風立ちぬ / Kaze Tachinu / The Wind Rises

I have mixed feelings about how the film is so heavily emphasised as Miyazaki’s swansong. Not because I think he’ll return to the helm, as he did after Mononoke-hime, but because he’ll still be a dominant force in the studio and even if he only writes rather than directs, the likes of Porco Rosso 2 are going to be very close to being ‘Miyazaki films’.

But aside from that, I am very happy that Miyazaki got to make this film. It’s the love story to flight that he’s hinted at his whole career, and it’s clearly in many ways autobiographical despite being ostensibly about historical figure Horikoshi Jiro. It’s also easily his most sophisticated and straightforward film as a director, the one time that he has been more Takahata than Miyazaki, more Ozu than Kurosawa, and that is something that I’m very pleased he proved he could do before the end of his career. Thus, the fantasy here is limited, more along the lines of magical realism than in the rest of his oeuvre, and the historical setting is key rather than something distant and whimsical. For the first time, he writes about the second world war, and how disastrous it was for Japan – even hinting at the taboo subject of Japan’s conduct in China. The Bomb looms just off the page, and it is very interesting to remember that at one point not so long ago Japan wasn’t leading the world in technology, but scrambling to catch up. Accordingly, the film has been Miyazaki’s most controversial, politically.

It’s only right that the war enters this picture, though. At the heart of Miyazaki’s evaluation of Horikoshi is that the weaponization of planes, while what provided his funding, stunted his creativity and stood in the way of his genius. Of course, this is a nice, idealised angle – as critics have pointed out, leaving out much of the darker side of Mitsubishi’s wartime production – but then, this is like so many of Miyazaki’s films centred on the changing world and nostalgia for what is lost. The things that he portrays of his engineering hero make sense, and the film makes no claims of historical accuracy.

Hiroshiki from early childhood has a series of visionary, consistent, often prophetic visions, many of them involving his hero, Giovanni Caproni – who apparently believes the Japanese boy is appearing in his dreams. Inspired to become a flight engineer, he studies at Tokyo University and meets a lovely young rich girl by chance during an earthquake. Though I thought there would be a touch of genius about having a story of Horikoshi narrowly missing out on love all through the narrative, but the fairytale romance Miyazaki gives us is also fascinating, gives some of his most beautiful imagery in the wedding scenes, and gives a bit more narrative structure to what is after all a film that lacks drive. The subtle meditation on the divided loyalties of a man devoted to both his work and his wife, as well as the sacrifices a woman can make, clearly have a lot to do with Miyazaki’s own thoughts on his home life, and make for some very interesting ambiguity.

Though the idea is taken from the novel on which the film is loosely based, the film also has scenes in a sanatorium based on the one in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and its protagonist appears as an eccentric but loveable foreigner with a huge nose and very broken Japanese – performed by former Ghibli board of directors member Steve Alpert. There’s similar casting dynamics at play in the casting of Horikoshi himself – he is played by Evangelion mastermind and Nausicäa wunderkind Anno Hideaki. This is quite a strange choice – the things Jiro is most recognisable for here are his glasses and his odd nasal voice. While Anno’s performance was jarring at first, something about his unpolished performance actually worked very nicely – it seemed natural and awkward in an appropriate way.

Technically, the film was a triumph. Those flight sequences he does so well are of course to the fore here, and the technical elements are beautifully-done. The characters look great – and some of the more comic seem more like something out of Ghiblies than the usual films, though never so much so that they seem out-of-place. The sound effects are often done by voices, like a more refined version of Yadosagashi, which felt nicely like it had almost been a personal preparation for me. It’s strange and otherworldly, being a little odd when it comes outside of fantasy sequences, but I think it works well. The choice of music is also a good touch.

This isn’t a film for everyone – the audience will likely be a lot smaller than that for Spirited Away or even Howl’s Moving Castle. Not everyone will want to sit through it, and it’s much more arthouse. But it is also assured, moving and quite brilliant. A real gem in an already world-class career. 

Ghibli Museum Short – やどさがし / Yadosagashi / Searching for a Home (plus Film Guru-Guru)

Today at the Ghibli Museum, the screening was of Yadosagashi, Miyazaki’s 2006 short with all sound effects provided by the human voice. Waiting eagerly in the queue clutching our little reproduction-cel tickets, I tried to read the summary – happy-go-lucky girl Fuki sets out to find a new family home, with her big rucksack full of apples. Before I could give in and admit how few of those kanji I could actually read, though, the doors opened and in we went.

Yadosagashi is a pretty perfect film for the setting – light and fluffy, but clever and highly charming. Made, presumably, during the Ponyo production period, it reflects the same whimsicality and is drawn in a simple, unshaded, rather loose style that reminds me of Panda Kopanda. Miyazaki is still capable of making films like a newcomer, and that is an uncanny talent.

Fuki sets out away from the angry roars of the roadside to return to nature. It is lucky she has her apples, because whenever she comes across something a little scary, she offers it an apple, which tends to placate it, or at least distract it. Eventually, the rain starts to fall and she takes shelter in a little hut, at first disturbing the vast numbers of creepy-crawlies living there, but then later befriending them. Yes, this film does the great service of making cockroaches and centipedes adorable! Fuki’s parting gift of an apple to the forest spirit ensures her a safe journey onwards, back towards the man-made.

The visuals are very light and almost slapdash, but that gives a whimsical charm to proceedings. The sound is perhaps the real focus. Instead of realistic sound effects, everything is done with the human voice imitating the real world or speaking onomatopoeias. Yes, Akagi fans rejoice – even ‘Zawa’ makes it in. This can be a little goofy, but that’s okay, because it all comes over as charming and a little silly, which is just what is intended. It has also been noted as perfect for an international audience, because there is almost no dialogue and most of what is actually spoken is a little garbled. The story is perfectly intelligible and the only tiny point my friends could have missed was the forest spirit asking Fuki to come visit again some time.

Light, gentle and quite lovely, but not without some excellent humour, it was brilliant and has given me a thirst for more – but I’ll have to wait until my next visit to the museum for anything else, I suppose! Who knows how many years hence? I must resist camrips…the experience of sitting in that theatre was too wonderful to settle for a shaky version of Mei and the Kittenbus or the one about the little egg someone has sneakily filmed – not to mention against the artist’s intentions. But it’s hard!

Also showing in the lovely downstairs exhibition room, alongside a breathtaking wheel of models that a strobe light made to seem like was coming to life, was former museum animation Film Guru-Guru, which was a simple but lovely short about two creatures rapidly evolving in competition with each other – the highlight of course being dinosaurs – until one became a bird and the other a mammal, the latter eventually becoming human and going to find where the other had flown off to, only to find a girl for a little kiss. Sweet, simple, playful and perfectly-executed, I would love to see it on the big screen.

I’m sure the rest of the animations will eventually come out for home consumption. Very few Ghibli fans can afford to go to the museum enough times to see all the films. But for now, this will have to do! 

Princess Mononoke – Theatrical Adaptation from Whole Hog Theatre

Something of a canny move for what is evidently a small but enthusiastic troupe of young actors, this theatrical adaptation of Mononoke-hime was publicised by websites like Kotaku and now has a Kickstarter to fund a further run. Personally, I knew as soon as I heard of it that I had to go. This is the first time I’ve written a review of a stage production for this animation blog, but I’ve written about live-action adaptations before – like that of Grave of the Fireflies – and after all, Mononoke-hime is central to this blog. Without my personal mission to see pretty much everything the two principal directors of Ghibli ever did, this blog would probably not exist, and without my introduction to the studio via Princess Mononoke back when it was the latest release, who knows how much longer it would have taken me to see the classics?

I went in expecting something small-scale and gung-ho. There are certain signs that a theatrical adaptation is going to be a drama-student-y ‘intimate’ production and share little with, say, last week’s viewing pleasure The Book of Mormon in terms of production values, and the tight space of the New Diorama Theatre, the fact that the driving force was clearly a keen little theatrical company rather than a big business and the mentions of puppetry tipped me off that this was going to be the sort of thing found in a little Edinburgh fringe venue rather than The Dominion. Which is absolutely fair enough – this is after all a niche project despite how ubiquitous Ghibli seem at present, with Film 4 pushing the boundary of what is a ‘Ghibli film’ even further than Nausicaä by including Hols, and the Prince Charles Cinema ready to air double-bills of the studio’s films that I will be very keen to attend (Mononoke-hime included). Besides, a small, intimate setting and experimental staging has much to be said for it, particularly for such a beloved property.

Was it a success then? Largely, yes. There was a lot here that worked excellently, but a few things that emphatically did not. Overall, I felt it something of a near miss, but what it narrowly missed was not adequacy – it narrowly missed brilliance. It landed, then, on being a very good production with some notable setbacks.

We were ushered in while two puppeteers onstage manipulated little kodama – the funny little forest spirits that are so iconic, and were as instantly endearing here as they are in the film. Up above a stage dressed to resemble trees, a small band provided forest noises with bird whistles and woodblocks. This band was absolutely one of the best things about the production – with only a handful of members (I couldn’t see, but around 5-7), they quite brilliantly performed lovely arrangements of Joe Hisaishi’s celebrated soundtrack, including the famous vocal selections. I left humming ‘mononoke-tachi dake’ to myself and would have been quite happy to pay the price of admission to see the band play the soundtrack.

The action began with the attack of the boar god Nago, and I must say that it took a while for me to start to enjoy myself. The early scenes had rather too much theatricality, with messages passed along a line in a very self-consciously representative way, one of several instances in a production with excellent puppets where a bunch of people under a sheet just didn’t cut it (even with LED eyes) and…well, the fact is that there was a very odd casting divide that was more prominent in the early scenes. The female performers – San, Eboshi, Moro, Toki, even Kaya at the start there, were all excellent. They were committed to their parts and had gravitas, yet also understood subtlety. The guys…well, they all seemed miscast. It comes, I suppose, in part from having key members of a theatrical company rather than auditioning, but none of them quite got it right. Ashitaka in particular was wrong. It wasn’t that his appearance was very different from his animated counterpart (being a gangly, pointy-faced white guy) – after all, so was San’s but she was excellent – it was more that he didn’t have the qualities of noble determination, innocence or quiet strength of Ashitaka, and came over more like he should be in a quirky student comedy. This was particularly evident when he was with Jigo (Jiko in the original), who had a similar quality. Jigo, along with Gonza, could get away with being rather younger than the character is because they are fundamentally comic, and can be hammy. Similarly, clownish Kouroku can look like he should be in the Footlights without it jarring. The trouble is it seems like every male member of the cast was chosen as a suitable Kouroku, only for them then to fill all the other parts. In the end, the only male performer who truly impressed was the puppeteer for the elk Yakul.

This hangup very much got in the way of my overall enjoyment, but fortunately once the story got going and Ashitaka reached Iron Town and the surrounding forests, things markedly improved. Beside the strong performances from Eboshi and San, the puppets began to get truly impressive – Moro in particular is lovely, taking three people to form and taking up much of the stage – plus, surprisingly, having someone growling and grunting under someone else’s speech sounded remarkably good. When Lord Okkoto also appears alongside her on much the same scale – but even larger – plus smaller wolves and boars flanking them, it is a fantastic spectacle in such a small space, and the idea to use slowly-unravelling streams of tape as rivulets of blood is inspired. The Shishigami’s iconic design translates well to the stage, including in silhouette, and an almost direct adaptation of the script – with a few token additions about the ‘Mikado’ (not sure why they decided to use that old and never-actually-accurate bit of terminology here) and the history of the Emishi (of course, strongly stated by Miyazaki to be in the story at least distinct from the Ainu) – keeps things brisk.

There are contrived performance elements that I could have done without. Half-hearted dance movements taken from drama school creative movement classes I didn’t need. Awkward clunky fight scenes including a rather old-hat Matrix dodge while a strobe flashed were Brechtian in all the wrong ways. People under sheets, whether boar gods, groups of shadowy apes, streams or giant out-of-control blobs of death, never look very good, and with the latter there was a very unfortunate moment where one of the people making up the headless daidarabocchi kept going ‘Nyah’ like a very self-satisfied Japanese cat being transported along with the huge monster, which I assume was not the intended effect and made the scene absurd.

But ultimately, the quibbles I had were far outweighed by the excellent, inventive elements here, and in all honesty, I’m just delighted that some young people had the gumption, the means and the enthusiasm required to get the rights to the project, put the whole thing together and corner the market. All the best to them, and I hope they (and others) will revisit the idea again, perhaps with other films. I can imagine the right project having the impact of a His Dark Materials. We’ll see. 

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.

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)

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.')

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)

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.

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)

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)

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.

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)