My first thought upon seeing this movie was "Oh, Lord, another Save The Earth!!1! envirowacko movie."  I mean, it has all the trademarks:  Evil humans build industry and pilliage the landscape, and the spirits of the world fight back!  But getting past the preconcieved notions of any animation that talks about nature (caused by Captain Planet, I'm sure) allowed me to actually really enjoy this movie.

Can a movie with Billy Bob Thorton as a voice actor really be good?  Yes!

Talking too much about this movie would end up being a spoiler.  Because the movie is shallow, or the story is boring?  Not in the least!  Actually trying to dicsuss bits of a story as well developed as this one requires so much backstory that you end up having to write a synopsys before you can move on to discussions about the movie.  But I'll do my best.

You follow the adventures of a prince from a "lost" civilization, believed to be wiped out.  A giant forest demon, in the form of a boar, attacks his villiage.  To save the villiage, he ends up having to engage the boar and kill it, but in doing so he's cursed (killing a god is a sin, you know).

He leaves his villiage in an attempt to track down the source of the troubles;  it turns out to be a large mining operation smelting iron from ironsand.  Cut and dried evil humans abusing natural resources, right?

Then you see the inside of the town;  it's well run, the people are healthy and happy (at least much happier than people generally were in feudal Japan, as explained very early in the movie).  The people are safe and well fed.  And the leader of the town goes above and beyond, including paying out the contracts of prostitutes all around the land so they can come do decent work and be well fed.  In other words, no Emperor Palpatine here.

But the fact remains that the humans ARE destroying the forests in their Warp 9 industrialization.  And the forests are fighting back;  the gods of the boars and the god of wolves are actively attempting to drive the humans off the land.  But the humans have gunpowder, making their position almost unassailable!

I'll stop here before I get into spoilers... the good news is I've only really spoiled about the first 15 minutes of the movie.  It's incredibly well written, but it's written for a more mature audience.

The violence is anime violence.  Copius amounts of blood are available to visualize the damage and pain.  The movie contains a relatively clean depiction of a massacre (if such things are possible), and many feudal style war battle scenes.  The Prince's curse gives him supernatural strength when fighting, and a few people are beheadded and belimbed on camera, to show the violence.  It's not much worse than what's available at the PG or PG-13 level, but just be aware if any young'ns are going to see the movie.

Also, the movie is not spelled out like American animation.  Bob the Builder doesn't stand up and say "Wow, with the power of teamwork and love of fellow man  even the tractors and four wheelers were able to work together!"  No, it's going to take a little bit of grey matter to figure out the punchline of the movie, but it makes the experience even greater for it.

All around, it's a deep storyline with beautiful visuals.  More proof that just because it's anime doesn't mean it's brightly colored mindless pap for little kids.  Adults can actually enjoy this movie, and feel like it was time well spent after that.  Heck, I haven't had such deep discussions about a movie since Millineum Actress.

And, if like me, you wondered if a envirocentric movie could be made that was deep on story and light on preaching (unlike, say, Battle for Terra), this movie is tailor made for you.