Well, it wasn't my viewing of Ponyo that I'm talking about, though I do want to talk about that in this post. It was the way I prejudged Ponyo in 2008, and by extension, all others of its ilk.
I have this distinct memory -- not where I was, not when I was, but a distinct memory nonetheless -- of seeing a poster for Ponyo, most likely the one to the right or some slight variation on it. And I remember thinking "My, that doesn't look very sophisticated."
My standard for sophistication would have been whatever Pixar's latest was, which at that time was Wall-E. While Pixar was delivering bells and whistles -- with the space-age Wall-E being a particularly appropriate example -- Studio Ghibli was stuck back in the hand-drawn limitations of yesteryear. To be honest, I'm not even sure I knew what Studio Ghibli was back then, having only seen Spirited Away at that point. The indictment I was delivering was of Japanese animation in general, which I always thought of as "anime," though I no longer think that term truly encompasses what we talk about when discussing Hayao Miyazaki and his creative partners.
Needless to say I made no effort to see the movie in 2008, and only finally just got to it two days ago, when it was my February assignment in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta.
I've come a long way in my understanding/appreciation of Studio Ghibli since 2008, much of it accomplished in the past five years.
Um, exactly five years.
It was February 18, 2017, when I had my watershed Ghibli moment. I had already overcome a certain barrier in my mind by deciding to watch six anime movies in the year 2017 -- I still called it anime then -- as part of the bi-monthly series Audient Anime. But I didn't know if I'd really take to them until that first viewing, which was My Neighbor Totoro.
Boy did I take to My Neighbor Totoro.
I gave it five stars on Letterboxd, but I would have given it five-and-a-half or six if that had been available. I was swept away into Miyazaki's world and I loved it so much that I couldn't stand it.
But maybe the real turning point, which pointed out exactly how wrong I had been in the previous decade since my Ponyo snap judgment, was when I watched Kiki's Delivery Service two months later. Also five stars.
I have not since given another Miyazaki movie five stars, but there's only been two that have received fewer than four. Here is how I have made my way through Miyazaki's filmography since then:
Castle in the Sky (6/18/17) - 4 stars
Howl's Moving Castle (1/26/18) - 3.5 stars
Princess Mononoke (5/10/19) - 4 stars
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (3/4/20) - 4.5 stars
Porco Rosso (6/19/20) - 3 stars
Ponyo (2/16/22) - 4.5 stars
Which leaves me only his first feature (1979's The Castle of Cagliostro) and his most recent feature (2013's The Wind Rises) away from being a Miyazaki completist, though as fans desperate for more of his magic would know, he's slowly but surely working on another feature called How Do You Live?, which currently has no release date.
I possibly could have waited until I finished those two to write a piece like this, but, you gotta strike while the iron is hot and while the idea is in your brain.
Of course, Miyazaki is not the only purveyor of Japanese animation I dismissed when I dismissed Ponyo. In the time since My Neighbor Totoro, I have also seen and loved In This Corner of the World (directed by Sunao Katabuchi), Your Name. (directed by Makoto Shinkai) and Only Yesterday (directed by Isao Takahata), Takahata having directed my favorite Japanese animation film before this fruitful period, Grave of the Fireflies.
A few films during this period have not really hit with me -- Porco Rosso and Takahata's Pom Poko being examples -- but never have I disliked one of these films. (Actually, the one small exception to that is Earwig and the Witch, directed by Miyazaki's son Goro, but as this film was made digitally, I hardly think it earns a spot in this discussion.)
In 2008, I thought I disliked all Japanese animation films, even with the obvious exceptions to that rule that existed, like Akira and Paprika. (Other exceptions, like Fireflies, Ghost in the Shell and The Secret World of Arriety, would come later.) I clearly thought they were just that, exceptions, and your average such film was destined to disappoint me.
And I don't even know which movie I saw that once cemented this impression in me.
Well like I said, I've come a long way. I now realize that what I thought were "unsophisticated" choices were often just that -- choices on how to portray the characters, not financial or creative limitations. The faces of characters in Japanese animation will never approximate photorealism, and that's the point. They want to avoid the uncanny valley, but they also want these characters to have a distinctive appearance that is not indebted to some other style, nor trying to seem as realistic as possible. Why would we watch animation if our desire was to approximate realism?
It's Miyazaki's divorce from the constraints of realism that make him such a great artist, and Ponyo is a shining example of it. This film has Totoro's sense of low stakes wonder, though also the high stakes of the earth possibly being destroyed, which is mentioned almost as an afterthought. (When the title character, a goldfish with a human-like face, flirts with becoming human, it throws the earth's gravity out of orbit, leading the moon to careen ever closer to the planet -- making this a funny film to watch with Roland Emmerich's Moonfall still in cinemas.)
The choice of milieu is also key here. After umpteen movies in which Miyazaki fetishized the skies -- and at least one more yet to come as his next feature after Ponyo -- Miyazaki directed his attention below his feet to the ocean, rather than above his head to the clouds. Turns out his creative animals and vehicles and landscapes are just as suited to Ponyo's oceanic themes, plus there's a sense of something new being explored, which is always great. Not that Miyazaki doesn't explore something new every time out, but there's new and then there's NEW.
I was also really taken with the film's color palette, which struck me as different than he had ever used before. There are lush greens and yellows here that blew me away, which is interesting as it is not even a case of the expected new uses of the color blue.
Well, Hayao, I hope this post has atoned for my initial slight of you, your oeuvre, and the entire animated tradition from which you sprung.
Now get busy finishing How Do You Live?, will you?
No comments:
Post a Comment