愛してるぜ ベイベ★★ / Aishiteruze Baby ★★

Katakura Kippei is an ordinary teenaged boy – simple, good-hearted, popular with the girls and carefree. One day, however, he comes home to find that his aunt has disappeared, leaving behind her five-year-old daughter, and he's the only one who can look after her. So begins Kippei’s abrupt introduction to motherhood.

The series is unashamedly reliant on the charm of little Yuzuyu, an adorable little child who is nevertheless still believable – selfish, reliant and prone to the occasional tantrum, but with a strong sense of right and wrong and a touching cheerfulness and generosity.

But cuteness alone is not enough. Fortunately, Kippei is an engaging, thoroughly likeable character who always strives to make others happy. He is adored by most of the girls in his school, including one scary stalker (naturally, the only one who isn’t utterly beautiful), but because he is so simple and so kind-hearted, this doesn’t make him arrogant or vain. His struggles to understand a five-year-old girl, and the strange jealousy between her and his new girlfriend, make him entertaining, engaging but also admirable – Kippei genuinely is a good person, and always treats others with sympathy and generosity.

Aishiteruze Baby is very good, but falls a little short of being a classic. I can cope with the poor animation standards, because the story is conveyed just fine. The trouble comes when the anime veers off into more adult territory: an abusive parent, a child clinging to the things that remind her of her mama, a mother hiding from her own daughter…and while suicidal teenager Miki is actually very well-portrayed in such a short time, her story suffers the same problem as the others I just mentioned: the old anime cliché of everything stemming from one or two significant events earlier in a character’s life (that can be seen in flashbacks), solvable by a main character talking…very… earnestly…until…they…change…their…ways. Rushed side-stories like these brought nothing to the anime, and made everything that little bit more trite. This, and some very slow episodes towards the end mean Aishiteruze Baby is only good, not great. Nevertheless, with some excellent characters, wonderful humour and a good heart, it’s worth seeing.

(originally written 24.8.05)

耳をすませば /Mimi-o Sumaseba/If you Listen Carefully/Whisper of the Heart

Now, the first time I saw Mimi-o Sumaseba, it wasn’t in the best of circumstances. It’s never good to watch an achingly cute love story when you’re in the midst of an argument with your girlfriend (in fact, I think the argument stemmed from the broken promise of going to see the film together – or was that The Cat Returns?), and as such, while I remember enjoying the movie, I didn’t actually recall much about it before rewatching it yesterday. And I’m glad I did, because it’s now amongst my very favourite Ghibli films.

When the film was made in 1995, Miyazaki was considering giving up directing, and most people inside the studio expected his successor to be Kondo Yoshifumi. However, this was to be his only movie as helmsman before his tragic passing in 1998. Nonetheless, for a movie the world remembers you by, you could certainly do worse than Mimi.

Sorry, Hayao, but I have to say that the stories of Ghibli films tend to be strongest when based closely on that of a novel- or in this case, a Ribon manga, even if one heavily adapted by Miyazaki himself for the film's screenplay. While Sen to Chihiro, Mononoke and Kurenai no Buta are in my opinion the best films the esteemed sutajio has ever made, their greatest strengths are decidedly not their storylines. On the other hand, Hotaru no Haka and this film benefit enormously from having really simple yet strong, cohesive storylines to build upon. Shizuku is a normal girl with some talent for translating lyrics from English but no idea what she wants to do with her life. She meets a boy named Seiji, and while they quarrel at first, she begins to see more of him after discovering the fairy-tale antiques/knick-knack store his grandfather owns and they grow closer.

It’s a simple story, told at a slow pace, full of charming details. Time is spent on cuts that would never be seen in an average Hollywood movie, let alone animation – people waiting politely for others to pass, things getting dropped and picked up again, typical petty family squabbles. Thanks to this attention to detail, the character animation is probably the best I’ve ever seen, being so very real. Shizuku is getting out of bed, reaches for the bottom of the bunk above her, misses it and carries on unperturbed; she lets out a breath or holds back her tears; Seiji and a group of musicians play an impromptu session, and they actually look like they’re playing. It’s sublime. There’s magic in, say, Sen to Chihiro’s Yubaba literally blowing her top and surging towards the camera with her hair a mass of living, fiery tentacles, but there’s magic too in simply capturing the unconscious mannerisms of a young girl. And then there are the fantasy sequences involving the Baron – the parts that make this a project suited to animation rather than live action…and they are astonishingly beautiful.

Some minor story details seem far-fetched (Seiji’s trick with the library cards, for one) but mostly the coincidences work within the idiom, because it’s not as though coincidences cannot happen, and you feel most of the events in the story would have occurred anyway, even if not for the circumstances that brought them about here. As a story, it is sweet, simple and touching, a romance in the simplest sense – affecting rather than titillating, which I for one far prefer. Easily in my top five Ghibli movies, despite being one of their most conventional. It may not be an adventure, as such, but it’s a story anyone can recognise and understand. Beautiful.

And undoubtedly, Miyazaki’s little story tweaks worked a charm. Violin-crafting? Inspired detail.

(Originally written 10.10.06)

満月をさがして / Furu Muun o Sagashite / Searching For the Full Moon

For a long time, circa 2003-2005, Full Moon o Sagashite was #1 on Animenfo’s ‘Top 100 Anime’ list, which was based on fan votes. Arguably that was because its relatively small audience found little to object to in such a charming anime, while the more prominent and boyish anime it outranked, like Rurouni Kenshin and Akira, had their vociferous detractors. The show still made some big ripples, and even though its run was just when I was starting to become a real anime obsessive, it had started just that little bit too late, and only now have I gotten around to watching it.

In many ways, Full Moon o Sagashite is an archetypal girls’ series: a sweet, happy-go-lucky young orphan girl is living a stifled life with her overprotective grandmother, but has a big dream – in this case, to become a singer. But thanks to a sarcoma in her throat, little Mitsuki has only a year to live. For some reason, she has the ability to see the Shinigami (gods of death in Japanese mythology) who have come to ensure no-one interferes with her fate, and even manages to convince them to use their magic to transform her into a sixteen-year-old so that she can begin her singing career.

Everything in Full Moon o Sagashite is cute. Mitsuki is a thoroughly lovely girl, who has a pure ambition, pure love, and often acts selflessly, though rebels and argues when she feels she has good reason, meaning she’s believable as a very, very sweet twelve-year-old. The people working with her in the music industry have her best interests in mind, and even the nasty rival figure is soon won over. The gods of death are of course wonderfully pretty and not only have cutesy kemono-mimi but can transform into adorable mascot characters – that genuinely are very cute. Of course, Mitsuki’s rise to prominence is jarringly fast, her very first single selling hugely, though since she’s a heavily-produced, heavily-promoted aidoru (pop idol) this makes a degree of sense. Studio Deen, the show’s creators (responsible for other cute shows like Binchou-tan and Maria-sama Ga Miteru), made the excellent decision of actually hiring real singers to voice Mitsuki (and her rival Madoka) and getting good songs written for them, which you can really believe would sell well – for that’s often the crucial element that music anime (like Beck) lack.

Arguably the real meat of the story would have fit into a 26-episode series rather than a slightly slow 52-episode run, but the relaxed pace and episodic nature to the middle part actually helped create a mood of relaxed intimacy that helped make proceedings more likeable. The anime, which like many adaptations that begin while the manga is still running, veers off in its own direction when it runs out of source material, is perhaps less mature and less realistic than the version fully realised by a single mangaka (the anime, for example, never shows how a singer has to struggle to stay in the public eye, and rather sidelines Meroko), but its pace is far more conducive to the kind of atmosphere in which this sort of story thrives – unhurried, detailed, rich in character; the manga, on the other hand, can at times seem like a rushed infodump.

Full Moon o Sagashite may not feature clashes for the fate of the world; it may not have the best, deepest study of how death affects people (though there are some lip-wobbling moments), nor have all its details fully worked out (for an anime all about death and the certainty of an afterlife, it seems strange that people are always insisting on what a loss it is, especially since Izumi tempting Mizuki with a vision of Heaven gives such a great opportunity to discuss the issue). However, it is a light little drama-comedy with some profound moments that at the very least will always stick in the mind, and always bring a smile to the face.

(Originally written 9.7.2007)