ハウルの動く城 / Hauru no Ugoku Shiro / Howl's Moving Castle

My initial impression was that the master has done it again. At the time, it seemed that Miyazaki just couldn’t go wrong, and that Howl was another brilliant and touching movie, a great blend of both the epic and the personal touches that he so brilliantly explores.

However, I must say, it isn’t nearly as good as some of his previous masterpieces – Spirited Away, Mononoke-Hime, Totoro, Porco Rosso…I would put it on a par with, say, Kiki.

Because while it has some brilliant and delightful sections, there are some glaring faults, particularly in the final third. It’s better than Wynne Jones’ book, a lot better, but in some ways it could have learned from her.

Visually, it is gorgeous. The castle lumbers along on four chicken-legs, pumping out steam, every segment moving – it’s a feast for the eyes. But more than that, it’s the little things, the details in the animation that are really special. Early in the movie, Howl returns from his flight exhausted, and just staggers into the castle, flops into a chair and puts his feet up on Calcifer’s hearth. It’s such a perfect piece of movement that it made me shiver.

The character designs are very different from the pictures Wynne Jones created. Howl is beautiful – really beautiful. ‘So plain stunning and sexy’, as Wynne Jones herself put it after an advanced screening, adding that she understands the dippy girls that used to write to her saying they wanted to marry him. Sophie took a while to grow on me, being rather more pragmatic and yet emotionally driven than the Sophie in the book, but in the end, I had really warmed to her, and she was really excellently cast and animated.

Other characters underwent major metamorphoses (appropriately enough), some for better, some for worse. Making Michael a little kid was excellent, making the castle seem more like a family home than student digs. I wasn’t convinced by Calcifer, one of two instantly-recognisable recurring Miyazaki cast members – here, it was the frog/Kaonashi from Spirited Away. I was expecting comic relief, rather than the brooding, sarcastic demon whose great powers are ebbing just below the surface (occasionally made the butt of various jokes) from the book, but to be honest, he was just somewhat annoying here.

I wasn’t at all sure about the bizarre look for the witch of the waste, and winced to hear that familiar voice – Moro from Mononoke-hime, and a Japanese national treasure: one of their oldest and most fabulous drag queens, Miwa Akihiro. Miyazaki totally altered the witch, from powerful, beautiful foe to powerful misshapen foe, who has only magic to keep her looking young, when her flesh is ultimately sagging. The spell is removed somehow by Suliman (who is Howl’s teacher, here, not the missing wizard), and the ancient, grotesque true image of the woman is revealed. Here she comes into her own, being taken in by the heroes, and referred to as obaa-chan ('granny'), and her voice starts to fit. I wish I understood the section a little better, but the scene on the stairs was absolutely hilarious. Her turning out to be not so bad (despite coveting Howl’s heart, for some reason) is another heavy-handed lesson in this movie’s theme: don’t judge by appearance.

The plot wildly deviated from the novel’s, thankfully removing the dreadful Wales story and the cop-out of Sophie’s hidden gift, but replacing it with a war and technology vs. magic storyline that I didn’t feel was resolved, or even fully explored, by the end – though I only understood about 30-40% of the dialogue, so perhaps it will be revelatory when I see it translated. I think I understood enough, though. The scenes leading towards the anticlimactic ending were rather trite – I certainly could have done without the mysterious door of flashbacks.

Wynne Jones could learn something from Miyazaki about relationships, and about heart, and how to seriously tell a story (even if Miyazaki slips up a little here); Miyazaki perhaps would have done a little better if he had taken from Wynne Jones’ book a need to explain things – in their own terms, at least – and not rely on empty magical contrivances. He also could have given more sense of place to the castle, which never seemed as familiar, in its quirky way, as it did in the book. Together, they have created something majestic and wonderful, but not quite as beautiful as other worlds Miyazaki has created.

(originally written 12.04.05, before there was any English version available. Upon watching the English dub, I added, 'I think I’ve been unkind to it, for while it IS messy in the second half and has a cheesy ending, it’s much cuter and more inventive than I remember, and that scene scaling the stairs is just brilliantly bizarre. Suliman’s pages are so cute and the dub voices are more impressive than I thought, and by the end the Sophies and Howl sound great. Markl’s voice is adorable, too.')

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.)

紅の豚 /Kurenai no Buta/Porco Rosso

‘Watched Porco Rosso, the last of Miyazaki’s Ghibli films I hadn’t seen – and I found it to be one of his best. It was light and comic, with cute scenarios, wonderful gags and some superb characters. It seemed to be very much an homage to Western cinema, but all the Miyazaki hallmarks were in place. The minor characters were delightful, especially the pirate captain (reminiscent of Popeye’s Bluto), whose camera moment was sublime. And of course the old oba-chans in Piccolo’s workshop’ - Oct 13, 2003

Over seven years later, with a sequel in development (a first for Ghibli, unless you count the ‘Mai and the Catbus’ short that is exclusive to the Ghibli museum, or consider The Cat Returns a sequel to Whisper of the Heart, which is something of a stretch), and 1992’s Porco Rosso remains in my favourite three or four Miyazaki films. Often a thin plot is grounds for criticism, but here it manages to work extremely well, giving focus to the characters and setting and lending an impression of gravity to a film that at its core is about a man with a pig’s face flying a plane.

The screenplay was based more or less in its entirety on a strange little manga Miyazaki drew in just ten pages, and was originally intended as a short to be screen on commercial flights. From an extremely fast-moving and minimal basis comes a slow-moving, wonderfully old-fashioned story about a man proud of his flying skills falling in love and being challenged by a flashy rival. There is a lot of absurdity here, and physical comedy, and slapstick, but everything is so wholesome and the tone so varied that it is never boring or overly frivolous, and when it is at its best, it is fantastic.

Of all Miyazaki’s films, this is the one I would argue feels most like Takahata directed. It is a little more European in feel than the rest of his work, smaller-scale and more charming, and yet more sophisticated, too. If a sceptic had seen Mononoke-Hime and Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi but remained convinced Miyazaki was just peddling cutesy fare for adolescents and younger, this is what I would show them to change their minds. It is much more meticulously researched than anything else he wrote, set against the rise of fascism and with a great love for inter-war aircrafts.

I am very much looking forward to see where the sequel will take Miyazaki and his studio, and wait eagerly for its release.

千と千尋の神隠し/ Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi / Spirited Away

‘I cannot stress enough how much I enjoyed Spirited Away – so gloriously bizarre yet so completely feasible in its own terms! Like Alice in Wonderland on a considerably greater scale, the characters, setpieces and concepts showed an astounding creativity, and the madness contrasts so well with the epic Mononoke-hime. The characters were wonderful – if we were to imagine Sen/Chihiro to have been acted by a real person, that little girl would be a sublime mime artist; Haku was so beautiful in the way all Miyazaki’s youths are beautiful; Yubaba was such an awesome presence when filling the screen, like some twisted Margaret Thatcher caricature…and all the sweet minor characters were brilliantly conceived. If Jeunet chose to direct a Disney film, he couldn’t hope for better results. And I needn’t mention the Freudian implications abounding throughout the film – riding on a serpent god indeed!’

Those were my impressions almost a decade ago, on October 24, 2002, shortly before Ghibli’s popularity exploded over around the world and certainly before I had much experience of the studio’s work. But even now, it’s one of my favourite animated films of all time, so full of flights of the imagination, superlative imagery and even subtle touches: how many of us notice that tiny glint of a hairband that indicates that the whole thing truly did happen and wasn’t just a dream at the end on a first viewing? I know I didn’t.

To date Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi is the only anime film to win the Best Animation Oscar, although perhaps it is notable that it was in a year no Pixar film was nominated. It brought Ghibli to a much larger audience and with Mononoke-hime, represents the pinnacle of Miyazaki’s filmmaking. Yes, I love Totoro, but the scale, tone and technical qualities of those two films, especially complementing and contrasting one another, are in my esteem amongst the greatest achievements of any director. Much as I think Takahata is the greater maker in that particular partnership, he has yet to produce two great films in such close proximity.

天空の城ラピュタ / Tenkū no Shiro Lapyuta / Laputa: Castle in the Sky

In light of Film 4’s current ‘Ghibli Season’ (which should really have been called a ‘Miyazaki Season’, given that no other Ghibli directors are represented, and that two films predate Ghibli’s foundation), I thought that perhaps it was time to dust down my old CDs and slightly less old DVDs of the great studio’s productions and give them a proper evaluation. First, then, to Laputa.

A favourite of many Ghibli enthusiasts, Laputa’s main appeal is its charm, but for me at least, therein also lies its greatest flaws.

An airship is attacked by pirates, targeting a young girl named Sheeta, who wears a mysterious and precious stone around her neck. In trying to escape, she falls from the ship, but instead of getting splattered across the mining town below, she is enveloped in soft lambency, a light emitted from the stone at her neck, and so floats down to earth slowly as a feather. She lands in the arms of a young boy called Pazu, and so their adventure begins: not only are the pirates still after the girl, but so are the army, for Sheeta's stone may just be the key to finding the lost floating city of Laputa.

The staff of Ghibli were clearly still perfecting their craft when Laputa was made. The framing of shots and the cutting is for the most part very conventional. The animation is varied, ranging from superb shots of flight over the countryside and the collapse of huge pieces of architecture to decidedly awkward running animations and repeating backgrounds. Joe Hisaishi’s music, so magnificent in later films, especially Mononoke, is anaemic and sometimes inappropriate. Admittedly, I was watching a badly-compressed digitised version of an old VHS fansub, so quality was poor, but it didn’t stop me seeing the art was also of mixed quality. The voice acting has an improvised quality I like, giving a natural and familiar feel to proceedings, but Pazu (voiced, amusingly, by the woman now best known for her inspired, inimitable performance as Monkey D. Luffy in One Piece) grated slightly with too many over-exaggerated noises meant to imitate exertion, and the bad guy became so cheesy at the end that it was all a little bit painful.

But the thing that makes Laputa a success is that it has charm by the bucketload. Julie Andrews’ conversation over tea and crumpets in a gazebo in an English country garden couldn’t be more charming. Pazu is plucky and extremely loyal, Sheeta is the very personification of sweetness (yet can stand up for herself when she needs to), hearts of gold are found in unexpected places, the mining community is populated by kind souls who only want to help the vulnerable and love a good scrap with ne’er-do-wells, fathers’ dreams can be reached, magical sights really exist, million-to-one chances always resolve in the favour of our heroes and good triumphs over evil with a minimum of fuss. It all makes you smile, uplifts your spirits, and that’s what makes the film genuinely enjoyable.

But it’s also what prevents it from ever being special. The very warmth of spirit that makes Miyazaki such a great writer makes this film movie feel like a low-quality Saturday morning TV cartoon. The story is as flimsy and formulaic as they come – baddies want the McGuffin, our heroes are put in peril as a result, girl gets captured so boy goes to rescue her, the McGuffin magically leads to the climax, and everything turns out right in the end. The characters never feel very fleshed out. Yes, I like cuteness. Sheeta is adorable, but never really does much. Pazu is also sweet (bafflingly, I was once told I looked like him, despite being in university at the time and he being about 12. I was actually quite flattered...) in a typical young-boy-hero way, but the way he can just call up superhuman agility and the great power of coincidence at will really saps any tension from scenes with him. As I mentioned before, the bad guy is just way too nutty to be taken seriously. The only characters who aren’t so flat that they irritate are the two seniors of the pirate family.

That’s not to say perfectly good movies cannot be made with very obvious and uninspired elements. They can, and this is one of them. It’s just that beside the truly memorable classics Ghibli have produced, a movie that is simply good just isn’t enough.

(Originally written 6.8.06. Note that Hisaishi since recorded a new and far superior score for the film, although apparently it has now been cut again from 2010 DVD releases. I have of course seen the film in better quality since this, and while I'm probably a little fonder of it in hindsight, and want to stress how beautiful the scenes with the robot soldier peacefully gardening are, it remains one of my least favourite Ghibli works)

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)

Majo no Takkyubin/ Witch’s Delivery Sevice/ Kiki’s Delivery Service

The change in tone between Mononoke-Hime, one of Miyazaki’s most epic, serious and Japanese films and tonight’s viewing, the intimate, whimsical and very European-flavoured Majo no Takkyubin, is a true indication of the director’s versatility. Kiki is few Ghibli fans’ favourite of the studio’s movies, but I think I’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who admires Miyazaki’s work who doesn’t at least like this warm-hearted, thoroughly sweet little story. Indeed, I can think of few fans of Japanese animation, beyond those who like nothing but giant robots, big explosions, gunfights and overlarge boobies, who wouldn’t have a place in their heart for Kiki, Jiji and their charming little world.

Set in an imprecise European location in the 40s or 50s, the tone is somewhat reminiscent of Pippi Longstocking (which Miyazaki and Takahata at one stage wanted to adapt for a TV anime) or the Heidi books (which were adapted into an anime series directed by Takahata, with Miyazaki working on layouts), although the story was based on a book (more a series of short stories) by a Japanese author.

Kiki is a young witch. At thirteen, she must leave home to find a city in need of magical services, where she will stay for a year in a traditional rites-of-passage ritual. With only her black cat Jiji (who can speak only to her) for company, she finds life in the big city difficult when she first arrives, but since her ability to fly on a broomstick is her greatest asset, she soon strikes upon the idea of setting up a delivery service.

There’s barely any plot to speak of. Of all the Ghibli anime, this is the one that feels most like it is simply a truncated version of an anime series. Pom Poko jumps about from character to character, plotline to plotline, but there’s a goal that unites all the different parts. Porco Rosso has the merest strand of a story, but it lasts the whole movie through, and has consistent development of character relationships. Majo no Takkyubin just…keeps things simpler. Kiki arrives, gets herself in trouble, picks herself up and sets up her business with the kind baker woman she meets, delivers various items, with the focus on her going beyond the call of duty to help people, makes friends with Tombo (who has saintly patience with Kiki), has a crisis where she loses her powers, then gets them back in time to help avert disaster so that there can be a strong ending. As you can see, it’s a very episodic plot, and other than Kiki and Jiji, none of the characters really share the screen with our young heroine enough to be developed very well. Even Tombo seems like a two-dimensional nice-boy character.

But that’s not really the point. The point is that Kiki is a lovely, sweet little girl in a mostly very sweet world, who has her ups and downs and enriches the lives of everyone she meets. She does little favours to lovely people, whose reciprocal acts of kindness really bring a smile to the face. This is winsome, innocent fluff, the wholesome entertainment most Westerners expect from their cartoons – but it’s done very well. Very well indeed.

I was watching another of my old, slightly dodgy subs, from the pre-Disney licensing of the movie. Every time I re-watch some anime, I’m thankful that I know a little more Japanese than I used to, because some of the translated lines were so much more aggressive than they needed to be. And whoever thought they were being clever by making a television announcer say, ‘Oh, the humanity!’ when a dirigible was crashing…well, you weren’t. I really should get new versions of these films soon. The washed-out colours and bad transfer were a pain. There are lots of cheap Ghibli DVD offers at the moment – I should make use of them. Despite this, I could see how good the art was, how beautifully this fictional city had been depicted, how sweet young Kiki looked, and how utterly cute Jiji was.

And the voice acting here really is top-notch. Kiki is played by Takayama Minami, who was recently making headlines in the anime world after successfully proposing to the man who created her most famous character, Conan, and who was one of the first seiyuu I ever really admired (since she played Emilio in Psychic Force). She plays Kiki with such earnest sweetness that I was astonished to discover that she also played the worldly, headstrong Ursula. But then, since her most recent role I’ve seen has been playing two identical (male) twins with totally different personalities in Jyuu-Ou-Sei, her versatility shouldn’t come as a surprise!

Also worth noting that while Tombo’s role wasn’t very complex, he was also played by another great seiyuu, Yamaguchi Kappei, who is most famous for playing Ranma and Inuyasha, but also does lots of generic young boy voices like Ryuichi in Gravitation and Iwaki in Rizelmine. And also plays Usopp in One Piece. Trust me when I say that you cannot beat his performance as Usopp. It is just peerless. Comparable might be Clarence Nash’s Donald Duck or Dan Castellanata’s Homer Simpson, in their own respective cultural spheres. Sure, Tombo isn’t up there with Usopp, but it’s still worth mentioning!

I’ve digressed somewhat, but the fact is that there isn’t a whole lot to say about Kiki. It’s simple, clean, sprightly fun that won’t challenge you, confuse you or surprise you, but will put a smile on your face. It’s not Totoro, or Sen to Chihiro, but aside from those two classics, I’d say there was no better Ghibli movie for younger children.

(originally written 20.08.2006)

Hisaishi Joe in Nippon Budokan: From Nausicäa to Ponyo, 25 Years with Miyazaki Hayao’s Animation

This little musical gem, for all its small size, is a lot of fun for any Ghibli aficionado. The premise is simple: gather a staggering number of musicians in the cavernous Nippon Budokan, hang an immense projector behind them and get Hisaishi Joe in to conduct his compositions written for Miyazaki’s Ghibli films. Have him to personally contribute a little delicate but accomplished piano-playing at key points, and intersperse the sadly too-short clips with him speaking about his musical process, and you have a very pleasant viewing experience.

It’s somewhat like the trips to see Howard Shore conducting an orchestra playing the music to the Lord of the Rings films I’ve been on, but more informal, less involving, and surprisingly enough, on a much grander scale.

For not only is there a full orchestra with some specialized instruments like taiko drums for a booming rendition of ‘Tataraba’ from Mononoke-Hime and a child choir for the adorable saccharine singalong of the Ponyo theme (with a very sweet little girl looking just the right amount of hapless as she sings the lead line at the front), but about five other full choirs for a truly immense sound, a full marching band providing perhaps the most powerful moment of the night, and even a great little slinky jazz band Hisaishi himself looks like he’s having great fun playing along with for the music from Porco Rosso.

Everything is consummately performed and sounds beautiful, leaving me deeply impressed. My only faults were that from what I could tell in the interview, there’s a certain eagerness to sweep under the carpet those horrible original synthesised scores for the likes of Laputa, to pretend the recent reworkings were in fact always there (although I may be totally wrong and have just failed to understand the relevant parts), and much more than that, that it was all so very short. I wanted three hours of this! Altogether the music was perhaps 45 minutes. That’s just not enough!

崖の上のポニョ/Gake no Ue no Ponyo / Ponyo on a Cliff

I’ll admit that I had doubts about this film. The early images of Ponyo looked bizarre and the plot sounded so thin. It was clear that Miyazaki was going back to his cuter roots, revisiting the tone he set in Tonari no Totoro and possibly even harking back to Panda Kopanda. But I wasn’t sure it was going to happen in the right way. Ponyo is a very odd-looking creature, even more so than the Totoros, and after three successful films with an epic tone, I wasn’t sure going back to the more babyish style was going to work. It felt almost like a direct reaction to my impression that his output was less worthy, artistically, than Takahata’s, which I’m sure has been said by more people than me, and now he was going to try to be quirkier, stranger, more experimental, and shy away from the mainstream.

In the event, I wasn’t right about that. Not quite. Ponyo has some very strange elements but is very much a spiritual successor to Totoro, and actually feels much more genuine than, say, Hauru. It feels more like the story Miyazaki wants to tell. And it is not without its populist elements. If you took the basis to Pixar, you would likely get a very similar story by the end, a little sassier and slightly less warm.

The story is straightforward: kindergartener Sousuke lives with his mother Risa by the shore, Risa holding the fort while her husband is away at sea, taking her son to school and working in the old folks’ home. One day, playing at the shore, Sousuke finds a funny fishlike creature with a human-like face and calls it Ponyo. However, mysterious watery creatures come and take Ponyo away. Her ‘father’, wild-haired and beak-nosed Fujimoto, tries to ensure she stays at home, but she breaks free, accidentally spills all of his magic supply and with it, finds herself able to pursue her desires, so along with her numerous dot-eyed siblings, goes to find Sousuke.

Because the central characters are around 4 years old, it was easy to understand most of what was being said in Ponyo, and I understood about 95% of the dialogue, with most of the 5% remaining being not understanding what Fujimoto was babbling about when he was talking to himself. I was worried that it would be contrived, but Ponyo has genuine charm and it’s impossible not to think of little Mei from Totoro when watching. The best parts are the sweet little moments, the cantankerous old woman getting water in her face and thinking there was a tsunami coming, Risa and Sousuke sending messages to his father about what a ‘baka baka baka’ he is, and of course Sousuke and Ponyo’s interaction, especially when they are out on their boat bumping into the various townsfolk.

The usual Ghibli staples are here: metamorphosis and an uncanny acceptance of it; spectacular high-paced sequences (cars and waves this time); the warmth of family and friendship; antagonists who are revealed to have a good side; and, of course, spectacular animation. The odd simplicity at the beginning soon gives way to that trademark naturalistic human animation, and then there is the stunning beauty of Ponyo’s mother (‘I love her! She’s scary!’ ‘Ah, sounds like Risa!’) and the amazing water effects – the copy available to pirates like me at the moment is a little jerky and does feature the silhouette of a guy standing up, being a ‘camrip’, but given that it’s just a camera in a theatre is of remarkable quality.

It’s far from my favourite Ghibli film, and yes, the cutesiness trivialises the film overall. I prefer Miyazaki’s epics, and it just can’t match Totoro in terms of mixing the fantastical (and adorable) with the starkly realistic and nostalgic. That said, it was well worth seeing and very heart-warming, and there’s no denying that Sousuke and Ponyo are irresistible. Miyazaki’s mastery is his ability to get us to support his characters, the strange ones as well as the instantly loveable. And no-one does loveable like Miyazaki.

(originally written 31.7.2008. Upon watching it again in April 2010 with English subtitles, I 'actually felt that the film was rather slow this time, even dull in its first act, and that Sou-chan wasn’t as cute as I remembered him being. That said, I found Fujimoto rather more awesome and amusing, perhaps simply because I was able to understand more of what he was saying.')

もののけ姫 / Mononoke-hime / Princess Mononoke

For a while, now, I’ve been saying that Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi is my favourite Ghibli movie, but I was mistaken. Mononoke-hime is the film that started my love affair with Miyazaki’s work, helped galvanise my love for anime and indeed, became one of my favourite films of all time. It has flaws that Sen to Chihiro perhaps manages to avoid, but the tone, scale and sheer emotional power of this film allow it to stand above anything else Miyazaki has produced - and I say this having watched almost everything the man has had a major role in creating.

I first saw this movie, dubbed, on the big screen, at probably its only official UK screening, which was part of Jonathan Ross’s season of personal favourites at the Barbican in 2001. It transfixed me. The spectacle, the fantastic setting, the sheer beauty of character and location…I was wowed.

The dub continues to be the only one I would ever choose to watch. For a while, I even preferred it to the original. I now know enough Japanese to know how far Neil Gaiman’s translation is from the original, how overly wordy and melodramatic, but it is still a strong piece of work, concentrating on spirit rather than precision. The cast of genuinely strong actors do well – but now I prefer the subtler, more naturalistic and more atmospheric original language track.

Our setting is a fantastical 14th-Century Japan, where the Forest Gods still thrive. But their existence is threatened by the development of industry, and of modern weapons of war. When a boar god, turned to a demon by the iron pellet embedded in its body, attacks a village, its touch places a cursed mark on the young prince Ashitaka. Departing on a journey to find where the pellet came from, he soon finds himself embroiled in a war between humans and gods, and at the centre of it, finds the girl who is neither one nor the other, the adopted human princess of the mononoke.

Again, we are confronted with the nature vs technology theme of Nausicaa and Pom Poko, but it seems so much more mature here, especially in that neither side is presented as being correct or virtuous. There is no such obvious evil as can be found in the God Brothers of the Nausicaa manga. Eboshi, head of the industrial Tataraba, is a charitable and highly respected woman, but her interests are at odds with those of the gods, who in turn only protect what they have always protected.

The beauty here is in the details. From the traditions of Ashitaka’s tribe to the daily lives of the inhabitants of Tataraba, the rules by which great gods live and the tiny artistic brushstrokes such as the way everyone must carry their own bowl, everything adds up to a totally believable fantasy setting. Just one line can hint at the history of an entire culture, with no need for further embellishment. This imagined world is so rich, so fully realized, that its supernatural elements become very easy to accept. There is a whole mythology here.

The plot might be a little lacking in focus and a little too reliant on contrivance, with Ashitaka just happening to go to the right places at the right times again and again, and the thing that most people complain about, the climax, is admittedly almost totally without rules, becoming perplexing and really rather lazy in writing terms, but is exciting enough to seem fitting and its resolution is neatly uplifting. Besides, Miyazaki isn’t great at stories: what he excels at is characters, relationships, fantastical worlds. And there are no better examples of these things than are found here: not only in his films, but anywhere.

Besides, I for one am astonished that someone who can write something as grandiose as this can write something as tiny and heartwarming as Totoro, as comically jaded and knowing as Porco Rosso, as whimsical as Sen to Chihiro and as action-packed and fun as Laputa. The man is a true legend.

(Originally written 18.8.06)
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