Tonari no Yamada-kun was the second Ghibli film I ever saw, and the contrast with Mononoke-Hime couldn’t have been greater. However, I was impressed when I saw it, by something so different from any other animation I had ever seen, in terms of both presentation and plot (or lack thereof). I was, however, aware that plenty of people would watch it with a look of utter bewilderment on their faces – although my companions at the time remembered a fair few plot points when I reminded them of the film several years since that 2001 screening in the Barbican.
While I enjoyed the film back then, it’s only really since that time that my obsession with anime has developed, and so now I feel I understand and appreciate far more, in terms of both animation and cultural reference.
Based on a classic Japanese gag strip, Tonari no Yamada-Kun is the kind of quirky, unconventional work that Takahata seems far more inclined to direct than Miyazaki does. Essentially, it follows a very ordinary Japanese family unit – the mother and father, their little daughter and adolescent son, plus the grandma who lives with them – as they do various everyday things. Drawn in the manner of the comic strip, it looks extremely simple while actually containing sophisticated colouring and animation techniques, along with some hugely impressive tour-de-force sequences featuring thrilling action, pastiches of Japanese images like traditional watercolours and one very memorable shift into a more realistic presentation. Remarkably, the animation is 100% digital, not just the excellently-integrated cell-shaded 3D that is worked into various scenes with varying levels of subtlety.
However, a lot of the elements that seemed purely random to me on my first viewing have become elucidated by the things I have learned since – folklore references to babies coming from peaches and from inside bamboo, what festival chants sound like, even the way that Japanese people beckon…all went over my head before, but all are well-understood now. Too bad there weren’t cultural notes for me on my first viewing.
Tonari no Yamada-Kun (the ‘Houhokekyo’ part, an onomatopoeia for the call some bird or other, was added only so that the character ‘Ho’ (with or without ten-ten/maru making it bo or po) could be in all Takahata’s works, as ‘no’ is in all of Miyazaki’s), like Pom Poko, is a collection of episodic events deeply infused with the Japanese way of life – but rather than the mythological, most of what we see here is the mundane, and the focus remains always on the same five characters, so there is more of a feeling of a single, consistent movie here than the slight mess of Pom Poko’s shifting focus. Japanese or not, though, these characters are instantly recognisable, and their realism, the squabbling as well as the love, makes them so likeable that it’s hard to resist their charm. It’s very much like the Ghiblies shorts in the way it takes slices of life, presents them in a very experimental way, and yet still manages to contain enough emotional content to keep the attention, and I would consider those charming little pieces the film’s closest relatives in the studio’s canon.
The scale is small, so of course this isn’t going to change lives, but it can certainly entertain, and the must be fairly few people who cannot identify to some extent with at least one of the family members. See it for the warmth of familial love. See it for the laughs. See it for the incredible way traditional techniques mix with computer imagery for something unique and yet instantly recognisable and classic. See it for the strong, understated vocal performances, the seiyuu really finding the right ground between realism and exaggerated comedy in mixed dialects (though the son struggles with any heightened emotions). But mostly, see it because it’s a Ghibli film, and one that stands entirely alone.
(originally written 18.1.07)
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