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)
No comments:
Post a Comment