この世界の片隅に / Kono Sekai no Katasumi ni / In This Corner of the World

This beautiful, reverent, affectionate and historically accurate Japanese movie almost slipped me by – not as connected as I once was to news from the world of anime, I heard about it only because it was on the plane during my trip back to England. And I’m very glad I caught it, because it was superb.

Crowdfunded, helmed by a director I’ve never heard of (though I’ve seen other works he’s been affiliated with) and produced by Studio Mappa who thus far are mostly known for the far less serious Yuri on Ice, this is perhaps an unlikely hit, but it hits all the right notes. It treads similar ground to Grave of the Fireflies and will of course be compared with it in just about every review, but has a far less focused and relentless tone, instead giving a far lighter touch and a whimsical method of building up its characters that actually reminded me of French filmmaking.

Based on a manga, this film tells the story of Suzu, a simple and rather childlike young woman who comes from a small community on the outskirts of Hiroshima. In the years before the war, she gets married to a young man she met only once before and doesn’t remember, then goes to live in nearby Kure, a naval port.

There, she contends with being a bit hapless in a new community away from her family. Her new husband has a sick mother, a big house and a domineering older sister to contend with, and her attempts to please them and do her best are very endearing – though she’s scatterbrained and has a habit of tilting her head when she forgets things.

Of course, eventually the war comes and brings with it at first inconvenience, and later tragedy. Naive Suzu retains her gentle nature through personal injury, large-scale tragedy and the unfamiliar aspects of life in a military town, like when she’s tempted by an extramarital affair or when she first encounters prostitutes.

The things she must endure are pretty horrific, but her reaction is believable – neither breakdown nor numbness, but a mixture of sorrow, guilt at not being able to do more to help others, and of course retaining her underlying personality really give this piece a believable and deeply likeable centre. The things she has to endure are terrible, as one would expect from a wartime drama, but there’s a rare subtlety in how they affect her, here.

The film is also beautiful. Suzu’s talent is for art – one of the funniest moments in the film comes when the military police suspect her of espionage and her feelings are hurt when everyone else finds the very idea hilarious – and sometimes that gets reflected by the artistic choices of the movie. The images of rabbits in the surf and the silly stories of childhood coming to life provide beauty or levity that enhance the artistry of this film.

Of course, it’s a heavy movie, but the point is to focus on war’s affect on ordinary people. Suzu knows nothing of Hitler or Manchukuo, is a product of her society with next to nothing to gain from Japan’s military role in the war, and is far more concerned with living as well as she possibly can. This isn’t a grand political statement, it’s an effort to capture the reality of a time and place that was to be shattered by the Bomb.

Delicate, nuanced and well-researched, it’s a must-see for anyone looking for art-house anime.  

彼女と彼女の猫 / Kanojo to Kanojo no Neko / She and Her Cat / Their Standing Points

The Shinkai Makoto story really starts with the surprise release of the iconic Hoshino Koe, It must be close to a decade since I saw that, when it was the hot new thing, much-lauded for being made almost in its entirety by one person – and since Shinkai has become one of the auteurs of anime, alongside such prestigious names as Miyazaki Hayao, Takahata Isao, Satoshi Kon, Hosoda Mamoru and Yuasa Masaaki. I don’t snap up his works as they come out, I must admit – I still haven’t seen 5cm per Second, let alone Hoshi-o Ou Kodomo – as somehow they always strike me as needlessly slow, pretentious and uninspiring in terms of story and character, which for me takes precedent over art or individual effort.

But before that beginning was this little vignette, a five-minute animation that won minor awards and had some in the know sit up and pay attention. Who knows? Perhaps without this, Hoshi no Koe wouldn’t have been taken seriously…

It really shouldn’t work. The black-and-white short film full of oblique angles, rain and a sombre, overly poetic narrator is such a cliché of French arthouse film that even the hook – that the narrator is a cat – has been used in viral send-ups of the genre such as Henri 2, Paw de Deux, which does similar things to this short but in the choleric rather than melancholic mode. And I’m fairly sure it was not influenced by She and Her Cat. In animation terms, it is horribly transparent throughout that this is an exercise in how to make almost no animation look like motion, and one gets a little sick of the camera panning across a still image to give the illusion of movement. There’s some very nice exterior shots, but it’s very obvious what we’re looking at is essentially a photograph that’s been traced for animation – and the same goes for most shots of the kanojo in question. The cat itself is amusingly incongruous, a cutesy blob that screams Japan, and generally it feels almost disingenuous, how many shortcuts are made in a blatant attempt to masquerade as finer animation.

And yet, oddly enough given my objections to Makoto’s other films, it works because it is subtle and heartfelt. It’s clever and simple and doesn’t have to spell everything out. The cat’s simple love and adulation, its childish pride in believing itself so much more adult than its little feline girlfriend, its inability to understand how anyone could make its owner sad and its simple life are pitched perfectly so that they are adorably naïve yet not sickly sweet like Chii in Chii’s Sweet Home.

There is much to criticise in artistic terms here, but of course a person making their own little animation as a personal project will want to make the most of the little they have. And the key is a script that doesn’t mind its unoriginality and lack of subtlety – yet spins things in a way just vague and yet adorable enough to make the short work very well. More than either of the longer animations I’ve seen from Shinkai, this makes me want to see more.  

Little Postman

Quite a few of these short animations get showcased on the Nintendo 3DS, but this is the first one I've felt compelled to comment on individually. I had the notion to do a compilation post one day, but this one needed a few more words.

A Polish animation with money from the kinds of bodies that make arthouse fans pay attention, including that country's Canal+, it deals perhaps inevitably with the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. It aims for profound and moving but lands on rather mawkish in a remarkably similar conceit to Disney's recent Paperman- albeit of course far less light-hearted – but what it does manage is a great beauty.

The short was made by BreakThru Films, not to be confused with Atomic Betty’s Breakthrough Films, but one of the two studios behind the Oscar-winning Peter and the Wolf short, which beat out such extremely strong competition as Madame Tutli-Putli and Aleksandr Petrov’s My Love – the latter of which shares with this its hand-painted quality.  Its style is nothing if not ambitious: the story of a sweet little boy scout who acts as the only form of communication between the oppressed peoples of occupied Warsaw, only to be blown up yet still manage to send his letters to their recipients in the few moments of afterlife that remain to him, is quite brilliantly told as if through animated graffiti. The boy appears on walls and billboards, leaving a trail behind him, as do the bomber planes and the fantastically-rendered explosions. The twisted form of the barricade that results from the explosion is seemingly a reference to the studio’s feature-length The Flying Machine, as is the rather obvious use of Chopin, and indeed I now read that this is in fact one of 25 short films made to accompany that project.

If I see more, I may have to add to these impressions, or it may be that this entry becomes an anomaly. But enough impression was made on me by the striking visual style that even out of context, I wanted to write something.

I think this also stands as the shortest piece of animation I’ve reviewed yet. Will it be outdone by She and Her Cat?

The Plague Dogs

This 1982 film was Michael Rosen’s follow-up to the popular but controversially visceral Watership Down, and in another world possibly could have established him as one of the world’s foremost animators, pushing animation about animals far, far away from cutesy American fairy stories. But no, The Plague Dogs was too bleak, much too bleak, and this was his last work as the director of an animation, with only a vague, name-for-credibility’s-sake connection with the Watership Down series.

And this is definitely not Disney. You might say forcing audiences to face death in Bambi or The Lion King reflects a certain darkness and maturity. Well, The Plague Dogs opens in a vivisection lab, where the poor dog Rowf is forced to swim in a tank until he drowns, getting revived to do it again another day, and again and again for the test results. In the next scene we see the dogs kept in their pens – and the dead ones picked up by a shovel to be dumped. I wrote of the colourful adventure story with chickens and ducks that gained some critical acclaim from Korea, Leafie: A Hen Into the Wild, that the bleak beginning on the battery farm showed that the film wasn’t going to pull punches, but after that it’s a colourful and enjoyable – if mature – adventure story and family drama. Well, The Plague Dogs starts bleaker than that – two dogs manage to escape their pen and get outside only through the incinerator, moments before the dead dog dropped in there with them is destroyed – and despite moments of hope and brightness, gets bleaker. Rowf is one of the dogs, the other being Snitter from the pen next door, who has had his brain experimented on and suffers seizures, but is convinced that there are good, benevolent ‘masters’ who will help them and give them a good life. They do not get a good life. Out on the Yorkshire Fells with no idea how to live, they first try to find a new master – not understanding how things work – and then try to go wild, which leads to their meeting a canny fox who calls himself The Tod, who teaches them better ways to kill sheep to survive...so that he can take his piece. His thick Lancashire accent is another reason the film hasn’t travelled well – although he sounds perfectly intelligible to me, speaking in a way not a million miles from my grandpa, a nice contrast with John Hurt’s neat enunciation. (Patrick Stewart also cameos!)

Arguably the film is less bloody and violent than Watership Down, but it’s so, so much bleaker. The Plague Dogs is mostly characterized by its unending, affecting bleakness. It’s probably more punishing and miserable than even Grave of the Fireflies, and while there is beauty in that – and great beauty in this film – it is not exactly the beauty one is desperate to revisit. Rewatching it today was my first repeat viewing in a good decade (the VHS, with various cuts). The film is so good at setting up and then dashing false hopes – in a few seconds, we see Snitter finally getting some affection and seconds later a gun has gone off and a man is clutching his face with blood running down from between his fingers.

The Plague Dogs has a unique aesthetic – or at least, shared with Watership Down alone – and some beautiful imagery and direction, with lots of close cutting. There are some impressive and haunting images, even if so simple as the rubber gloves for reaching inside the rat cages being left inside-out. Snitter’s hallucinations are probably more believable and unsettling than Fiver’s, though the transformed stones are a very misleading image to publicize the film with (as they did).

But I don’t mind the film being obscure. I don’t mind it not having the legacy it might have. I have enjoyed it, and I have to say that for all it’s punishing and even upsetting, it’s also quite beautiful, and haunting, and certainly unique. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

茄子 スーツケースの渡り鳥 / Nasu: Suutsukeesu no Watari-dori/ Eggplant: Migratory Bird with Suitcase

As predicted in my impressions of the first Nasu film, this one is despite being along the same lines as its predecessor rather more conventional and less ‘artsy’. Those impressions were dominated by my long list of director Kousaka Kitarou’s previous work, as I was impressed by just how many of anime’s big names he had worked with – not many can boast having worked on Akira, Spirited Away, Metropolis and Grave of the Fireflies. This time, he brought in another interesting name from Ghibli – Yoshida Ken’ichi, key animator for many Ghibli films, including Mononoke-Hime and Mimi-o Sumaseba, but also working (very briefly) in that capacity for several favourite series of mine, including Evangelion, Scrapped Princess, Wolf’sRain and Dennou Coil, and providing the strong character designs for Eureka Seven and its successor Xam’d.

These two remarkable men, however, followed up a remarkable OVA with something rather bland. Suitcase is a direct follow-up to Summer in Andalusia, but without its intensity, demonstrable depth of knowledge or exotic setting – for a Japanese anime, at least. Again, it covers a bicycle race, but this time focusing on the team aspect of such races and with the Belgian team (which is seemingly full of Spaniards) taking part in the Japan Cup.

This means that Pepe and co get a cute Japanese assistant as well as the support of a funny little Japanese kid. Interestingly enough, given that with Yoshida on board you might expect them to look like something out of Eureka Seven, these two look about as much like Ghibli designs as it’s possible to get. The race is a difficult one – a torrential downpour starts, a formidable old vet has decided to race and a key member of the PaoPao team is under psychological stress because of the death of someone close to him. Various factors come into play, and apart from what happens with seemingly the slightly unhinged veteran, mostly the film is predictable but satisfying. The trouble is, the first film made me expect rather more.

Though the animation is smoother and more ambitious, Madhouse having come a long way between 2003 and 2007, it is also much less inventive. It’s remarkably effective how well the animations for cycling have been done here, the motions after all not being very typical ones for animators to encounter, but I really missed the stylish, exaggerated, desperate movements we see in the first film. There’s obvious exhaustion here, but it’s not an unfamiliar page in the lexicon of anime expressions. There’s also a somewhat clumsy use of cel-shaded CG, particularly for cyclists going around bends – it’s just not quite integrated well enough and looks awkward. Finally, the humour is strained – the last fart joke could possibly be passed off as just trying to be realistic, but the first, during the race, is just unneeded, and the little parts about Pepe’s clothes being damaged so that his bottom is visible and the Japanese girl getting all flustered definitely come over as childish.

There is much of merit here – the animation is superb, the voice acting is strong, the setting is still refreshingly different. But it just comes nowhere close to how impressive, different and clever the first film was. Perhaps it’s almost wholly down to the difference between adapting an ambitious manga and anime-makers devising their own story.

On the other hand, I vaguely appreciated the way an attempt was made to have ‘Nasu’ as the title make a degree of sense. Though the part about the suitcase…less so. 

The Secret of Kells

Despite being an animation fan, I actually hadn’t heard of The Secret of Kells until about two months ago. I missed any news of its release in Ireland at the beginning of 2009, I missed the buzz when it was nominated for an Oscar in 2010 and I ignored the few images I saw of it online, until I read that it was a kind of successor to The Thief and the Cobbler, being a beautiful and idiosyncratic film made outside the influence of the big studios. Yes, this is the first really noteworthy production from Irish company Cartoon Saloon, previously known only for the rather ugly Skunk Fu!, which I caught on TV once or twice. It was financed by French production companies and is slowly growing in renown through word-of-mouth, and it’s my sincere hope that the momentum it’s given Cartoon Saloon will lead to several great little films: the next, Song of the Sea, is already well underway.

Make no mistake, though – this does not look like an animated film a master has slaved over for half a lifetime. It has moments of real, stunning beauty, but it is still economically made and does not contain the sort of jaw-dropping sequences of Cobbler. Indeed, though that film is cited by director and original creator Tomm Moore as a major influence, the link is mostly that Kells has a heavy influence from Irish traditional art, just as Cobbler is influenced by Persian aesthetics. In fact, my first thought was that it looked like traditional animation imitating Flash (and indeed, there are a few sections of very obvious Flash animation – a shot of the main character running in panic towards the camera made me check it wasn’t ALL Flash, just done very cleverly), and that the closest resemblance was to My Life as a Teenage Robot or Samurai Jack (the latter being another example of traditional animation that looks similar to Flash). Thus it came as no surprise to see Samurai Jack’s creator Genndy Tartakovsky cited as another major influence – a lot of the character look like they would be right at home on Cartoon Network. Especially the two kids at the heart of the story.

But in terms of story, feel, pacing and concept, this is nothing at all like those hyperactive cartoons. The story takes place in 7^th- or 8^th-century Kells (it’s hard to say because the book is 8^th-centry but characters here are historically 7^th), and is a fictionalised account of the creation of the very real Book of Kells – amongst the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts extant. It seems likely that the germ of this film came when the creators looked at the sublime art in the book and wondered what it would be like to see it in animation – especially as one of the film’s most triumphant sequences, closing the film, works on that very idea. Young Brendan is the nephew of a stony-faced abbot fixed on one idea – fortifying the abbey against the Viking invaders who so often plunder the holy sites of the British Isles. When renowned illuminator Brother Aiden appears from Iona, though, brining with him the most beautiful book ever known, little Brendan gets caught up in helping him finish it – which takes him into the forest, where mysterious creatures known to the pagan religions live, including the ghostlike but powerful Aisling (pronounced, here, ‘Ashley’) and the sinister Crom Cruach.

The atmosphere throughout is tense – the invaders will come, sooner or later, and there’s no standing against them unless the wall is finished. The book is beautiful, but is it worth risking everything for? And while the walls may encircle a holy place, the pagan gods certainly exist in this world too – the whole thing is rife with the sort of symbolism that is fun to analyse but will soon be overanalysed in a rather irritating way.

The look of the thing perhaps could have been more striking, but at times is a real triumph. The characters are very stylised, drawing influences from old Irish art, but very appealing – though I’m not sure why there needed to be token representatives of different races in the abbey, as if it was meant to be inclusive and progressive it mostly came over as crude stereotyping. The Vikings are not really human. Part of the influence from the manuscripts is some backgrounds with an immense amount of detail and patterning – and it’s when that happens this looks the best. It’s lovely to look at sometimes, and when there are stylistic changes, such as the Flash sequences for chalk on a slate or when Brendan comes up against Crom Cruach, the strangeness and uniqueness of it is a triumph and a celebration of animated art.

While it is beautiful at times, has a sweet and moving story with a very real basis is history, lovely voice acting and rich characters, I found myself wishing for just a little more – more story, more explanation, more development, more impressive animation sequences. But that doesn’t stop this being an excellent film. Count me as a fan of the Saloon.

The Thief and the Cobbler

The usual reaction to the production story of this film is one of great sympathy to a genius of an artist and anger towards idiot corporate busybodies who don’t understand artistic vision. But personally, my own thoughts tend towards disappointment – this could have been one of the best animated films of all time, widely-known and admired, pushing traditional animation a long way…had it been finished in the 70s. As it is, it’s a missed opportunity, a terrible waste, being only a curio for animation aficionados and a few who were exposed to a butchered version as kids. Such a shame.

If I thought that Puss ’n Boots had some odd plot similarities to Disney’s Aladdin, I had another thing coming altogether when it came to seeing this: in a city with domes and minarets very similar to those of Agrabah, the sinister, goateed, rubber-lipped Grand Vizier plots to betray the sultan and marry his beautiful daughter, and only a low-born commoner can stand in his way. And while Aladdin was released before this film finally saw a commercial release, it had been in production for decades before that and Disney animators were undoubtedly aware of it, which is more than I can say for Puss ’n’ Boots. Again, if this had come out and blown minds in the late 70s or early 80s, Disney’s film would be seen as an affectionate tribute to a masterpiece, Jafar a nod to Zigzag. Now it only looks like a cruel company stomping upon the little man and ripping him off.

This film was the baby of Richard Williams, Canadian-born but based in England from his early 20s and an animator of celebrated short films, he begun conceptualising this project in 1964, starting production in 1968 and tightening it up into what was recognisably The Thief and the Cobbler by 1973. Self-funding with money made on other commissions, his progress was painfully slow and Williams kept missing deadlines and therefore failing to secure proper funding, so the film languished, even with voices recorded and the legendary Art Babbitt contributing. Eventually the extant footage impressed Spielberg and Zemekis enough that Williams was hired as animation director for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, doing a memorably excellent (though supposedly creatively stifled) job – and providing the voice for Droopy in one of his best-known scenes. But again, deadlines and budget were pushed to breaking point and the film was nearly shut down. Part of Williams’ deal was that The Thief and the Cobbler would get funding and distribution – but of course he didn’t make deadlines again and Aladdin was about to make the film look like a rip-off, so it was snatched away from Williams, Fred Calvert rushing the remaining scenes and adding cheesy songs, making everything more kid-friendly for what is now a very much derided version. In 1994, Miramax got hold of the film and further spoiled it, adding awful voice-overs, with Matthew Broderick doing his Simba voice.

Thankfully, fans got hold of the workprint thrown together by Williams for investors and now we can watch the Recobbled Cut, assembled by a fan named Garrett Gilchrist, preserving the vision, story and pacing Williams intended – but of course relying on footage from many sources, from high-quality DVD releases to grainy old VHS recordings and even the hasty storyboards drawn just for the workprint. It really is cobbled together – but shows what this film so nearly was.

In 1978, an Arabian prince offered to fund the film, based on the results of a ten-minute experiment. Of course, the deadlines flew by and the budget for the ten-minute piece ballooned from $100,000 to $250,000. Imagine if Williams had stuck to his budget, secured funding and finished the film around 1980. How beautiful and stunning it would have been! There are sequences here far in advance of anything else at the time, which look like good CG but were rendered by hand. There are clever hallucinogenic chase scenes and some of the most brilliant Rube-Goldberg-esque sequences with characters in them I’ve ever seen – especially the thief’s misadventures at the end. But it was not to be. Genius doesn’t work that way, sad to say.

The film is a fascinating melding of styles. The cobbler Tack is drawn greyscale (but for his eyes) until he goes out into the dessert sun, and is very much a Chaplin- or Harry Langdon-esque figure, mute but childish and instantly likeable. The thief looks like a crude goblin, always followed by a swarm of flies, and while he is also mute, his often frenetic scenes are more like Keaton, mixed with Road Runner (which makes sense given that Ken Harris animated him). Zigzag looks like a UPA character, while his attendants are weirder still, right out of zany cartoon strips, while Babbitt adds Disneyesque designs. The witch…well, the Witch looks like Ren and Stimpy doing Fliescher – the latter part probably thanks to the work of Grim Natwick.

So much here is superlative. Tack chasing the thief in a psychedelic sequence; the war machine and its destruction; the thief’s misadventures recovering the balls at the end. And perhaps more than anything else Vincent Price’s unforgettable performance. The plot would just about work, and the animation would make it worth it, completed. Tack is adorable and though I wish she wouldn’t keep sneering, Yum-Yum is likeable too. It would have been eccentric in pacing, story, character and humour, but that would be no defect. As it is…it’s a missed opportunity – and Miramax’s version is awful: the songs are dull and noticeably cheap in their animation, and Tack speaking…well, if Sean Connery’s bizarre deep voice in the original isn’t weird enough, the way he talks in Yum-Yum’s chambers is plain disturbing (Gilchrist actually painted out his mouth). Between this and the other eccentric classic in production forever, I’d go for Le Roi et L’Oiseau. If this were finished, though…

마당을 나온 암탉 / Madangeul Naon Amtak / The Hen Leaves the Yard / Leafie: A Hen into the Wild

It seems a little counter-intuitive, but this kiddie-friendly animation about cute talking animals seems much more likely to prove to the world that Korea’s animation industry is becoming mature and able to make its own artistic statements than a sci-fi feature film like Wonderful Days. That’s because while Wonderful Days seemed derivative and fell short of what it aimed for, Leafie certainly has obvious influences but possesses a very unique style, voice and completeness.

While this is the story of a battery hen who escapes from the farm and then hatches and raises a little orphaned duckling, it also makes clear from the very start that it is not going to pull punches or sugarcoat the fact that battery hens and injured wildfowl don’t live very long. Our heroine Leafie (Ipssak) only escapes the farm by pretending to be dead and being dumped in a hole with a load of chicken corpses, and encounters with the one-eyed weasel are by turns violent, bloody and depressing. So despite some broad comedy and a couple of sections with an over-reliance on fart and poop jokes, this animals-on-a-farm story has a lot more in common with the markedly adult, harrowing Watership Down than with Disney’s Home on the Ranch.

Ipssak escapes the weasel with help from the proud, impressive Wanderer, and finds a place to live with the help of the fast-talking Mr Otter/Mayor (a Korean pun on the word ‘Dalsu’). Unfortunately, Wanderer’s mate succumbs to the weasel. Trying to help, Leafie keeps the duck egg safe, but sadly Wanderer, with an injured wing, cannot fight off the weasel forever. The duckling hatches, and believes Leafie to be his mama, and the two of them go to live by the waterfront. They are not easily accepted and it’s really no place for a hen, but little Greenie (Chorok) grows up to be a strong young duck like his father. However, he’s also very much an outsider, not understanding why he is so different from his mother and having to ask other local creatures to teach him how to fly. When the migrating ducks come to the area, though, he may just find his place.

It’s really the air of melancholy that gives the piece its mature feeling. Everyone but Leafie thinks creatures should know their place and never stray from them. Poor Chorok spends his youth a confused outsider. And of course, the final ending is as bitter as it is logical – though it makes me wonder how far a small kid would understand it.

It helps, of course, that the film is both visually beautiful and distinctive. Anime has heavily influenced Korean art and animation, and though it’s distant in a world of animals, it can be seen in some of the eyes, expressions and action scenes. Other more comic animals look like they’re from European comics, and the ducks whose names are the equivalent of Do Re Mi and Fa look like something from Wakfu. The one human character, the farmer, reminded me of the way the characters move in Avatar, which of course is also Korean-animated. The backgrounds are gorgeous, recalling children’s picture books, presumably like the one on which this story was based, and the animation is very impressive, both fluid and imaginative. This is the first full-length feature from Odoltogi Studios, but I very much hope it will not be the last.

(South) Korea has spent so long producing great quantities of animation for the rest of the world and being completely under-recognised for it. It’s time for the apprenticeship to end and the country to get a chance to make cultural statements of its own in the medium. And this feels like a big first step. I regret not seeing it when it was screened at the Korean Film Festival. Though the plot is simplistic and rather episodic, the characters’ individual journeys work extremely well, and while Chicken Run did it to some extent with roosters – in a comedic context – I never thought until this that I’d find a duck badass. .

茄子 アンダルシアの夏 / Nasu: Andarushia no Natsu / Aubergine: Summer in Andalusia

With this artsy short film, Kousaka Kitarou managed the rather bizarre feat of becoming the new figure to watch – after already having had a remarkable career that meant he had a significant role in many of anime’s most important films. He started out in Oh! Production while Takahata was still working for the studio, and though he had no credited part in Takahata’s Gauche the Cellist, nor in the animation the studio produced for Miyazaki’s Cagliostro, by 1984 he had worked with both future Ghibli helmsmen through key animation in 1981’s Jarinko Chie (by Takahata for TMS) and 1984’s Nausicaa (for Topcraft), the latter as one of a long list: the role of a key animator is often integral to the story of the rise of a significant Japanese animator – especially when it comes to Miyazaki and his contributions to Horusu and Gulliver’s Space Travels. After that he strengthened ties with Miyazaki as animation director on Sherlock Hound, worked with Ghibli for Laputa and provided key animation for what most of the Ghibli associates had walked away from – the lengthy project that became the disappointing Little Nemo.

It was during this period that he left Oh! and branched out in remarkable ways. After Laputa, he was there to provide key animation in a number of landmark titles, all released within two years – Gainax’s first film Wings of Honneamise, the weird but interesting Mamoru Oshii half of Twilight Q (with Studio Deen), Takahata’s most well-known piece Grave of the Fireflies and Outomo’s seminal Akira. As if that were not already a remarkable enough resume, he followed it up by associating himself with episodes of Yawara!, which as well as being made by Madhouse as they moved into becoming a powerhouse studio able to make features was the first manga by Urasawa Naoki to become an anime (Kousaka also had a hand in Master Keaton and the superb Monster). He then worked for Rintaro on the early X2 anime, one of the first time Clamp’s work had been adapted for anime, a year after its predecessor Tokyo Babylon. He tried his hand as a director with the OVA A-Girl before returning to Ghibli for some of their best films, rising up through the ranks to become an animation director for Whisper of the Heart and then a supervising animation director for Princess Mononoke – my two favourite Ghibli works. His second work as a director saw him return to Clamp to adapt Clover, and then in 2001, he was not only a Ghibli supervisor again for Spirited Away, but also provided more key animation for Rintaro with his remarkable Tezuka adaptation Metropolis.

So yes, he was in a good position when it came to make this short film in 2003. I’m sure that’s the most I’ve ever written about a director’s history, but I just find it remarkable. Usually, it amuses me to find that someone in anime has a link or two to another significant figure, but Kousaka seems to have worked for almost every highly prominent figure in anime short of Kon Satoshi and Hosoda Mamoru, who probably nodded to him as their Madhouse sempai.

The story Kousaka decided to adapt was from the manga Nasu (‘aubergine’). One of the stories there was about a cycle race, and the story is that since they were both cycling fans, Miyazaki suggested Kousaka animate it. Kousaka asked Miyazaki if he wanted to collaborate, but it was during the period Miyazaki was saying he had burned out and was retiring, so Kousaka went off to Madhouse. Set, as the title suggests, in Andalusia, the film follows professional cyclist Pepe Benengeli as he takes on a difficult stage of the Vuelta a España. Not stylised and comical like the Tour de France in Les Triplettes de Belleville, this is a fond but realist take on the event, emphasising the strategies cyclists use on a field where so many are so equal, the politics of being sponsored and the difference it makes being supported by a home crowd. Pepe is an interesting main character for such a brief piece, rather prickly and unwilling to show his emotions even to loved ones, but they support him wholeheartedly anyway, because they know what he really feels underneath. The real human link here is his family watching him on television and later in person – especially his brother, who is newly married. There are lovely vignettes of local culture, especially the food (mmm, giant paella), but what’s most remarkable is how much is said in such a short time, with such sparse dialogue.

The art remains mostly realistic, and the influence of Ghibli on the character design is noticeable, especially when it comes to the wife, to the point that I’m sure if it were more well-known this would get mistaken for a Ghibli work as much as KumoKaze. At the end, though, in the final sprint, the sheer speed and exertion is expressed in looser art, scratchy lines and distorted faces – but it is done with such superb timing and taste that it manages everything that the race segment of The Animatrix fails to pull off.

It may not sound like there is much to this film, nor that it is a very interesting subject, but it is trying something different with animation and managing it extremely well, and will appeal to arthouse fans – indeed, it was the first anime ever to be shown at Cannes. A sequel exists, also much-lauded, though it sounds like its flavour may be somewhat less unique. On the strength of this, I will certainly be watching out for it – and everything else Kousaka does. Perhaps with a feature film or two he can fill the voids that Kon Satoshi and Yoshifumi Kondou so tragically left.

ואלס עם באשיר / Vals Im Bashir / Waltz with Bashir

Waltz with Bashir got a lot of attention – primarily with arthouse audiences – upon its release in 2008. With a striking, realistic art style, a hard-hitting and intellectually fashionable subject matter and unconventional structure, it was nominated for an Oscar not for best animated film but best film in a foreign language, won the equivalent award at the Golden Globes and earned top awards from respected animated film awards such as grand prizes from Zagreb and Tokyo Filmex. It is not hard to see why it was such a darling of the arthouse animation crowd: completely adult-oriented, based on harrowing real-world experiences and from a culture not generally associated with animation (this and $9.99 being the first animated films made in Israel since 1962), it is certainly not the average animated feature.

Key to its seriousness and distinctiveness is that it is an animated documentary. Not a thousand miles from Nick Park’s Creature Features work, a series of interviews are taped and then the animation is made to match it. But these interviews, some repeated or even conflated to make the details work better for a film, are not simple observations of life delivered by cute animals: they are recollections of Israeli soldiers from the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The main character of the film, the director and writer Ari, has a strange memory of his time serving in Beirut, but can remember almost nothing of the actual events. So he sets out to interview others who were there to try to piece together the truth. There is brutal violence, graphic depictions of death, even one absurd sequence where gratuitous pornography is animated, something I doubt could be featured in live-action. And at the very end, in a fine moment of contrast, real news footage is played, reminding the audience with stunning simplicity just how real these events are, and the distance between reality and animation is artificial.

This is not made to tell the story of a war. It is not to educate, to make political statements or to excuse. If you don’t know the background, you may well be lost. If you don’t know why there would be Palestinians in Lebanon, or who the Phalangists were, you might struggle to understand all the implications of what is happening, but you are likely to understand the stories individuals tell and the sense of despair, helplessness and disgust so many of them retained after the event.

Visually, there is much to be praised, though it is somewhat annoying to read other film reviewers who clearly have very little to do with animation clearly not recognising the very obvious visual characteristics of Flash animation, presumably because they see only blockbusters and have no knowledge of the evolution of Flash on the web or the cartoons from the likes of Cartoon Network that make extensive use of it. Those disconnected limbs and that odd fluidity, the slow movements of the heads and the way the camera can squeeze in and out – all are hallmarks of Flash. There were accusations of rotoscoping here, presumably because those bold lines and the smooth motions are reminiscent of the likes of Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings and the like, but the filmmakers vehemently deny the technique was used. On the other hand, there are a few junctures where I suspect that at the very least the faces are traced or very heavily drawn from film footage – for example, one martial artist demonstrates a kick in a sequence the filmmakers were clearly so proud of they repeat it a few times – and his face has the most realistic expression for a person doing martial arts I have ever seen in animation.

Other sequences are fine for their strangeness and the symbolic elements, the very reason for making this a piece of animation; the are visions and dream sequences that come with really surprising and impressive moments of beauty, including the eponymous waltz. On the other hand, there is much that doesn’t satisfy: the idea of the suppressed memories seems artificial and forced, and the fleeting mentions of the Holocaust needed far more development to be valid thinking points.

But Waltz for Bashir is nothing if not memorable, powerful and unique. Well worth watching, if not one to enjoy.

Le Roi et l'oiseau / The King and the Bird / The King and the Mockingbird

Le Roi et l'oiseau is widely considered a masterpiece of animation. Two things brought me to it. The first was reading about Norstein's The Overcoat, with its 20-year production time, which led to mentions of this film being in production from 1948-1980 - the project began when the studio Les Gémeaux was in a strong position, having been the only animation studio operating in occupied France during WWII, but stalled when they hit financial difficulties in 1950, with an unfinished version being released in 1952; a rights dispute ensued, stretching into the 70s, and then finally the film was finished from 1977 onwards. The second was, as with The Old Man and the Sea, the recommendations of Studio Ghibli, Miyazaki and Takahata having highly praised this animation as a great influence on them and released it in Japan as part of their Ghibli Museum Library collection.

It is a very strange, rather hallucinogenic film. It may be regarded as a classic, but there is a lot about it that is slapdash or defied explanation. On the other hand, there are also moments of great visual ingenuity, some genuinely hilarious humour and a very interesting meld of animation styles testament to the two very different periods in which it was made.

In the kingdom of Tachycardia, decadent King Charles (V+III=VIII)+VIII=XVI enjoys commissioning images in his likeness, while warring with a large bird who has his nest in the towers of his castle. The King managed to hunt and kill the bird’s wife, leaving him the single parent of four adorable chicks, but in return the sardonic bird torments him about his ugly cross-eyed face. One day the king commissions a new painting, dropping the unfortunate painter into a pit for making him cross-eyed and himself retouching it with nice normal eyes. For some reason, the works of art in the king’s bedroom come to life at night, including images of a chimneysweep and a shepherdess: here the story with its basis in Andersen comes to the fore, and these two paintings become the sympathetic lead characters of the film. They escape from their frames, but the painting of the king believes that the shepherdess ought to marry him so pursues them, on the way dropping the real king down one of his traps and taking his place. The couple evade capture for a time, with the help of the bird, until they descend to the lower city, right out of Metropolis. Here, apparently the king doesn’t care what damage he does, so he uses a giant robot to capture the heroes. The shepherdess is prepared for marriage while the sweep and the bird are forced into labour. Rebelling, they are thrown to the lions, but the bird and a blind organ-grinder from the lower city convince the lions to burst free and overcome the forces of the false king. All that remains is a climactic battle for the giant robot, and a final scene that may be quite an abrupt end to the film – but is one of its most iconic and memorable pieces of imagery.

Visually, the film recalls nothing so much as Disney and Fleischer shorts from the 20s and 30s. Many frames have been drawn, given great fluidity to every movement, but the characters move almost without weight, and their movements have odd, jerky timing or can be hard to interpret. The identical policemen in particular have expressions right out of black-and-white Mickey Mouse and those little chicks have more than a little of Snow White’s fauna in them. Meanwhile, the king’s strange, languid movements are superbly idiosyncratic, and the bird himself has some wonderful moments. It’s sometimes possible to notice the jump from 40s to 70s in a single cut, but overall the film is remarkably coherent.

There is much that will stay with me forever. Some brilliant visual gags are on display, mostly surreal: in one scene that really made me laugh, the King has to open a series of traps to catch out his chief of police, and then unexpectedly zips off when his throne is converted into a bumpercar. The appearance of the chimneysweep surprised me, an extremely feminine boy I wouldn’t think would meet any ideals as a romantic lead in either the 40s or the 70s. And one scene, in which what appears to be a concertina with eyes and feet comes along, does a dance, and then is ignored and forgotten. I really cannot make sense of that sequence at all. I can accept that the king and guards might just be persuaded not to investigate a statue made of birds even if it was awkward, but that concertina really bewilders me.

There are numerous little curios here. What do those allusions to Hitler really signify? Why gondolas? Should the concept of the painting replacing the real king not have been given more recognition? But ultimately this is a freewheeling, rather bizarre animated fantasy, and somehow it feels like it would be fruitless to question it.

雲のむこう、約束の場所 / Kumo no Muko, Yakusoku no Basho / Beyond the Clouds, the Promised Place / The Place Promised in Our Early Days

I watched director Shinkai Makoto’s famous debut Hoshi no Koe when it was first available, a beautiful short film all the more astonishing because he produced it entirely by himself – drawing, animation: just about everything but the sound. Here, he has been given a greater budget and presumably an entire production studio, and made a full-length animation.

Unfortunately, it suffers the same problems as his debut, which while stunning to look at, was ponderous, mindlessly pretentious and self-indulgent. Both films have good premises: Hoshi concerns the heartache of a couple separated when one of them goes into space, the time it takes between sending and receiving messages growing exponentially wider as the distance between them increases, until finally messages sent by a youth are received by an older and older addressee; Beyond the Clouds, meanwhile, is about an alternative, divided Japan where a huge tower has been constructed, and some schoolboys’ dreams to one day fly there in a plane they are building.

The film is breathtakingly beautiful. Some of the finest depictions of skies and buildings I’ve ever seen pass by in the background of scenes only a few seconds long. However, the director unfortunately seems to think that painfully slow, vague storytelling is how to make something seem deep and profound and beautiful, and it just becomes dull. However, the characters are much more interesting than those of Hoshi no Koe, and overall it was a solid, dazzlingly beautiful film - just one I don’t think I’ll have much inclination to sit though again for a long, long time.

(originally written 12.5.05)

Persepolis

Persepolis - that strange, comic-book-style, largely black-and-white animation from France that was nominated for an Oscar and in my view deserved it more than the eventual winner Ratatouille, and has met almost universal acclaim. Here are my thoughts from the screening I caught in 2007:

I thought it was excellent, a simple memoir but moving, poignant, pleasingly frank and with some great moments of humour. The simple art was coupled with some wonderful animation and pastiche, and there were some very gripping moments and plenty of likeable characters. If anything, the fundamentalist government is shown in a considerably less threatening way than in, say, Reading Lolita in Tehran. The floggings and murders seem less of a real threat here, where talking back cleverly to authorities seems to go mostly unpunished. Nonetheless, there are some harrowing moments when real political dissidents are caught.

Superb and highly lauded, it is well worth seeing.

Старик и море and Моя любовь / The Old Man and the Sea and My Love

Aleksandr Petrov is quite unique in the modern animation scene, perhaps in the whole history of the art, not for conceiving of his way of creating moving pictures, but for actually doing it. A student of Yuri Norstein, he starts from a similar basis but his methodology is at once simpler and far more artistically challenging. Petrov uses just one pane of glass and paints upon it with oil, and for the changes between frames, he adjusts the paint where possible, and where larger changes are needed, he repaints. In other words, every single frame of this animation is an oil painting, quite literally.

I discovered Petrov through the twin prongs of Ghibli’s support of him, helping to release his work and including it in their museum library, and his contribution to the Winter Days project, where his aesthetic was unique.

The Old Man and the Sea is his most lauded work, and in my experience the best. It won the Oscar for best short animation and perfectly balances artistry, innovation and a compelling, classic story. Based on the Hemmingway novella, it is the simple tale of an old fisherman who is considered washed up by his community, having failed to catch anything in 84 days. Even his young apprentice is told to find a new boat to fish with, and has to comply despite his loyalty. The old man goes out alone and so begins a battle with a huge fish that threatens to overcome his fading strength. It’s not a novel story but it allows for powerful moments and for an impressive showcase of Petrov’s painting skills, bringing with it as it does chances to paint not just people but shifting water, grand skies and most impressive of all, the fish down in the murky deep.

My Love feels almost resentful, as a follow-up. It feels as though The Old Man and the Sea was a very sincere effort to gain worldwide fame and renown, and the recognition was not enough. Petrov returns to Russian dialogue – The Old Man and the Sea being released in English and French – which is welcome, but the art style is much more impressionistic and less realist, and while the possibilities of the medium are better-explored – the light in an open door becomes the pages of a book, the characters transform to classical lovers and poets, the ground rushes up to become a wave – it all feels forced and contrived. The plot, based on a story by Shmelyov, revolves around a 15-year-old boy coming of age and initiating a romance with two possible love interests, treating them with typical – even shocking – immaturity, could function well for this kind of animation, but it just doesn’t feel like Petrov is interested. I know this is mostly speculative, but I was gratified to learn that Petrov’s contemporaries, including Norstein, found this film to be soulless and more of a technical showcase than a sincere animation. For a story about love, it seems so distant from its characters and almost disdaining. Of course, the technical side would have stunned me but for seeing it done more to my personal tastes in The Old Man and the Sea, which strikes the right balance between painterly and realistic both for animation and for my preferences in oils.

I want Petrov to be given a real chance. I want to see this incredible art form given a feature-length film release and to be amongst the most beautiful pieces of cinema ever seen. But story comes first – and the sincerity and love with which it is told. The Old Man and the Sea was perfect for a short film. It is that side of his art I’d love to see Petrov develop.

ほしのこえ/ Hoshi no Koe / Star’s Voice / Voices of a Distant Star

‘Hoshi no Koe was a nicely bleak and different short, produced almost entirely by one man, about a young girl sent to a distant galaxy still keeping in touch with her lover by text message. Poignant and original, but a bit ostentatious and melodramatic.’ That was my assessment on October 13, 2003, and my opinion really hasn’t changed since, after two repeat viewings and the director's first full-length film, Beyond the Clouds, The Promised Place.

This is not to play down the accomplishment of a single man slaving away in his bedroom to produce an impressively high-quality animation. What it lacks in fluidity of movement it makes up for in inventiveness and art quality. And it is admirable that Shinkai Makoto chose to do everything besides the music – even the voice acting in the initial release, along with his partner. But even back in 2003, the half-hour OVA was rather over-hyped, and Shinkai has even been called ‘The Next Miyazaki’. Honestly, though, if this were released by a conventional anime studio rather than having the hook of being essentially a solo project, it would have had the same fate as a thousand other standalone anime OVAs – ignored by all but a very small minority. The concept was nice, but the execution just was not strong enough in story terms to match the lush visuals, and if the storytelling falls short, nothing else can quite redeem that fault, even the fascinating production story.

Far be it from me to take a New Critical approach – but even knowing the interesting story of how one man with an iMac, a grant and seven months made something beautiful and stately, I cannot call Hoshi no Koe a strong piece of animation.

Uzbudljiva ljubavna priča / Exciting Love Story

It’s hard to write anything about Zagreb animations, because they are so short and so varied. The Zagreb School is something of an alternative to the mainstream of animated powerhouse studios producing blockbusters for the big screen or regular weekly productions for television: releases are irregular, very personal and very mixed, belonging to the world most of us, even those interested in animation, mostly remember exists only when the Oscar nominations for short animation pops up. So I thought it would be simplest to write about my favourite one, adapting a chunk I wrote for my MPhil thesis.

Exciting Love Story, by Dovniković, is a simple and clever little short in which the main character Miki moves between eight frames that comprise the screen, pushing against, breaking through and being unable to see past the black lines marking the borders of each distinct environment in a way very reminiscent of metatextual jokes in comics. Each frame exists both as a coherent space and as an element making up a greater metaphysical space on the screen, but for comic effect Miki can interact with them in both ways. Elements can move from one to the next, and scenes can collapse, creating an unpredictability and malleability of space that fully utilises the possibilities of animation for the sake of visual comedy.

The result is something exuberant, experimental and yet also distancing – an exploration of the nature of animation on the screen makes for something amusing and fun, but which cannot really sustain more than a very basic storyline for more than a few minutes. The nature of animation is highlighted, and with it the artificiality of what we see.

Taken as a story, it is of course lacking. Taken as a funny little experiment, it does exactly what it sets out to do.

おもひでぽろぽろ/ Omohide Poroporo / Memories Drip-Drop / Only Yesterday

What I suspected is now confirmed. I’ve seen every Ghibli film directed by Miyazaki, and with Poroporo, every Ghibili film directed by Takahata, too. And yes, surprised as I am to come to this conclusion, I think that Takahata is the better director. This is of course highly subjective, but after watching this movie, there is no doubt in my mind that while childlike awe, huge setpieces and simple thrills make Miyazaki’s films the masterpieces they are, the subtle hand of Takahata shows a maturity, a delicacy and an ingenuity that only Mononoke-Hime and Sen to Chihiro can come close to, and do not match. While perhaps I enjoy Miyazaki’s films more, there is more to appreciate in Takahata’s best. It is the difference between Hollywood and Arthouse – I love both, but admire the latter more. Yamada-Kun and Pom Poko were too zany and uneven to convince me, and for all its sincerity Hotaru no Haka too sensationalist, but not so Omohide Poroporo.

Omohide Poroporo is a simple little story – an oeru (OL, or Office Lady) named Taeko takes a break from her hectic city life to visit relatives in the country. On the way, she reminisces about her childhood. Intriguingly, Takahata based this work on a series of nostalgic manga about a little girl growing up in the 60s, with lots of cute and funny stories – I imagine them being like a more serious Yotsubato or Ichigo Mashimaro; to take these little anecdotes and make a coherent movie of them in the form of a memoir is rather impressive, and it works very well – we have the 10-year-old Taeko’s daily life, from trying her first pineapple to puppy love to the mystery surrounding a talk on menstruation, contrasted with the more solemn reflections of her adult self as she joins in the harvest and comes to feel at home in the countryside. And while I expected another rather inelegant pedagogic sermon on how nature is far superior to city life, which would have been typical of Ghibli (remember Takahata directed Pom Poko, though the concept was Miyazaki’s), I was surprised to find even this dealt with maturely, the farmer Taeko befriends pointing out that even though it’s not roads and cities, everything that can be seen in the countryside is still man-made, crafted and controlled by farmers and agriculture, which was a great scene.

And oh, the animation – because this is a simple, realistic story, the art remains simple (though adult Taeko’s cheekbones are a brave but wonderful addition to her design, really defining as well as aging her face, and some of the imitative art styles of child Taeko’s imagination sequences are superb), and a lot of people who don’t care much for animation wouldn’t think much of what they saw, but that’s BECAUSE it is so well-done. Apart from one or two fantasy sequences, everything here is an imitation of real life, and I can’t express how well the animation is done. Animation was clearly done after voice recording here, for real, stuttering, quirky, believable performances are given by the excellent seiyuu cast and animated beautifully. The movements of heads while the characters speak, the way that cars bounce on bad suspension, the entire class of children that move about individually in the last scenes, the funny, perfectly-depicted awkwardness of kids putting on performances, and especially the tiny changes in expression on the face of young Taeko, with the lack of self-awareness typical of her age, are breathtaking for anyone who cares about the art of animation.

This is something special. This is something that arthouse crowds would adore. This is a story that will move you, make you laugh and make you smile with more fondness than any blockbuster. Stay away if you need fast cutting or explosions to keep your attention, but if you treasure good stories maturely told, this is the best film Ghibli can offer you.

(originally written 9.11.2006)

L’illusionniste / The Illusionist

Not to be confused with The Illusionist, the 2006 film with Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti, itself easy to confuse with 2005’s The Prestige. All centre on stage magicians and prestidigitation, but L’illusionniste is very different, no thriller or murder mystery, but a small-scale drama from the director of Les Triplettes de Belleville, Stephen Chomet.

The story of the script is quite interesting, written by renowned mime Jacques Tati in 1956 but never produced. The animated illusionist is clearly a depiction of Tati himself, with a section in a cinema added to the film just to drive this point home, so this is something like a new Tati film. It’s also worth knowing that the dynamic of the characters is intended to mirror the fondness of father for daughter, because without knowing this beforehand, it is very hard not to see the film in a very different way – and besides, the matter is complicated by the fact that the daughter in question was abandoned by Tati as an infant…although even the matter of which of two estranged daughters the script was inspired by is in dispute. Indeed, central to the problem of this film is that it often doesn’t make its concepts clear enough.

Les Triplettes de Belleville was of course in many ways a tribute to Tati and his Hulot character, but L’illusionniste is altogether more melancholy and realistic than Chomet’s previous film. With stage magicians losing the attention of their audiences, the central character decides to leave France for England (it was Czechoslovakia in the Tati script). Having no luck in London, he goes to perform in Scotland, and there makes friends with an impressionable young woman who marvels at his talents. He buys her a train fare to Edinburgh, then pays for her board and lodging, and lavishes gifts upon her, struggling hard and working several jobs for the money. She, meanwhile, does nothing but keep house and do some cooking, not only for him but other down-and-out performers in the lodging house.

In the end, she finds a dashing man and the illusionist leaves her behind to find a new way to live, all but penniless and alone. If you see the story from his point of view, it’s a bittersweet tale of self-sacrifice and affection. But focus on her and her motives…and you start to wonder. If you accept that she genuinely thinks the Illusionist can work magic and has unlimited resources, then she’s at first a bit thick and by the end a total moron. Even without common sense her experiences should have made things clear, and they clearly aren’t living lives of luxury. If you think she’s figured it out, she’s a leech and a scrounger. Either way, there’s no reason why she shouldn’t get a job, why she shouldn’t realise that finding a new man in her life could upset her illusionist friend.

Some parts of the film are very funny, especially when the illusionist thinks his rabbit has been cooked. One shot at the end, when light moves as the pages of a book are blown in the wind, is stunningly beautiful. Edinburgh looks incredible, and its realisation was testament to the local artists used for the film. But there is so much more this film should have been, but wasn’t. I would be surprised – indeed, disappointed – if the film won the Oscar, even if it is more sophisticated and artistic than Toy Story 3 or How to Train Your Dragon. For sophistication and artistry are not all that go into a good film.

鉄コン筋クリート/Tekkonkinkreet

Tekkonkinkreet is an interesting animated movie, something of a milestone in anime history, despite being far left of the mainstream. For one thing, it’s the first major anime film ever to be directed by a gaikokujin – American special effects artist and cell-shaded cgi pioneer Michael Arias. On the other hand, the film is very much in the house style of Studio 4°C, and was based on an existing manga, but the daring compositions of shots and the high-octane action sequences recall the (separate) sequences from The Animatrix that the director and the studio were responsible for. I think the American’s influence is most obvious in brutality of the fight scenes, the willing embrace of weird hallucinogenic sequences that recall Scarfe’s flowers in The Wall, and perhaps the need to cram in a bit too much, making the middle of the story sag really quite badly. But it’s 4°C who really leave their fingerprint on this film. One of my favourite anime of the last few years has been their Mahou Shoujotai: Arusu, and having seen that overlooked classic, I instantly recognised the distinctive style of their animation: Mahou Shoujoutai may have had prettier character designs, but it took similar risks, with impressive CG, fluid animation and quirky art that didn’t necessarily follow the conventions of anime anatomy or stay wholly consistent.

Tekkonkinkreet is the story of two street kids, Kuro and Shiro (Black and White) who rule their city. When yazuka and property developers invade their turf, it becomes clearer and clearer that despite their superhuman skills, the two of them need one another more than even they know. Kuro is the tough one, the fighter and the breadwinner, while Shiro is something of a village idiot, possibly autistic and certainly mentally undeveloped, but pure and good-hearted. It’s the situations the story forces these two into that really matters – which makes a lot of the peripheral stories seem somewhat extraneous, but the payoff is worth it.

The rather ugly characters contrasting with the beautiful cultural mishmash of the background art makes this unique and will keep it away from the mainstream, which expects its aesthetic a lot prettier, and while it could have done with a good 25 minutes trimmed off, and has some very predictable twists, it’s a moving and effective anime movie and well worth seeing, even if it won’t be for everyone.

(originally written 11.1.2008)