風の谷のナウシカ / Kaze no Tani no Naushika / Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Manga)

When asked for their favourite directors, few anime fans would omit the living legend Hayao Miyazaki. It’s now been several years since I went to The Barbican to see what must have been one of the only UK screenings of Princess Mononoke, and I was instantly besotted. Since then, I’ve seen all but one of the great man’s films, and probably the majority of those produced by Studio Ghibli, which he co-founded. But this is where it all began, with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

Miyazaki had won some acclaim as an animator, even directing a Lupin III movie (the aforementioned lone film), but it was with this manga that his writing was shown for the first time, and where he had total creative freedom. Begun in 1982 and not completed until 1994, Miyazaki adapted the first volumes into an anime movie, which I watched several years ago and found rather less gripping than his usual work, lacking the crucial human element that makes him so appealing. Nonetheless, after hearing the manga called ‘The greatest graphic novel of all time’ in more than one place, I gave it a try.

Humanity is in turmoil. After an age of great technological progress, warfare razed the land, and suddenly giant forests of poisonous trees and fungi sprouted up, and with them huge insects like the vast maggot-like ohmu. In a valley near the brink is a small village, where Nausicaä, daughter of the chieftan, lives in harmony with nature and with the love of her people. Flying with her ‘Mehve’, a personal glider of sorts, she finds an airship that has suffered heavy damage under attack by forest insects. She attempts to save those inside, but her actions eventually lead to her becoming involved in a war between two powerful countries, so involved that she becomes the only one who can free humanity from its restraints.

Nausicaä is very long, and to be honest, like the god warrior Ohma, it seems to be falling apart, unable to hold itself together. Miyazaki is clearly a skilled artist, but his style doesn’t appeal to me, despite how keenly I love the character designs of his anime work. For one thing, the pages don’t flow well. It’s not just that he keeps his boxes square and doesn’t seem to want to use the sort of techniques manga artists like to incorporate to suggest pacing (cutaways, for example): he just seems to move from place to place, person to person, scene to scene at will, which is unsettling for the reader. It doesn’t help that a lot of his characters look VERY similar. This is true of his anime, too, but they have much smaller casts, and don’t look nearly as alike as all the ‘young-looking’ characters do here (eg non-grotesques). He likes including silly facial expressions, and while they’re perhaps quite naturalistic, they tend to spoil the mood at times.

And the story just meanders about too much. Political intrigues between different nations, great long pedagogical speeches about environmentalism (the preaching really started to grate), lots of battles between men and men or men and monsters (most of which were pretty silly), diversions that took place entirely in the mind and nice scenes of home life – all crammed in. Some were better than others, and some minor characters really made a strong impression…but the propensity to build up some powerful villain only for them to be dispatched flippantly can only happen so many times before it gets annoying. I think the last chapter, a truly thrilling, cinematic climax, was the only one I wholeheartedly enjoyed.

And the fact is that I just didn’t like Nausicaä. She was just too perfect. Too universally loved, too flawless, too bland. She can fight, she can understand animals, she can fly like none other – it was just too much. Plus she felt like a mouthpiece for idealism, like she could never be wrong, and that just made her seem like less of a character, more of a vehicle…like a pretty little wagon with schoolbooks piled up inside.

Mononoke-Hime explores similar thematic ground, only with better characters (most of whom look almost identical to SOMEONE in Nausicaä), much more interesting setpieces and a whole lot less cliché, despite the overblown ending.

Nausicaä is far from Miyazaki’s best, but certainly noteworthy as a stepping stone I can only be grateful he took.

(originally written 1.7.06. I have since seen Cagliostro.)

空飛ぶゆうれい船 / Sora tobu yuureisen / Лета́ющий кора́бль-при́зрак / The Flying Ghost Ship

Given yesterday’s announcement that Takahata Isao’s new film will be based on a depressing Japanese nursery lullaby, and Studio Ghibli’s recent focus on key members’ pre-Naushika films (Chie the Brat, Sherlock Hound (movie version) and Puss In Boots, all of which I’ve yet to see, are getting re-releases on DVD/Blu-Ray with the Ghibli Nursery project), I was finally inspired to plunder that obscure back-catalogue, starting with this 1969 co-production with Russian companies. I have versions in Japanese and Russian, but the latter was better-quality, and as both can be regarded as original versions, as well as because I was interested in hearing Russian voice-acting, I chose to watch that one.

The movie is remembered principally because Miyazaki Hayao worked on it as a key animator, and in his usual way, muscled into the creative process, suggesting new scenes and being responsible for some important animation sequences. But for once, despite his segment having perhaps the most interesting cuts and angles, his artistic vision was probably to the detriment of an already highly dubious film.

Let’s face it, this is a bad movie. Very bad. So bad it’s highly entertaining, but definitely bad.

In its sub-sixty-minute-minute run-time, we see a truly gratuitous amount of incongruous clichés – giant robots, phantoms, haunted houses and Flying Dutchman-like ghost ships (armed with rockets). James Bond underground bases and government conspirators (complete with deathtrap chairs). Sea monsters and rebel organisations, evil corporations poisoning their customers for no reason whatsoever, and an old, old plot twist I would assume was stolen from Star Wars if not for the fact that this predates it by nearly a decade.

Its main character is your stock plucky young boy, a bridge in character design between Osamu Tezuka and the Ghibli style, and the rest of the characters are similarly palatable, if totally forgettable. The skull-faced captain makes the real visual impact, but narrowly avoids just being completely laughable. There’s also a comedy dog who raises some smiles, though its inclusion in a moment of tragedy midway through the movie should make Disney detractors realise that while that studio's films are emotionally manipulative, at least they have a bit of subtlety rather than sticking in token sad scenes that are so rushed they neither have purpose in and of themselves nor advance the plot. Everything about this movie is basic, derivative and poorly-executed, with plot points often nonsensical or included for their own sake rather than as part of a coherent plot, and the links between them rushed and stumbling. And yet...it has its simple charm.

I would definitely - albeit charitably - say this one is so bad it’s quite good.

(originally written 3.3.08)

長靴をはいた猫/ Nagagutsu-o Haita Neko/Puss ’n Boots

This makes me very cheerful. Nagagutsu-o Haita Neko is from the glory days of Toei, and another stop on the Miyazaki trail. Considering that in 1969, he was also working on the pretty awful but good-hearted Sora Tobu Yuureisen, Miyazaki’s work as a key animator clearly shaped him in different directions, but if he got one key scene to play with there, here he was given free reign (shared with future collaborator Outsuka Yasuo), and developed the pacing and comic timing of slapstick chase scenes that would last him a career.

The film itself was successful enough that Toei made Pero the Cat their mascot (Pero…Perrault…get it?), and you often hear it referred to as a classic, in Ghibli fan-circles, at least. It sticks fairly closely to the original storyline from the Perrault classic: a poor peasant boy and Puss In Boots (who had boots before meeting young Pierre, here) set out together to make their fortune, trick high society into accepting them and end up besting an ogre, or in this case the Maou (demon king) Lucifer. The trick that ends the old story doesn’t work here, so an extended chase scene ensues, contrasting the epic and the comic to great effect: it’s the last twenty minutes that the film is remembered for, and there that we see the masterful slapstick animation that recurs in such later works as Cagliostro and Laputa.

The art is a little simplistic, much more reminiscent of Disney and other Western houses than the earlier Horus’, perhaps seeking a broader appeal, and oddly enough, there are a few times where the lead characters look strangely like they’re from Family Guy. This is very much a 60s animation, which shows in the palate and the transfer, as well as some odd psychedelic effects, but the animation is smoother and the backgrounds are lovely, and sometimes the colour choice shines through marvellously. Toei Douga had finally found its feet and was producing some classics.

With a conventional plot, the lead characters are a bit thin, but I really liked Pierre, with his girly hair, slightly stoned expression and propensity to blush. It was interesting that even though yes, he develops athleticism and swordsmanship out of nowhere, we also see him failing, for example when trying to jump from ledge to ledge. Remarkable that his voice actress, 19 at the time, would 30 years later be voicing Tai from Digimon. He’s not in the sequels, and that diminishes my interest in them more than new staff does.

The other characters are charming. Pero is actually likeable, for a wiseguy, more like a Kurosawa clown than one from Disney. The dopey smallest cat and the mice are hilarious, but not in an understated way, which is a pleasant surprise: they seem unintentionally funny, which is much more entertaining than someone who thinks they’re hilarious. I’m not sure about Lucifer: I like that he has a comedic side as well as a menacing one, but his design is just a little too simple and unsightly.

Throughout, I was wondering if Disney had been influenced by this in making Aladdin, since there are a lot of resemblances to the parts that don’t come from the folk story – poor kid looking at a princess with unsuitable suitors, masquerading as a noble with the help of a sidekick in order to woo her before admitting it all in a paroxysm of guilt, and a sympathetic bumbling monarch getting swayed by riches – there’s a fair bit that’s reminiscent, and we all remember The Lion King’s relation to Kimba…

Warm, funny and absorbing, there’s not much that’s startlingly new here, and it’s very much a conventional kiddies’ cartoon, but it’s probably as good as kiddies’ cartoons can get.

(originally written 14.8.08)

ルパン三世 カリオストロの城/Lupan Sansei:Kariosutoro no Shiro/Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro

While I may consider Miyazaki one of the very best writer/directors who ever made films, animated or otherwise, that is not to say that I will automatically adore everything he does. Indeed, there are a few of his movies I consider to be good, but not great. This is one of them.

This was Miyazaki’s first movie as a director, and the only one not considered part of the Ghibli canon. True, Nausicaä was made before Ghibli’s foundation, but most of Ghibli's staff was formed from the team that made that film, it’s generally considered part of the studio’s work. Cagliostro takes the Lupin III franchise’s well-known characters (in Japan at least…and perhaps one day internationally if Miyazaki’s fame continues to rise or Spielberg ever does the long-rumoured live-action adaptation) and puts them in a typical perilous situation: tracking down the source of counterfeit bills, Lupin and his nakama find themselves uncovering corruption in the heart of a small country, and of course a beautiful and innocent young damsel to rescue.

Other artists have made Lupin and co look much cooler, but Miyazaki’s design suits the slapstick tone of this far-fetched story well. There’s no magic, but most of the fights and the tricks Lupin manages to pull off are cheerfully unlikely and silly. The story is loose as can be, climaxing in the most slapdash ending of all Miyazaki’s slapdash endings, but there’s a lot of fun to be had with the playful interaction between characters and the inventive setpieces.

It’s not hard to see the huge influence Lupin III had since his manga debut in 1967 (writer Monkey Punch based him on the original Arsene Lupin, of course). The clown that can be very serious when needed is now second only to the innocent young boy on a voyage of discovery as a typical shounen protagonist (and often the two are merged). The cast of Cowboy Bebop are heavily based on these prototypes – replace Ed with Zoro from One Piece and everything would fall together. And this movie is generally regarded as the best Lupin III has to offer.

But it’s really quite slow and predictable, and only sporadically funny. It hasn’t dated too well, shaky framing and washed-out colours reminding me of cartoons like Inspector Gadget – not necessarily a bad thing (oh that the Inspector Gadget movie had been this good) and the animation does hint at glories to come, but watching someone make a good film with what materials they had and watching someone make a genuinely good film is different. Fun as it is to see what will become Miyazaki hallmarks (design, simple and obvious romances, mid-air drama…and this is the first of three Miyazaki movies with ‘Castle’ in the title), that doesn’t make the film itself any better or any worse.

Not a bad movie, by any means. But I would rank it as similar to, say, a middle-tier One Piece movie. A nice addition to a franchise and certainly an entertaining diversion, but no great classic – nothing that I would watch again and again.

(Originally written 26.8.06)

どうぶつ宝島 / Doubutsu Takarajima / Animal Treasure Island

Here is another chance to see Toei in its golden age, making wholesome family entertainment, and also to see the young Miyazaki cutting his teeth back in '71 as adapter and key animator. This is childish fare, an adaptation of Treasure Island, simplified, made into a slapstick adventure and with all the characters except for the central kids made into loveable animals. The Disney influence is strong, with musical numbers (albeit not actually sung by the characters) and a totally superfluous animal sidekick who is little more than an extension of Jim’s psyche, only slightly more irritating. Often these Ghibli prototype films - and indeed those by Ghibli when it was formed - have cutesy characters that turn out to have a lot of personality and become fascinating in and of themselves, but that is not the case here.

However, this is an excellent example of a kids’ animation film and has some real moments of that Toei genius. Long John Silver is a pig (one of the more obvious of Miyazaki’s fingerprints) and while he is capable of being cruel, even murderous, he is also presented in a humorous style, the butt of jokes and certainly not too formidable to have pratfalls. There is never much seriousness in the action, and lots of amusing visual jokes. Crowd scenes are extremely detailed and inventive, and a lot of the action setpieces towards the end are both silly and clever, much like the frenetic sequences Pixar garner praise for several decades later.

Jim and Cathy are flimsy characters but likeable ones, and though she is the damsel in distress occasionally, Cathy is strong and cool and is probably in distress only as much as Jim is, and their roles are somewhat interchangeable. Both look very young, which is perhaps fitting for the target audience.

On occasion the animation standard slips, like when Silver and Jim are tumbling down a cliff and Jim is essentially a static object turning on an axis, or when you can see an error where a log keeps poking onto the screen right at the end, but in general there is a lot of complexity here, and the art is bold but not so simple that the animation becomes unimpressive. It is not as fun or idiosyncratic as Puss in Boots, and certainly not as clever or intriguing as Gauche the Cellist, but it is great entertainment from a studio at its prime.

(originally written 9.10.08)

パンダ・コパンダ /Panda Kopanda/Panda・Baby Panda/Panda! Go Panda!

Miyazaki and Takahata have been in the anime business for a very long time. Watching Panda Kopanda, it really feels like going back to the roots of their work, but it’s also important to remember that the two of them had been working in animation for some time before it was made in 1972: Miyazaki for 9 years, Takahata for 13. Panda Kopanda is commonly referred to as a movie, but is actually two short films of about 30 minutes each, and it is very seldom mentioned by Miyazaki fans without reference being made to Totoro.

Yes, as was their custom at the time, Takahata directed the film with Miyazaki having considerable creative input, writing the screenplay, designing the characters and working as a key animator, a collaboration born from Hols in 1968. Panda Kopanda is written for young children, and there’s no escaping its utter tweeness.

The story is simple: a young girl of about five or six called Mimiko is left to live on her own. However, on her first day without her Grandma taking care of her, she finds two pandas – a tiny baby and his enormous father – in the bamboo grove near her house. It transpires that they can speak, and they soon move in with Mimiko to form a kind of surrogate family. The father panda is a gentle giant, taking everything at a slow pace and enjoying the good things in life (especially bamboo) and his little son is hyperactive and curious about everything. Mimiko is a good match for them, being inexhaustibly cheerful and optimistic, with a strange predilection for displaying her panties – often enough that I felt very awkward watching this anime on the bus lest someone should sit next to me and think that rather than a gleeful display of innocence, these endless panty shots were supposed to be titillating. Awwwkward.

Anyway, let’s leave that aside. Mimiko and the pandas get into various scrapes, for example when Pan-chan the baby panda decides he wants to go to school with his new ‘mama’, or when the zookeepers come to find the escaped animals. In the second episode, a circus comes to town and a little tiger who looks very much like what Tigger from the original Pooh illustrations would look like if drawn by Osamu Tezuka, even bouncing on his tail like the Disney version, joins the gang. Everything is brightly-coloured, happy, simple and full of slapstick laughs. No-one comes to any harm, lots of laughing is done, lots of adults are bemused by childish logic, and papa Panda looks a lot like Ou-Totoro when he smiles. It’s interesting to speculate how much closer to Totoro this movie would be if its art were more sophisticated, its dialogue more naturalistic and the pandas mute (thus scenes enacted in mime more prevalent), but so much of its identity is derived from its happy-go-lucky babyishness and the cheerful simplistic conversations Mimiko has with the animals that to change them would be to make a very different movie.

Unfortunately, the subs I have weren’t great. Some lines were just left totally untranslated, and others were nonsensical – at one point a boy says something along the lines of, ‘“Atashi no papa yo!” Baka mitei’ (mimicking Mimiko), approximately, ‘“He’s my papa!” Are you an idiot?’ (or ‘You look like an idiot’), and the subs said, ‘My papa’s an idiot too!’ They also missed a pun about kare-pan (Japanese curry bread – bread filled with curry, like a bun). Goodness knows how many more mistakes were made that my limited Japanese skills couldn’t detect.

Nevertheless, these two episodes are winsome, wholesome, babyish fun. Takahata and Miyazaki were interested in stories for young children at the time (Mimiko’s seiyuu also played Heidi in their adaptation) and this is much more childish than anything they would do now: if not for what the two men would go on to do, it would no doubt have been lost to obscurity. Nonetheless, it is still entertaining, charming and cute. And dammit, when Papa Panda finally shows how strong he really is towards the end, I don’t care what anyone says – that’s damn cool!

(originally written 14.10.06)

じゃりん子チエ/ Jarinko Chie / Chie the Brat

Jarinko Chie is another pre-Ghibli movie directed by Isao Takahata, this one from 1981. This is perhaps his most immediate and light film alongside Houhokekyo! Tonari no Yamada-kun, and is similar in many ways: based on a popular humorous manga with a focus on a slightly dysfunctional family, although the storytelling here is for the most part more conventional.

Jarinko Chie has aged well: the animation is smooth, the acting (though there are some odd choices of obviously adult actors for children) is top-notch and it still hits the right emotional notes. The plot flows quite nicely: Chie lives in a little eatery with her meatheaded father, who is tough enough to beat up yakuza but embarrasses her in school. Her mother - having wed Chie's father for an arranged marriage - is estranged from the family, and lives elsewhere. However, although tough, athletic and forceful little Chie takes after her father the most, she idolises her mother and tries to be more feminine for her. She hides the fact that she sees her mother occasionally from her father, but this secret can’t last forever.

Intertwined with this is the rather bizarre story of some tomcats with visible testicles in the same style as you see in Pom Poko, who speak in human voices (although the humans cannot hear them). It’s a typical Takahata jerk in styles, and while yes, it works okay, it seems odd to use it for the climax of the movie. The slapstick and the warmth of the family, even when the father is a total meathead, are what work here, and the little things that jerk you out of the moment, like anthropomorphised cats or a weird cameo from that hideous Peko girl, I don’t think really enhance the whole, being too unsubtle to just fit in and be noted only by those looking for them. Takahata is at his best when either everything he shows is acceptable as real or there is consistency in the unreal.

The strong, dated Osaka-ben accents here and cultural references make it perhaps not a film for the uninitiated, but the non-idealised portrayal of a family, the slapstick and the way events really have an effect on the characters make this enjoyable for anyone. No Sero-Hiki no Gauche, but fun nonetheless.

(originally written 10.09.08)

太陽の王子 ホルスの大冒険/Taiyō no Ōji: Horusu no Daibōken/ Hols, Prince of the Sun

Forget Nausicaa. This is where Ghibli really begins. Takahata may not have the mass international appeal of Miyazaki, but he is at least as important to the Ghibli story. With this, his first movie as director, Takahata shows how pervasive his influence is on all the work that came after him, even if his films tend to be much less conventional now. Here, too, we see the union of Takahata, as director, and Miyazaki, as key animator and ‘Scene designer’, which according to information on the Internet really means ‘Creative Consultant’. This is Takahata doing the heroic boy’s adventure, with a young hero called Horusu (Hols/Horus) fighting against an evil demon, and it starts in a way that is pure Miyazaki-helmed Ghibli, with a boy battling wolves only to be interrupted by a huge stone golem. But Takahata tends to be more subtle than the man who now overshadows him, and the film evolves into a curious study of village life and an angst-riddled relationship.

Now, these are all things that are very familiar from anime, to the extent that they could be called generic clichés. Horusu himself is the bold, simple type that can be seen in Pazu and Ashitaka, not to mention the likes of Goku, Naruto and Luffy (if you add in a fair bit more clownishness). But it’s important to remember this film is from 1968 – and that it was a disaster, resulting from a huge struggle between director and studio.

So what are the major influences here? Osamu Tezuka, certainly – you can see how Ghibli’s house style has evolved from his via this movie, and some of the background characters look like they’re right out of Tezuwan Atomu – though others are more reminiscent of European comics like Asterix and The Smurfs. Disney is more clearly influential here than in later Ghibli productions, with talking animals (a cute sidekick and then two with an angel/devil-on-the-shoulder dynamic) and a tall, skinny, pretty goofy-looking villain who could have been from an early Disney film, as could the songs.

But what’s impressive is that the film really isn’t what I had expected. I expected tweeness, bad animation, poor plotting and a lack of emotional depth. And while all those issues were present, Horusu had so much more to redeem it. The middle section in the village is remarkable, and Takahata’s direction already feels like that of a European arthouse director, with the little intimate scenes, the concern with the everyday and even the random nudity, as well as a rather hallucinatory section. And while the idea of a major character having a dark side is by no means new, I’ve seen few movies aimed at younger kids that have such a tortured sympathetic character as Hiruda. Great stuff.

Other elements are mixed. The animation ranges from terrible shots of Horusu almost motionlessly sliding down a hill on his bottom to some wonderfully fluid fights and a sequence that follows a great image of the surf breaking with a superb one of the sun behind Horusu’s back. There are also two complex scenes that just aren’t animated, a series of stills, a coloured animatic storyboard, presumably because with Takahata many months over schedule and unlikely to make their money back, Toei pulled the plug before these difficult-to-animate scenes with large numbers of animals were made. Some plotting is too brisk – Horusu just gets told where to go and what to do by the people he runs into, so there’s no real sense of a coherent, driving plot, and more than once, a small child is disappointed and upset only for it never to be mentioned again and them to be as friendly as ever afterwards.

It certainly doesn’t have the epic scale of Mononoke or the intimately recognisable characters of Mimi-o Sumaseba, but for its time, its budget and its significance on the world of anime, as well as for just being plain fun to watch, I recommend it.

(originally written 19.2.07)

風の谷のナウシカ/ Kaze no Tane no Naushika/ Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

I can’t help it.

I know the historical value of the film. I know that without it, Ghibli may never have been founded and some of my favourite films might never have existed. I know it’s an iconic part of Miyazaki’s canon. But I just do not like it.

Nausicaa is just a bad film. The manga was much, much better – and that wasn’t exactly great.

Okay, for its time, some of the animation is excellent. There are shots when Nausicaa is flying that are just awe-inspiring in their smoothness and daring, and the guy who went on to make Eva did a superb job with the Giant God Warrior. At other times it looks dated or unimaginative, and parallax-style animation is relied on a little too heavily, making everything look like it’s made of big cardboard cut-outs, but that I can forgive. But I really do think that Miyazaki, Takahata and especially Hisaishi have honed their craft considerably since these early days (though I shall have to watch the World Masterpiece Theater series, Conan and Panda Kopanda before I really make my mind up about that), and it was really the Totoro/Hotaro double-bill that marks the beginning of the Ghibli I love.

Still, this was the film that propelled Miyazaki to success. Made by Topcraft animation, it is nonetheless generally considered the first Ghibli film and these days is prefixed by the famous Totoro logo.

I think my problem with the film is much the same as the problem I have with many other Miyazaki films – that he is very good at imagining a setting, but not very good at putting a story into it, which remains true even in his most recent films – Sen to Chihiro in particular. Nausicaa’s setting, this world where nature has risen against humanity, is great, as is the idea of focusing on a small community caught between two larger states at war. But the storyline just lurches about, dragging on and on until its very artificial climax and even more artificial resolution. There’s never any real sense of danger or purpose, and it doesn’t even have the epic global scale of the manga.

Plus I have real problems with the voice cast. The Japanese cast are just so bland, so obvious and flat that I get very bored of them very quickly. I didn’t like the girl who plays Nausicaa when she was in Cagliostro, and she was far more annoying here. it’s as if she was only interested in sounding pretty, and to hell with the performance. The new English voice cast was just as bad (and when a dub cast can only be decried as ‘Just as bad’, something’s very wrong with the original version). Whoever was playing Asbel was plain embarrassing, Nausicaa sounded even more vacuous, Uma Thurman sounded like she was embarrassed by the material and Mark Hamill seemed determined to read the script as you would read a scary picture book to a three-year-old. Patrick Stewart was great, though, and mercifully free of problems with lip-synch because he only had to worry about, in his words, ‘Moustache-synch’. He kept things understated and the casting decision worked well.

I have to say, of all Miyazaki’s movies, this is the one I’m least inclined to watch again. You’d think two armies facing off would be more exciting than a little girl waiting at a bus stop with a strange furry monster, but you really could not be further from the truth.

(originally written 17.09.06)

アリババと40匹の盗賊/Aribaba to 40-ppiki no Tozoku/Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves/Ali Baba’s Revenge

This is in all likelihood the end of my personal little trail of devotion. Like several other Ghibli enthusiasts, I’ve tracked down all the significant feature films of Miyazaki Hayao’s career, some much more difficult to find than others, and found myself happily watching some golden-age Toei in the process.

But while others uncovering this half-lost little gem, seemingly only disseminated at present as English dub Ali Baba’s Revenge (which is more or less the direct opposite of what this film is about), have raved about its frenetic action and quirkiness, I must confess how disappointed I was. By 1971, when this film was released, Toei had already released Hols, with a scope and tone that hinted at great things to come. Puss In Boots was slightly limited by its time, but it was slick, clever, funny and satisfying. Doubutsu Takarajima looked good and moved at a nice pace. So why, around the same time, with Miyazaki working on key animation, was Ali Baba so crushingly awful?

Awful? Yes indeed. This is simply a very bad piece of animation. While it has a nice premise – with the riches found in the cave, Ali Baba seized control of a whole kingdom, and begat a dynasty of tyrants, until finally the descendent of the murdered head thief (the part about his killing Ali Baba’s brother conveniently left out) leads a rather feline rebellion – the execution is horrible. For one thing, it looks terrible, apparently aiming for an American comic strip aesthetic, with round eyes that mostly stay crossed in a horribly unfunny way, the most ugly yellow cats I’ve ever seen and a genie apparently traced from the cover of a Dr Seuss book, only with all the charm surgically excised. For another, it moves horribly, full of recycled animation and always changing between shots with nasty, choppy editing. For a third, it’s dull, with no characters actually having stories that are in any way interesting: the king’s character changes in almost every scene, and the little thief boy is just swept along by events and an exposition-spewing mouse.

It sounds terrible, too, especially the musical numbers, but since this is the English dub, the original may be better.

While it’s true that in the chase scenes at the end, there is a faint glimmer of Miyazaki’s hand, but I’d hesitate to call it ‘undoubtedly Miyazaki’s animated choreography’ as Nausicaa.net does, unless they have read things I have not (quite possible as they almost never cite their sources), for it’s much more generic and less distinctive than the chase scenes in the earlier Puss in Boots, and totally lacks his distinctive sense of weight and momentum.

Ugly, annoying and dull, this is by far the worst of the pre-Ghibli films Miyazaki worked on. But of course, a film is determined by its director, script and budget, and a key animator’s influence will always be limited. But this is nothing like as good as the other films from Toei at the time. It’s not even as good as the peculiar and dated Gulliver. Indeed, even the mess that is The Flying Ghost Ship was far more watchable than Ali Baba was. A shame, but there it is.

セロ弾きのゴーシュ/ Cero-hiki no Goushu/ Gauche the Cellist

Even from Takahata, I wasn’t expecting something quite so good. Perhaps it’s because I associate his pre-Ghibli work with Horus and Panda Kopanda, but I wasn’t expecting something so mature. A large part of this is down to the deftly-woven allegorical story on which the film is based, but despite how much the anime industry has grown and developed since 1982, everything here is beautiful, intelligent and warm.

Gauche is a cellist competent enough to be in a professional orchestra in a little town, but whose skills are lacking to the extent that he seems to be holding everyone else back. In the first scene, a rehearsal for a recital of Beethoven’s sixth (wonderfully vibrant animation of the conductor unfortunately rather badly set against two-frame violin tremolo animation) is constantly interrupted for his sake, and it’s hard not to warm to him as he looks so crestfallen after being berated by the conductor. Over the course of the next week and a half, he gets visits from various creatures who ask him favours – teaching them a scale, playing a piece to help them practice, soothing a sick baby mouse (one of the cutest things ever, for not being too cutesy) with a calming melody…Gauche reacts to these anthropomorphic guests in an intriguing way – he interacts with them but retains cynicism, so that we soon realise he thinks he is imagining the whole thing, manifesting his own wishes and fears, or perhaps is being aided by the tricksy spirits of traditional Japanese lore, without any of this having to be said, a nice subtle touch that perhaps limits the appeal for international audiences who may not realise why Gauche is guarded, even cruel.

Not until he performs his recital does he realise that the animals he thought he was aiding were all actually teaching him lessons and helping him. His exuberance, realising this, is impossible not to smile through. Some of the nuanced human animation here is amazing, especially for 1982, but it’s the voice actors (a mixture of veterans (from shows like Doraemon and Sazae-san) and near-amateurs) who really shine. The mouse mother is my favourite, a real old-fashioned Japanese lady, who humbly wheedles and guilt-trips without being unattractive, and whose interaction with her beloved child may seem overprotective but then when you see them playing together, is really touching. The cuckoo, the cat and the little Tanuki are great, too, and the still shot of Mrs Owl really made me laugh.

This short hour-long animation is one of the best I’ve seen, clever, peculiar and charming. Sometime between the seventies and eighties Takahata seems to have gotten more ambitious, artistic and sensitive: though perhaps I’ll have to wait to see Jarinko Chie to really judge that!

(originally written 06.08.08)

ガリバーの宇宙旅行/ Garibā no Uchū Ryokō/Gulliver’s Space Travels/Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon

For two reasons, this somewhat unremarkable and highly uneven little Toei film from 1965 stands out in animation history. Firstly, it signalled the failure of Toei to break America, flopping upon its 1966 release even though it was the first of their films to be based on an English story, and led to no more Japanese animated films appearing in US cinemas until 1978.

More interesting for me, though, is its place at the beginning of the somewhat mythologised story of Miyazaki Hayao, now-legendary Ghibli figurehead. In his own accounts, Miyazaki talks of his work as an inbetweener, his work scrutinised and usually heavily edited before it even reached the eyes of a key animator. Two years into his career, he worked on this film, and proposed a change to the ending. Apparently, in the original screenplay, the inhabitants of the ‘Hope Star’ were all robotic, and Gulliver and Ricky/Ted merely battled to fend off evil robots in order to save the good ones. But Miyazaki suggested that there be a twist at the end, the Hope Star refugees being revealed to be not robots but cyborgs of a kind, humans wrapped in robot skins.

I can’t help but feel the story may be exaggerated a little. Unless somehow major changes were made in the translation (for the only version I could track down was the English dub, which is actually quite pleasant, if frequently awkward), it is clear for most of the part of the story in question that the robots were at the very least once human. The antagonists are machines they created to keep them comfortable, which wouldn’t make sense if they were robots in the first place. When asked about water, they say that they gave it up long ago, which heavily hints that they are not wholly robotic. The baddies also sing about superiority to man, not other robots. So it seems either changes were made to the backstory to suit Miyazaki’s suggestion, or what he was really responsible for was the presentation of that scene, the way it unfolds like a twist even though it isn’t really. Whatever the case, the result was one that changed the course of animation in the decades to come: Miyazaki had gained the attention of his superiors, was soon working on key animation, and eventually became the world-renown director he is today.

For all its significance, though, Gulliver’s Space Travels is not a particularly good example of golden-age Toei animation. Toei in the mid-60s were still trying to imitate Disney, with talking dogs and a forest full of cutesy friends for the aging Gulliver, somewhat hallucinogenic musical numbers and yet nothing like the budget or capability to make something as slick or smoothly-animated as The Jungle Book or even The Sword in the Stone, roughly contemporaneous Disney films. The feature was also written by Sekizawa Shin’ichi, the man behind Mothra and several Gojira films, so perhaps it would be a bit much to expect a film about the day being won by a pure heart or strong will, or even the sort of silly and exciting chase capers of later, more charming Toei films. Instead, there’s a full-on war with an army of evil robots with laser beams, combatted by our heroes with water pistols and giant water balloons. It at least makes you feel the Disney influence has been left behind, and that few things could be more typical of Japanese anime, but it really lacks the charm of later Toei, and all feels very crass, to the extent that not even Miyazaki’s poignant climactic scenes can make for a satisfying ending – and that’s without the truly cheesy final stinger that people have griped about since Alice in Wonderland.

Additionally, the presence of Gulliver seems an entirely random gimmick designed purely to rope in an audience. Young Ricky, dreaming of a more thrilling life, befriends a toy soldier and a talking dog, before meeting an aging Gulliver in the forest and travelling into space with him, where they are first abducted and then befriended by people who look and act like robots. Is there any Swiftian satire? Any real link with the Gulliver of his stories? No, he’s just a peripheral figure who happened to have a rocket ship. Ultimately, this is something of a mess, but harmless and fun, with one or two inspired moments.

And of course, well worth watching for its place in the history of animation.