The decision to animate a film can be made for a variety of reasons, including chance—an animation studio ends up being the only group interested in a given script, for instance. The benefits of doing live action can include wider audience reach, cheap filming (unless the location is extraordinary), and no artists sleeping in your studio after a long day of hard work. Special effects can be expensive, and your characters are either enhanced or limited by your actors. Animating a film greatly reduces the problems surrounding special effects—no stunt people. Characters can do anything, as long as you can draw it. And there's the rub. Once you animate a film, the fact that it's animation becomes its salient feature. If a film's artwork is under par, you've drawn great attention to a weakness. Unless something else is going to save it (story, soundtrack, characters, interesting setting, etc.), it's going to get panned.
Guess what?
This film would never have been made in America. Not because of the thoroughly Japanese story and themes, nor because of the almost French lack of cinematic vitality. This film wouldn't have survived its first test screening because it's animated. And to be honest, I can't fault any hypothetical studio for passing on this one. It was at times moving and carried a worthwhile theme, but I don't see why anyone bothered to animate it. There were no special effects to speak of, no talking animals, no "wild-takes," and the scenery is no Studio Ghibli artwork.
RAIL OF THE STAR is the story of Chiko, a young Japanese girl growing up in Korea during the Japanese occupation of World War II. This is a coming-of-age story set against the hardships and peculiarities of war. At the start of the war, Chiko has difficulty dealing with the small sacrifices the family must make in times of rationing, etc. Later, she doesn't quite understand why she can no longer even talk to her childhood friend, the Korean maid who raised her. By the movie's end her family joins other refugees attempting to escape North Korea to the American held South. She has seen and heard things no child should, and perhaps the clearest message of the film is that war can be hardest on the innocent.
RAIL OF THE STAR is based on the novel by Konayashi Chitose. It brings to mind Spielberg's cinema version of J.G. Ballard's EMPIRE OF THE SUN; both movies are autobiographical accounts of a child's loss of innocence at the hands of war. But EMPIRE centers on an English boy living under the Japanese occupation of China, and RAIL is about a young Japanese girl in Korea, initially on the "winning side." The different perspectives separate the two drastically; Chiko is with her family throughout the war and never experiences quite the hardships of EMPIRE's older and more independent hero. Perhaps that is why we don't see in Chiko quite the triumphant change of character that James gains. Where he is dramatically a better human being for the experience, she seems to have merely endured the war intact.
As I said earlier, this is no Miyazaki film. In itself this is no terrible thing, but without an extraordinary story and lacking a serious soundtrack, this is little more than an important story that happened to be animated.
If you want to see a film about World War II from a Japanese perspective—and you'd rather not look at real people—this film is a start. But action junkies and those of us spoiled by the grand tradition of epic anime will be, well, bored. There's little violence, at least none in her presence. In fact, not enough of anything happens. Chiko's life is turned upside down by war and the racism that accompanies it, her family must make a dangerous trek across politically hostile North Korea, but the movie doesn't do enough with it to fill out a feature length film. RAIL OF THE STAR would've made a good 15 minute or half hour OVA...
There's a 60 second montage at the end of the film showing all the highlights of the story. Suffice it to say that if you watch only this you will have missed little of the film's core.

RAIL OF THE STAR Copyright © TV Tokyo / JVC English Language Versions © 1997 A.D.V. Films Released in North America by A.D.V. Films English Subtitled VHSRS/001S $24.95 80 minutes