The Last Unicorn

The Last Unicorn wasn’t a film of my childhood, as it has been for many since its 1982 release. It is generally regarded as something of a classic of animation, and despite its dated aesthetic, the style of the dialogue is remarkably modern for its era and it certainly has captivating imagery. I only watched it for the first time on February 2nd, 2009, and was impressed by the ‘strange and fascinating little animation, very interesting in terms of animation history, extremely idiosyncratic, oddly paced and with some extremely good voice acting.’ I was keen on the ‘quirky, underacted, very Jewish humour’, and found that it was compelling, despite a fairly weak story.

A unicorn discovers from a random butterfly that she is the last of her kind, the rest run out of the world by a ‘red bull’. She is soon captured by an old witch, but escapes with the help of Schmendrick, a bumbling young wizard who mostly relies on simple tricks. Escaping together, the two of them eventually find their way to a castle where can finally find some answers.

The story, though, really isn’t the focus. It all gets wrapped up with a deus ex machina that really could have happened in the first five minutes if that had been how the film was written. The film is more concerned with personal responsibility, relationships between people of different classes and true natures. This makes for a film that always feels somewhat at arm’s length, but allows for some really interesting moments and high visual impact.

But the film is still somewhat seminal. It’s also interesting in that Rankin/Bass had Topcraft provide the animation: they had been collaborating since the early seventies, making mostly TV specials such as Tom Sawyer, as well as the version of The Hobbit now largely eclipsed by the Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings adaptation. They went on to make a less impressive follow-up, Return of the King and a further fantasy film, Flight of the Dragons, before Cagliostro and then Nausicäa changed Topcraft forever. The Last Unicorn is very probably the most important and well-known of the Rankin/Bass-Topcraft collaborations – although it’s worth remembering that the bulk of the Topcraft workers who did not go on to be part of Ghibli would work again with Rankin/Bass, this time as Pacific Animation Corporation, to make Thundercats.

Odd, unique and memorable, The Last Unicorn deserves its place as a minor classic that’s just a little too quirky to be part of the Disneyesque mainstream.

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.)

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)

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)

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)