コクリコ坂から / Kokuriko-zaka-kara / From Up on Poppy Hill

Miyazaki Junior got what most Ghibli directors – even ones who make successful films like The Cat Returns – do not. He got a second chance. And since trying to be like otou-san with Earthsea didn’t work, it seems he’s now trying to be like Takahata: this is a whole lot less Kurosawa and vastly more Ozu.

From Up on Poppy Hill is the sober, realistically-told story of some Japanese students in the 1960s renovating and saving their outsized school clubhouse, which they call the Quartier Latin. Two key students involved in this, the someone taciturn daredevil Shun and the mature and headstrong Umi have something of a romantic spark, but things are complicated when it turns out that they might actually be half-siblings.

It’s all a slow and mature sort of a story, and viewers hoping to see another Mononoke-Hime or even Totoro are likely to be disappointed, and to be honest, most people who aren’t keen on arthouse in general will very possibly find this dull. Its closest matches in the Ghibli canon are Whisper of the Heart and Only Yesterday – and possibly the far-more-dull Ocean Waves. To be certain, there’s a precedent.

Given a chance, any viewer can find things to enjoy – the sweet melodramatic love story, the silly humour of the big chap who runs the Philosophy Club, the uplifting spectacle of the moment the clubhouse’s fate is decided…and the sweetness of raising the flags every day is iconic.

I don’t for a moment think that this is for everyone, especially not the easily-bored, but for those who enjoy simpler, smaller-scale animations, this is a little gem. Arguably there wasn’t much need to make it animated, but it did a great job of recreating a time and place, and I’m not sure live-action would have captured the clubhouse in the same way, nor been able to express Umi’s sudden realization of what the revelation about Shun’s father means for her with such brevity.

Recommended for fans of slow but heartfelt stories. Also, I just have to mention that because of her hair, every time I look at Sora, all I can see is Francine from Arthur. 

Ghibli Shorts – Night of Taneyamagahara, On Your Mark, Ghiblies, Sora-iro no Tane and CMs

(more to come when I get the extras with Ghibli ga Ippai)

種山ヶ原の夜 / Taneyamagahara no Yoru / The Night of Taneyamagahara
The honest truth is that if not for the fact that this was a Ghibli short film, directed by superb background artist Oga Kazuo, I would not have bothered. It’s a little folk story by Miyazawa Kenji, the mind behind the wonderful Gauche the Cellist and Night on the Galactic Railroad, but is only a tiny fragment of a story and barely animated.

Very much like cheap educational television animations and Jackanory-style storytelling programmes, it is less a piece of animation than a series of still images with the camera panning over them while a soft voice reads out a story. In this case, the plot is that when a man falls asleep in a group on the Taneyamagahara mountain, he dreams the grass and oak trees are talking to him, asking him to care for them when he buys the land, and not to cut too many trees down to make charcoal. Just as he is coming to an agreement, he steps on a young lightning god by accident and is punished. That’s about it. There’s a nice, wistful mood, yes, but very little to identify with or see progressing.

And honestly, while the art is lovely in terms of its backgrounds, they’re not the visual spectacle of Iblard Jikan and the human characters are clearly intended to seem ordinary and unglamorous, but end up not very appealing at all. Plus, perhaps unsurprisingly, when much of your screen time is devoted to talking leaves, things get a little dull and repetitive.

オン・ユア・マーク/ On Your Mark
Wow - the music video Studio Ghibli made for Japanese Rock duo Chage & Aska’s song ‘On Your Mark’ in 1995 is so unutterably beautiful that I was stunned. So much story, so many fascinating questions raised in such a short time that it’s got to be the best non-performance music video I’ve ever seen.

(originally written 1.9.06. Even now when I see clips of the short video appear in things like AMV Hell it takes me aback how high the quality is, particularly for a mid-90s piece of Japanese animation, and how ambitious it was)

ギブリーズ/ Ghiblies 1&2
It’s been a long while since I watched the Ghiblies shorts – about five years – but they still make me smile. Crude 4-koma-like art not so distant from that of Tonari no Yamada-kun or Sazae-san portrays the everyday lives of the Ghibli workers – albeit fictionalised into the ‘Giburi’ studio, based on the joke that the way ‘Ghibli’ is said in Japan (‘Jiburi’) is a misreading of the Italian word, which should have a hard ‘g’. With a great little bassline in the second short and some fun jumps into a more realistic style and CG experiments, it records what are clearly funny moments from the office.

Only a few minutes each, they’re well worth the watch for any fan, if perhaps a little baffling for the uninitiated.

そらいろのたね/ Sora-Iro no Tane / The Sky-Colored Seed + Nandarou
Funny, childish little animations for Nippon Terebi, these little animations are cute bits of nothing. Nandarou, meaning something along the lines of ‘Thingy’ or ‘wassat?’. In the TV spots created for their 40th anniversary in 1992, it variously shoots out mini versions of itself, reabsorbs them and eats some characters of the studio logo before turning into various other, similar-looking things. Oh, and one where it goes all huge and CG. These are just little bits of fun for a few seconds each.

Sora-Iro no Tane was created at the same time, directed by Miyazaki. A cute, colourful animation looking like a typical kids’ cartoon, it has a bit more substance than Nandarou, albeit still being somewhat hallucinogenic. A small boy trades his toy plane for a sky-coloured seed from an anthropomorphic fox. The seed sprouts into a house at first big enough only for a little chick. It keeps growing, until a cat can fit in, then the boy, and soon elephants and numerous other creatures want to be included. The fox decides the trade has been unfair so swaps again so that he can have the whole house to himself, but the edifice gets too close to the sun and pops, presumably teaching him his lesson. A minute and a half of innocent fun.

Various commercialsThe Nisshin Seifun commercial is probably the best thing Miyazaki Goro has yet worked on. Storyboarded by him and directed by Katsuya Kondo, it’s about a silly fat cat chasing a butterfly drawn in a nice line-art style. A fun bit of frivolity.

Miyazaki Hayao’s House co. commercials are probably the most richly animated snippets for TV the studio has made. The lovely little clips show 50s kids from the point of view of adults, delighting in catching sight of (presumably) their parents. Beautifully done and endlessly adorable, they’re indispensable viewing for fans. An odd, warbly song from a Ghibli seiyuu about the chicchana onna no ko called ‘Okaasan no Shashin’ (mother’s photo), though, which if anything I’d have changed.

Umacha, or ‘Delicious Tea’, were two short ads for an iced tea from Asahi. Oddly, it was made in tandem with a live-action version. It’s done in the Yamada-kun watercolour style, and essentially the idea is that the tea is very refreshing. Directed by Tanabe Osamu, they seem to me somewhat throwaway, perhaps reflecting a lack of input from studio writers.

ゲド戦記/Gedo Senki/The War Chronicles of Ged/Tales from Earthsea

The Earthsea of Ursula Le Guin is a long way off in this adaptation, and yet not far enough for it to work. As it is, the most entertaining thing about Gedo Senki is the drama that surrounded its inception.

First there was the drama of Miyazaki Goro stepping into his father’s shoes and shadow to make this film, documenting every step of the process on a blog that made it quite clear that he resented both his father’s absence in his childhood and the great expectations now on his shoulders, while of course being grateful and humble for the opportunity to be given a chance to be at the helm of the world’s most respected animation studio. Then came the drama as Ursula Le Guin went to the screening and declared her great disappointment, especially since she’d always hoped Miyazaki Hayao would adapt her books, which was why she’d given the rights to the studio. Both were very interesting for a fan to follow, but also prepared me for what turned out to be a rather tedious and disjointed movie.

How I wish father and son had exchanged projects, Miyazaki Snr. directing this film and Miyazaki Jr. taking on Hauru no Ugoku Shiro, the studio’s other recent disappointing adaptation of an occidental fantasy novel. That way, Goro-kun could have cut his teeth on the project that seemed just a little bit BENEATH Miyazaki-sensei (especially after his career reached its zenith with Mononoke and Sen to Chihiro), while the great man himself could have tamed the epic. While I wasn’t too impressed with Hauru, it at least showed that its screenwriters knew what to take from the source material and where to diverge wildly into original material.

For Gedo is just a mess. It tries to pick the iconic moments from books one, three and four of Earthsea and twist them into a new plot replete with clichés but bereft of the spirit of the novels – and then drops in little references to the source material (like Tenar’s past from book 2) that no-one but an established fan would understand or care about. It’s plain when reading the Earthsea series that book three, The Farthest Shore, is by far the best material for a film, despite its lack of a real antagonist – but that’s because it deals almost exclusively with the relationship between Ged (known throughout the movie, as in the books, by his alias Haitaka – ‘Sparrowhawk’) and Arren, who starts as a hero-worshipping naïf and comes of age on the journey. That gets lost in the film, since they only have a few real conversations, and the focus is shifted to the relationship between Arren and Therru, who in the book was a hideously scarred preteen who would speak to nobody, but here is a teenager with a fetching scar who takes about three scenes of grumpiness to defrost, predictable and inevitable as spam about Viagra in your inbox.

And this is part of the problem of the film – it’s so predictable, so full of ineluctable clichés and unredeemable platitudes. We see some slaves; slavery soon becomes a threat. A pretty girl is saved; she happens to be in the place the protagonists find themselves in. Add to that a totally meaningless and unnecessary plot taken from book one about a doppelganger, and some really dubious ways to get characters from A to B, and you have a mess. The only one who escapes with his dignity is Ged, whose magic remains nicely subtle, although he’s quite useless at the end.

It also seems once again that the only ones given enough time and money in Ghibli to make really top-quality films are Miyazaki and Takahata. While it doesn’t look as rushed and simplistic as Neko no Ongaeshi, this is no visual spectacle on the level of Sen to Chihiro. Characters are simple, all of them looking like they’ve walked out of Nausicaä’s Kaze no Tani, although the one who looks like Kurotawa doesn’t get away with his slimy looks by being a loveable rogue; he just has to be a cackling imbecile henchman, one of the most tiresome antagonists I’ve seen animated since Disney’s 80s slump, once again showing how Miyazaki Goro doesn’t have his father’s skill with undermining expectations. Arren is a typically good-looking Ghibli boy, though his dark side tends to be drawn with increasingly silly levels of exaggeration. The dragons, mostly cel-shaded CG, move stiffly and weightlessly, jarring with the animation and making me remember just how incredible it is to see the eel-like Haku in flight in Sen to Chihiro. And the less said about the way the baddie looks at the end, the better.

The backgrounds almost elevate the standard of art to beautiful. Some are breathtaking. But then mixed in with the ethereally beautiful skies and almost tangible cities are shots of desert sands that are pretty much monochrome, drab, thoughtless banquet halls and brick walls that look like they’ve been dashed off in minutes. Shame.

Shame, too, that the gritty, weather-worn, dark-skinned heroes of Earthsea are such simply-drawn Caucasian-looking figures. It just feels too obvious, too cheap, too much like someone on a board has said, ‘White sells better; stick to what we know.’ And yes, there’s a long debate to be had over whether anime characters are supposed to look Caucasian or Japanese which I’ve gone into at length before, but either way, they certainly ain’t dark-skinned.

Not that changes in an adaptation are a bad thing. I don’t think a straight adaptation of any Earthsea book would work as a movie, and Le Guin’s arrogance is showing when she imagines it would be a good idea to have a film set between two of her books, since everyone’s so familiar with them they’ll understand. But you can’t just use words that sound appropriate to a fantasy setting and assume they’ll have inherent relevance: since the seiyuu for Ged (Kamaji from Sen to Chihiro) sounds like he’s got a very sore throat all the time and the woman who plays Kumo (Eboshi from Mononoke) thinks she’ll sound really creepy and chilling if she just whispers all her lines, the nadir of the show was when they were almost inaudibly huffing at one another about ‘eien no inochi’ (‘eternal life') and ‘Sonzai no tatakau’ (‘battle of existence’) or something, I really did just want it all to end – and at nearly two hours, it’s much too long for the amount of story it contains. When the highlight of the movie is when two old flibbertigibbets are gossiping about the new ‘work’ they’ve seen up at Tenar’s, you know you’re in trouble.

A shame, because this could have been a great epic. But what I find myself really yearning for is for Takahata to make another down-to-earth, affecting story like Omohide PoroPoro.

(originally written 7.1.07)