猫の恩返し/Neko no Ongaeshi/The Cat Returns

Of the kids in the Ghibli playground, Neko no Ongaeshi is one of the outsiders. While it’s really a spin-off of Mimi-o Sumaseba, its premise derived from a minor plot point therein, in other ways it seems considerably more distant from the rest of the Ghibli films than they are from one another.

For one thing, it is the sole film thus far directed by Morita Hiroyuki, and evidently had a smaller budget than the films the studio was making at the time (Sen to Chihiro was released the previous year). For another, it's a return to the more childish style of slapstick and scaled-down epic adventure the studio hasn't really employed since Laputa - even Totoro had a very different take on the winsome, being more of an adult look at childhood than an adult's attempt to appeal to a child. And then there's the fact that for once, the human cast isn't drawn in Miyazaki's style, something I was rather glad to see.

A young girl called Haru rescues a cat from a road accident, and is surprised when it thanks her in human speech, though not nearly as surprised as she is when she’s visited by the Cat King, who in return for her saving his son's life wants to take her to his kingdom to become a princess. Haru doesn’t want to be taken away from her home, nor does she want to marry the cat she saved, and doesn’t know what to do. When a voice tells her to seek help from a 'Cat Bureau', she meets Muta and The Baron, both from Mimi-o Sumaseba, enlisting their help just before she is whisked away.

It's a freewheeling and charming story. You can tell that the writer whose manga served as basis for the screenplay (or perhaps Miyazaki, who is credited with the concept) simply came up with a nice typical story basis (normal girl has mysterious things happen to her) and ran with it. It's not a sophisticated plot, nor is it devoid of dubious coincidences, but it's fun and fast-paced, with lots of big setpieces, an interesting two-act structure (the two different worlds being very different) and some great little touches. Lots of little details from early in the plot come back later with that satisfying feeling of a nice little twist, and the characters are great - The Baron is undeniably very cool (another example of the refined upper-class character that seems so very Western yet works so well in anime – like Shinku in Rozen Maiden or Saber in Fate/Stay Night), the greedy and lazy Muta is a perfect foil and companion to him, and a variety of other minor characters really leave a mark. For example, there's Yuki, the sweet cat who looks like she escaped from a Disney film, the hilarious slightly-sinister-tour-guide-type, the crow who provides a great mise-en-scene at the end...and then there's Haru, whose clutzy manner and bewildered asides make her very endearing, in a similar vein to Sen/Chihiro. Indeed, the two characters are close, but while we're encouraged to see the real vulnerability of Sen/Chihiro, Haru's world is purposely more silly, more superficial, more safe. She is very rarely left without friendly guardians, and it never really feels like she’s a little girl lost.

Yes, the tone of the film is very light. There is a lot of slapstick, from hapless and inept guards falling over to the defenestration of some unfortunate felines who fail to adequately entertain the King and his guests, which at first looks like it's going to be horrible, before you realise it's played for laughs. The climactic duel is far from dramatic, and there are a lot of very silly clichés - a tower blown up with a big button on a remote control, a clownish character's formidable past being revealed, a character having appeared earlier than you might realise at first, but as I said before, these little twists feel very neat, and make you smile, make you laugh, make you realise this is not a serious action piece but a cute and somewhat daft comedy. And it works in that idiom well.

However, that does make it feel rather more like a Saturday Morning kids' show than most of the later Ghibli films. This impression is reinforced by the cheaper art and animation than is typical of the studio in the last 10-15 years. While some of the backgrounds are superlative, be they modern Japanese streets or the fantasy Cat Kingdom, and the animation is smooth, art is often simplified when there are a lot of characters, or they're moving in a complex way - this is especially visible when a lot of guards are on the screen at once. The colouring is much simpler than in Sen to Chihiro or Mononoke-Hime, and overall it's all less of a spectacle than I'm accustomed to from Ghibli, but frankly the material suited it well and it was all good fun. Also, I’m glad my Japanese is getting good enough that I mostly rely on subs only for vocabulary words now – the reinterpreted English version (subtitles for the dub rather than a straight translation) used a lot of painful cat-related puns and really made some characters far more abrasive and hard to like.

This is far from the best Ghibli film. Indeed, it's nothing special. But it's immensely enjoyable and a joy to watch; I very much doubt anyone who saw it would feel they'd wasted their 75 minutes, even if the experience wasn’t exactly life-changing. I'd say that after Porco Rosso, this was the best of Ghibli's light adventure movies. Not up with the heavier classics, but closer to them than the likes of Laputa or Nausicaa, in large part because it achieves what it sets out to do.

Besides, I have to say I find nekomimi (cat ears) inordinately cute. I blame watching Thundercats as a child. Not that they have nekomimi...

(Originally written 22.10.06)

平成狸合戦ぽんぽこ/Heisei Tanuki Gassen Ponpoko/Pom Poko

If Miyazaki-sensei is the main-mast of the good ship Stajio Jiburi-go, his sturdy foremast has to be Takahata Isao, director of the haunting Hotaru no Haka (Grave of the Fireflies), quirky Tonari no Yamada-kun (My Neighbours the Yamadas) and this warm, extremely Japanese but highly idiosyncratic film, Pom Poko.

Named after the nursery rhyme sound effects supposedly made by tanuki (racoon dogs) as they beat their stomachs, the movie revolves around the folklore associated with the popular creatures. When I was in Japan, there were a great many images of tanuki – one at the door to our hostel, several simply on the street, numerouin the shrine dedicated especially to them in Asakusa. Every Japanese child grows up hearing tales about Tanuki, many of which (I’m told) were referred to in the movie, and they’re prevalent in anime and manga that draw heavily from Japanese tradition, such as Naruto. Drawing on typical Ghibli themes, the story revolves around the Tanuki losing their homes as the development of Tokyo reduces the forests, pitting nostalgia for an old, bucolic way of life against modernisation in a way that is one part nostalgia, one part heavy-handed preaching, but makes for a sympathetic cast and a compelling situation.

However, focussing on an entire ‘clan’, rather than individual stories, while giving an entertaining variety of situations, means there’s never really any compulsion to see what’s going to happen next, or any sense of a solid goal that may or may not be achieved. This makes the film drag at times, and at two hours, it was a little overlong.

But it was great fun to watch, and I spent most of it with a big smile on my face. The simple-minded tanuki are so amusing and so much fun that their antics are hugely enjoyable. The sight gags are often utterly brilliant, from hapless tanuki trying and failing to transform in time with the others to the surprising appearance in human form of the characters – the best being the three old masters. The characterisation was never short of perfect, and the voice actors were perfect. But, as with Tonari no Yamada-Kun, offsetting the generally humorous tone with moments of deadly seriousness worked superbly, really hammering home the fact that an easygoing lifestyle does not mean cruel truths simply vanish, or on a more superficial level, that a comedy film cannot make you think seriously.

And like Yamada-Kun, Pom Poko sometimes emphasises such changes with changes in art style. There were three main ways the tanuki were drawn – semi-realistically, as cartoon characters and as simple caricatures (though I think it would have been better without the latter, which were apparently an homage to some old manga and didn’t suit the tone of the piece…) – and this helps one think of the real animals as though they were sapient.

With its ghost parade and its numerous transformations, the film is chock-full of Japanese cultural references. Just about every monster I’ve ever heard of, from faceless women to living lanterns and umbrellas made an appearance, as did traditional icons from Shintoism and Japanese Buddhism. Even Christianity got a nod, with one choral ‘Amen’. In-jokes were also plentiful; I spotted Kiki and apparently several other Ghibli characters were slipped in.

The film was a lot of fun, and its affection for a world gone by was (as with Cars) understandable and rather sweet, if not exactly something that’s going to change anyone’s lifestyle. It was enjoyable on many levels: just because I enjoyed recognising all the different bits of Japanese folklore, doesn’t mean someone who knows nothing about it won’t be equally entertained, and I'm sure people with more knowledge of the subject would understand more than I did. I’d recommend the film to anyone. As long as they’re not offended by the idea of giant, multi-purpose testicles being used as weapons, parachutes, mats and just about anything else you can think of.

(originally written 17.8.06)

海がきこえる /Umi Ga Kikoeru/I can hear the sea/Ocean Waves

‘I thought this was worse than a soap opera’, says the protagonist of Umi Ga Kikoeru, and while it’s not as bad as all that, I can’t say this film is a whole lot better.

I can easily find reasons for Mimi wo Sumaseba and Hotaru no Haka to be animated rather than live-action, but Umi really didn’t benefit at all from being animated, and the standard of art was a long way from Ghibli’s best - when their main team is at work. which it was not, here.

And the story really is lacking. A high school boy’s relationships with his best friend and a girl develop a bit. That is it. At seventy-two minutes including opening and ending credits, there really isn’t that much to this movie. If it were something remarkable, something beautiful and unique, the technical aspects would be good enough to support the story. As it is, there is nothing to elevate it beyond the status of absolute mediocrity.

Like Neko no Ongaeshi, this was a project designed to give the younger studio members some experience while keeping the budget low. While Neko was at least buoyed by a sense of exuberance, Umi is weighed down by its attempted realism and its lack of decent plot or likeable characters. The whole thing looks like it was a struggle to conceive, realise and complete, and as such, is probably the least pleasant of all Ghibli’s films to watch.

(originally written 30.12.06)

となりのトトロ/ Tonari no Totoro / My Neighbour Totoro

Most people with any knowledge of Studio Ghibli’s history know the story of Totoro’s release: after the success of Nausicäa, Ghibli was formed and released the moderately successful Laputa. Miyazaki wanted to direct something cuter after this, a little pet project about children and big, friendly animals in the vein of the earlier Panda Kopanda, written by him and directed by Takahata. But financing the project was difficult for the fledgling studio, so they decided to couple the film with the latter’s Hotaru no Haka (Grave of the Fireflies), which was believed to be a safer option. Hotaru was a success, but it was Totoro that made the real cultural impact, causing Miyazaki to (for better or for worse) eclipse Takahata, furnishing Ghibli with its mascot and bringing the studio their first real fans in the West.

And while I don’t think the film superior to Hotaru, I can’t deny that it is more enjoyable. I’ve compared Miyazaki’s style to Hollywood and Takahata’s to arthouse before now, and I think that’s exemplified by these two movies, and their relative levels of success. But just as Hollywood is popular because it does what it does extremely well, undeniably Totoro does what it sets out to do magnificently. And that one man can write something like this and then go on to create Mononoke-Hime speaks volumes about his talent and versatility.

Two sisters, 11-year-old Satsuki and 4-year-old Mei, move with their father to a new house in the countryside of 1950s Japan in order to be close to their sick mother. There, they encounter various supernatural creatures, the largest and most powerful of which Mei calls ‘Totoro’ (probably trying to say ‘Torouru’, or ‘troll’), but life goes on as ever, the girls playing, exploring and on occasion getting lost. There’s not much in the way of drama here, but that’s not the point. It’s a slice of life, in the common anime territory of little girls being little girls, and Miyazaki writes children very well – Satsuki is incredibly sweet but occasionally a little insensitive, Mei likes to follow her sister about and can be very headstrong, and the boy next door, Konta, has difficulty talking to Satsuki in anything but grunts, though his real feelings are betrayed by his deeds and his body language. What makes Totoro really shine is the little moments – the way the father’s hat is almost blown off at the beginning, how Konta rides a bike that’s too big for him, the way Mei reacts to finding tadpoles. It’s also worth remembering that the Totoros, Nekobasu and the Susuwatari are only onscreen for a very short period of time; the majority of the film is taken up by the daily lives of the little girls – going to see their mother, Mei coming to school, getting caught out in the rain. The magical elements are iconic and thrilling layers added to a heartwarming, solid and extremely well-sketched core. The owl/bear/tanuki creature may be what sticks in everyone’s mind, but it’s the likeable little girls and their very ordinary interactions that make the movie so likeable.

Totoro isn’t about being clever or being funny or being exciting. It’s about sweetness and strangeness and happiness. Luckily for us, Miyazaki is a master of all these things, and several more. A film everyone should see at least once, and most will watch time and time again.

(originally written 21.6.07. One final note about the concept of Totoro being a shinigami and Mei being dead for much of the film, a theory that has run around fandom a few times and Ghibli have dispelled: It's already a film all about death. Just real death as opposed to creepy, theatrical death. I prefer it that way.)

おもひでぽろぽろ/ Omohide Poroporo / Memories Drip-Drop / Only Yesterday

What I suspected is now confirmed. I’ve seen every Ghibli film directed by Miyazaki, and with Poroporo, every Ghibili film directed by Takahata, too. And yes, surprised as I am to come to this conclusion, I think that Takahata is the better director. This is of course highly subjective, but after watching this movie, there is no doubt in my mind that while childlike awe, huge setpieces and simple thrills make Miyazaki’s films the masterpieces they are, the subtle hand of Takahata shows a maturity, a delicacy and an ingenuity that only Mononoke-Hime and Sen to Chihiro can come close to, and do not match. While perhaps I enjoy Miyazaki’s films more, there is more to appreciate in Takahata’s best. It is the difference between Hollywood and Arthouse – I love both, but admire the latter more. Yamada-Kun and Pom Poko were too zany and uneven to convince me, and for all its sincerity Hotaru no Haka too sensationalist, but not so Omohide Poroporo.

Omohide Poroporo is a simple little story – an oeru (OL, or Office Lady) named Taeko takes a break from her hectic city life to visit relatives in the country. On the way, she reminisces about her childhood. Intriguingly, Takahata based this work on a series of nostalgic manga about a little girl growing up in the 60s, with lots of cute and funny stories – I imagine them being like a more serious Yotsubato or Ichigo Mashimaro; to take these little anecdotes and make a coherent movie of them in the form of a memoir is rather impressive, and it works very well – we have the 10-year-old Taeko’s daily life, from trying her first pineapple to puppy love to the mystery surrounding a talk on menstruation, contrasted with the more solemn reflections of her adult self as she joins in the harvest and comes to feel at home in the countryside. And while I expected another rather inelegant pedagogic sermon on how nature is far superior to city life, which would have been typical of Ghibli (remember Takahata directed Pom Poko, though the concept was Miyazaki’s), I was surprised to find even this dealt with maturely, the farmer Taeko befriends pointing out that even though it’s not roads and cities, everything that can be seen in the countryside is still man-made, crafted and controlled by farmers and agriculture, which was a great scene.

And oh, the animation – because this is a simple, realistic story, the art remains simple (though adult Taeko’s cheekbones are a brave but wonderful addition to her design, really defining as well as aging her face, and some of the imitative art styles of child Taeko’s imagination sequences are superb), and a lot of people who don’t care much for animation wouldn’t think much of what they saw, but that’s BECAUSE it is so well-done. Apart from one or two fantasy sequences, everything here is an imitation of real life, and I can’t express how well the animation is done. Animation was clearly done after voice recording here, for real, stuttering, quirky, believable performances are given by the excellent seiyuu cast and animated beautifully. The movements of heads while the characters speak, the way that cars bounce on bad suspension, the entire class of children that move about individually in the last scenes, the funny, perfectly-depicted awkwardness of kids putting on performances, and especially the tiny changes in expression on the face of young Taeko, with the lack of self-awareness typical of her age, are breathtaking for anyone who cares about the art of animation.

This is something special. This is something that arthouse crowds would adore. This is a story that will move you, make you laugh and make you smile with more fondness than any blockbuster. Stay away if you need fast cutting or explosions to keep your attention, but if you treasure good stories maturely told, this is the best film Ghibli can offer you.

(originally written 9.11.2006)

Wakfu: shorts and extras

Season 1 impressions here: http://adziu.blogspot.com/2011/03/wakfu-season-1.html

Goultard le Barbare
More a Dofus special than one for Wakfu really, this appears to be really where the whole Ankama animation effort begins. There’s next to no information on Goultard le Barbare’s inception online, but it seems to have first been screened at the 2007 Japan Expo in Paris. The animation style also looks like the iffy first previews of the Wakfu cast, especially in the lack of pupils in the eyes of iops, but somewhat to my surprise, there are some animated sequences in this 20-minute short that really show Flash used to its fullest.

Goultard tells the story of a character who features prominently in Dofus and its comic adaptation, and appears (with little explanation) in one episode of Wakfu, where he proves himself incredibly cool and powerful. Here, though, his story is just beginning, at first in Heracles-like scenes from his childhood and then in a big showdown. This early animation effort from Ankama is a little throwaway and ends just as it gets interesting (which makes sense as a tie-in), but ultimately doesn’t have anything of the polish or cuteness of the series it would prove possible. An interesting companion piece.

Wakfu Webisodes
From what I can tell, these showreels and little gags predate the main series’ release. The first two are impressive showcases of what Yugo and Ruel can do, respectively, and last only a minute or two each, while the rest are silly comedy pieces about the tofu birds. They are interesting little nuggets, and show that the remarkably smooth flash animation that sometimes it felt the series had to build up to (forgetting the first Nox/Grougal clash) was in place early on.

Mini Wakfu
Continuing the tradition of the webisodes was the little gag episode accompanying each main serving of Wakfu, in cutesy SD-style. Like Avatar’s similar attempts, the style doesn’t quite look right, the rhythms, fluidity and variable models of anime’s SD not quite captured. And honestly, while some raise a giggle and justify the rest, others are horribly unfunny…

Noximillian special
Now this is the reason I am giving the specials their own impressions. I was overwhelmed with a great sense of ‘wtf’ while I watched this – because the character background special was animated by Madhouse in the style of Kaiba – one of my top two or three anime of the past five years. This was rather mindblowing for me, being so unexpected. Not that many people have seen Kaiba and I’m sure still fewer have seen Wakfu, and I thought them worlds apart, so seeing them together was rather startling. I presume, based on little but a hunch, that the makers of Wakfu were impressed by Yuasa Masaaki’s work and requested he work on the special episode. He provided only character design, but it’s clear that the rest of the team could continue the thematic stylings of Kaiba, especially when the characters give such a strong aesthetic.

As a standalone piece, it’s unoriginal but functions well as the dark past of a primary antagonist, making him more sympathetic and comprehensible, even if it ends too abruptly and it would be better had Nox lived his loss, rather than simply hearing of it from another. But the look of the piece is striking and unsettling, and above all, it’s a clash between French and Japanese animation that has become very dear to me but I never expected to see melded in this way. That stuns me, and kept me in a state of near disbelief throughout. In so many ways, this was a stroke of genius.

Ogrest: La Legende special
Ogrest: La Legende is the second of Wakfu’s special episodes, telling a side-story separate from the main story arc. Ogrest is a major figure in the backstory of the Wakfu game, but thus far has had little impact on the series, until now. The special, framed by some adorable scenes of a sick Yugo being told a story by his father Alibert, tells of Ogrest’s birth and childhood adventure with a group of Ecaflips. It’s a cute and winsome story, and a long way from the tragedy that forms the backstory, although there are hints of darker themes here and there.

Ogrest is the second special animated in Japan, rather than in-house at Ankama. According to the credits, Madhouse were once again the major studio involved, but work was also undertaken by the Korean in-between powerhouse Dr Movie (who do a lot of work with Madhouse), and also by Ghibli. This is likely mostly token background work and perhaps some character animation, but it is nonetheless apt because Miyazaki’s work is here – and I don’t mean in some abstract, this-feels-a-bit-like-Ghibli-so-I’ll-namedrop way: there are character animations here taken more or less directly from Toei’s Doubutsu Takarajima – which Miyazaki worked on as key animator, and which more or less defined his signature chase style back in 1971. The homage is subtle, but they made it explicit in a recent Inside Ankama, juxtaposing the clips. It was a great little nod to an important but much-neglected piece of anime history, and I have to hope more Wakfu fans go and find the original, because it doesn’t seem like many people have ever heard of Animal Treasure Island.

And the plot is all more or less a reference back to that film, too: after his unusual birth story, adorable little Ogrest (une catastrophe ambulance) gets mixed up with three animal pirates looking for treasure. They ultimately find it, but Ogrest doesn’t find what he’s looking for – or does he? We get a happy ending, but with plenty of foreshadowing of what is to come.

Wakfu’s specials are getting more and more interesting. With more to come – as well as feature films – I am only getting more and more excited about what Ankama will come up with next.

Wakfu: season 1

I’m not ashamed to say that Wakfu is the first animation I’ve been really excited by in a long, long time. I’ve enjoyed various anime and have great admiration for a lot of the films I’ve seen lately, but it’s been months since I last watched something where at the end of each episode, I needed to start the next one, and if I ran out of time, looked forward to continuing until I did.

Wakfu is an interesting and idiosyncratic piece of work. Since the success of Code Lyoko, which I was never very keen on, French popular animation has had a bit of a renaissance. Wakfu comes from this tradition, and in my view is its best iteration yet, eclipsing the likes of Ōban and in fact being the first European animated weekly work I’ve been interested in since the rather lacklustre Watership Down series.

Wakfu has its roots in gaming: its original incarnation is as a MMORPG, itself a sequel – its predecessor being called Dofus. The animators working on the game begun working with Flash animation in the typical basic way: vectors moving with somewhat artificial smoothness, with some nice little perspective techniques such as you might see on Weebl’s Stuff. Pleasant enough, but not really the sort of thing I’d want to watch. I may have seen the early animation previews in 2009 when they were posted (a couple of years or more after being made) on the MCM Expo sites, but they made no impression. That all changed when I saw the stunning season 2 intro, and realised the astonishing things that could be done in Flash.

It didn’t do any harm that the theme song is amazing, either. It’s been stuck in my head since I first heard it. Sois!!

The story is full of fantasy clichés. A foundling is targeted by a malevolent and powerful antagonist, so with the help of his adoptive father’s friend, a princess and her (female) bodyguard and a knight indebted to them, he goes off to find his true family, while getting to grips with the mysterious powers inside him. Some of the stories are unoriginal to the point of being tributes – as when the ‘confrèrie’ teach a village of weak non-warriors to defend themselves from bandits – and I rather wish the unfunny direct references to Lord of the Rings and Star Wars were left unsaid. Some of the sprightly first episodes go overboard with silliness – the primary antagonist of one episode is an old person with a big robot made of bread – and after all a large part of the series is given over to what is basically a minigame, pure videogame plotting, but somehow these little silly things they manage to pull off and make so fun, and when the plot does turn dark and epic, as you always know it will, you are already so fond of the characters that it’s incredibly compelling. And the complexity of the antagonist, who after all thinks that he will be able to simply undo all his sins, makes for some really interesting ambiguity in the final stages.

Somehow the design works. Detractors could clearly call it ‘fake anime’, as that’s obviously the inspiration for the aesthetic, but the whole thing also looks very French/Belgian. Yugo’s hood recalls Les Schtroumpfs and those Tofus look straight off a yoghurt pot in a French supermarket. Actually, the things I most wanted to change were those cheaply designed-looking tofu mascots and the noseless iop race, who just looked too like RPG sprites beside all the rest.

But if I didn’t care for the characters at first, every one won me over. Tristepin? I thought he was annoying at first, another Sokka from Avatar (especially as Yugo is very like Aang), but when he carried Yugo to the goal line in the tournament? I was won over forever, which helped when he became central in some episodes. And even that silly birdy Az made me smile with every appearance by the end. Yugo and Nox I loved from the start, and Adamaï has such a great voice.

Indeed, the whole cast is superb. Not every episode is a classic and not every joke hits the mark, but it’s one of the funniest, most enjoyable, most affecting and cutest series I’ve ever seen, and I will definitely watch the extras and season 2.