without Hands successfully feeds the baby only after she drops the golden hands, right? I think the contrast between her not being able to do it (and how much that upsets her) with the hands, then being able to do it without them, serves to reinforce the idea that the prince while well-meaning doesn't really understand what she needs when he gives her the golden hands, and how learning to get rid of them is part of her character arc about learning to live on her own.

The gardener kills the fawn because the letter he gets from the prince, which the devil replaced, tells him to kill the baby and take his eyes, so he kills the fawn instead so he can keep the eyes in a box and show them to the prince when he returns. It's the same idea as the Snow White scene where the hunter presents the evil queen with a pig's heart instead of Snow White's. It might have been something of a trope in fairy tales of that time. It turns out to be sadly unnecessary, but from the gardener's perspective, at the time he does it, it makes sense to sacrifice the fawn as a way to protect the girl and her son, since the prince won't hunt them down when he comes back if he thinks they're dead.

The Waltz with Bashir dog scene... I think that one was more just intended to add another story about how the war fucked someone up and made them feel guilty, I mean that was probably something the director actually heard in an interview and I felt it did a good job introducing the kind of tone the reminiscences would carry for the rest of the movie. It's still completely fair not to like it because you dislike seeing violence against animals, though I think that on its own wouldn't really work well as a criticism.

One point I'd bring attention to is that not every visual choice a director makes necessarily has to advance the narrative. I think "plot" is over-emphasized in the writeups here too personally. An example of nudity being even more "superfluous" in The Girl Without Hands is that giant naked river lady that lifts the Girl up to eat fruit, there's no reason why she couldn't be wearing an elegant mermaid dress, but if she were, would we have to analyze how her dress advances the plot? The point of the nudity in Waltz with Bashir probably is just because they're in water and it makes the scene feel slightly more jarring by showing something taboo, and that's enough to make it a useful artistic choice even if it doesn't strictly need to be there, but we're probably more likely to analyze why something is included, and get upset about whether it should have been or not, if it challenges social taboos, whether via nudity or farts.