This is my final of six films in my bi-monthly Audient Anime series.
I haven’t exactly stuck the landing on Audient Anime. It’s
not been the result of too few choices. It’s been the result of too many.
For a while I had assumed I would finish my 2017 bi-monthly
series with Your Name, the acclaimed Makoto Shinkai film that hit theaters here
in 2016, but would count for my 2017 rankings because it didn’t receive a
theatrical release in the U.S. until 2017. That’s the kind of killing of two
birds with one stone I try to accomplish in December. Unfortunately, the film
is not available for rental from iTunes, and I’m not sure how I’m supposed to
get my hands on it short of piracy.
Then I also came into possession of two other Miyazaki
films, since I’d considered concluding with anime’s most celebrated director,
having started the series with three of his films. In fact, I still have rented
from the library both Howl’s Moving Castle, which I’d wanted to make my June
film before settling on Castle in the Sky, and Miyazaki’s “final film,” The
Wind Rises, which has since become his penultimate film at worst, as he has
un-retired and will be releasing another new film in 2019. But in my rush to
watch 2017 films in the month of December, neither of them has made it into the
DVD player.
Part of the reason I haven’t felt that urgency is that I did
see an anime film this month, one that I was not planning on at all, and in
fact had not even heard of prior to watching it. Back on December 5th
I watched In This Corner of the World, Sunao Katabuchi’s film that feels like a
thematic cousin to Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies. The distributor had
sent a vimeo link to my editor and he shared it with me so I could review it
for the site prior to its Australian theatrical release. I thought the movie was great, but I already briefly wrote about
it in this post, and given my wealth of other options and prospective options,
I thought I’d include it in a possible anime smorgasbord to end the series. As
it turned out, on December 28th, it’s the only one of my choices
I’ve actually watched.
I might still watch Howl’s Moving Castle with my kids when
we’re having a beach holiday to close the year, but given that we’re leaving
tomorrow and won’t be back until January 3rd, it’s time for me to
just get down to business and write my final Audient Anime post.
So that final film is indeed In This Corner of the World,
which is a doozy, but not quite as much of a doozy as Fireflies. Both films feature
characters living (or failing to live) through the atomic bombs dropped on
Japan in 1945, which is why they earn a direct comparison. It could be that there are other anime movies that overtly wrestle with this period of Japanese history, with its tragedy on an epic scale intermingled with the shame of its imperialist agenda, but given that many anime films are aimed at or at least appropriate for children, I suspect there aren't a ton of them.
Corner follows its characters up to and slightly beyond the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, and Grave kind of starts just before and follows them afterward. But both deliver images that can't be unseen, which befall characters we would never expect them to befall. Corner is probably slightly less gut-punchy, and slightly less good. But both films earned a 4.5-star rating from me, which is still high praise even though I give those out a bit more freely than I once did.
Dang it, after two paragraphs I already feel like I'm out of fresh things to say about this movie. Which could be because I already said them. So without forcing myself to adhere to some preconceived format that I'm the only one who probably cares about, I will instead link to my review of the movie, which has most of what I want to say about it anyway. Go take a look at that here.
So even though this isn't quite the end to the series I wanted -- writing about the film more than three weeks after I saw it can't help but feel like a bit of a whimper -- it's been a phenomenally successful series, one that has opened my mind to anime just as I'd hope it would. I'm not sure that I was completely closed off to anime, but I'd taken the worst parts of some anime movies I'd seen and conflated them to somehow representing most examples of the genre.
I couldn't have been more wrong. Of the six films I watched, two received a perfect five-star rating from me, two received 4.5 stars, and the "worst" two were still all the way up at four stars. And this is without consciously selecting the cream of the crop. Half of the movies I saw were not even on my radar when the series began, including both 4.5-star movies (Only Yesterday and this movie).
If I want to extrapolate out from there, that means that not only are there some legitimate masterpieces in anime, but that even the "average anime" is at a very high level of quality. I'm disappointed in myself for ever assuming less than that.
The really good thing is that this has stoked my thirst for more. That's no guarantee. I had an incredibly positive experience during my 2016 monthly series of watching one silent film per month, but you know what? The entirety of 2017 has passed without me watching another one. I seriously doubt that will be the case in 2018. I'm eager to see as much more anime as I can. I'm motivated.
I know what my 2018 bi-monthly series will be, and damn does it have a clever name. But I may make that the subject of its own post sometime in January before my first post in February. Stay tuned for that. I know you can't wait.
Corner follows its characters up to and slightly beyond the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, and Grave kind of starts just before and follows them afterward. But both deliver images that can't be unseen, which befall characters we would never expect them to befall. Corner is probably slightly less gut-punchy, and slightly less good. But both films earned a 4.5-star rating from me, which is still high praise even though I give those out a bit more freely than I once did.
Dang it, after two paragraphs I already feel like I'm out of fresh things to say about this movie. Which could be because I already said them. So without forcing myself to adhere to some preconceived format that I'm the only one who probably cares about, I will instead link to my review of the movie, which has most of what I want to say about it anyway. Go take a look at that here.
So even though this isn't quite the end to the series I wanted -- writing about the film more than three weeks after I saw it can't help but feel like a bit of a whimper -- it's been a phenomenally successful series, one that has opened my mind to anime just as I'd hope it would. I'm not sure that I was completely closed off to anime, but I'd taken the worst parts of some anime movies I'd seen and conflated them to somehow representing most examples of the genre.
I couldn't have been more wrong. Of the six films I watched, two received a perfect five-star rating from me, two received 4.5 stars, and the "worst" two were still all the way up at four stars. And this is without consciously selecting the cream of the crop. Half of the movies I saw were not even on my radar when the series began, including both 4.5-star movies (Only Yesterday and this movie).
If I want to extrapolate out from there, that means that not only are there some legitimate masterpieces in anime, but that even the "average anime" is at a very high level of quality. I'm disappointed in myself for ever assuming less than that.
The really good thing is that this has stoked my thirst for more. That's no guarantee. I had an incredibly positive experience during my 2016 monthly series of watching one silent film per month, but you know what? The entirety of 2017 has passed without me watching another one. I seriously doubt that will be the case in 2018. I'm eager to see as much more anime as I can. I'm motivated.
I know what my 2018 bi-monthly series will be, and damn does it have a clever name. But I may make that the subject of its own post sometime in January before my first post in February. Stay tuned for that. I know you can't wait.
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