The long way I've come since Ponyo

How can I have come a long way since a film I only saw two days ago?

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?

Audient Anime: My Neighbor Totoro

"Whoa! Introducing a new series on us just like that, Vance, without any lead-up or lengthy preamble?"

Yes I am. Because it's more of an informal bi-monthly series, like when I rewatched all six Star Wars movies leading up to the release of The Force Awakens back in 2015. When you are doing bi-monthly series you gotta get started in February, so I'm launching one now in the hopes that we make it all the way through to December.

I'm couching my language in uncertainty because this series involves my son, and his viewing habits are not always predictable. But the attempt to predict them is what's causing me to launch Audient Anime, which makes for a very logical series to intermingle with my monthly series, Asian Audient.

My son, now six-and-a-half, is a huge Pokemon fan. There are Pokemon movies that I'm sure he'd love to watch with me, some of which we saw at a Hoyts kiosk when I was getting a different movie a few months ago. I promised him then that we would rent one "next time," but fortunately, he hasn't held me to that promise yet.

See, I don't want to watch Pokemon movies with him. But there are plenty of movies that will remind him of Pokemon that I'd love to watch with him.

I've been pretty derelict in my Studio Ghibli viewing. Almost impossibly, I have still only seen one film directed by Hayao Miyazaki, that being Spirited Away. I've seen probably 20 other anime films, but the medium's undisputed shining star has mostly eluded me. If you want to read the various obstacles anime presents for me, or has presented for me at different points in my life, you can follow the tag below this post to my other posts on anime. But let's just say the fact that I have not made a priority out of anime would be an understatement.

That had to change, and there's no better time than now to do it.

Although Miyazaki's films in particular, and anime in general, mostly have little crossover with the world of Pokemon, I figured the similar animation style would put my son in the mind of Pokemon and lower his barrier to entry. I sought advice on which film to start with, initially imagining Kiki's Delivery Service (for no good reason), but the members of my Facebook Flickchart group steered me toward My Neighbor Totoro. One said "Totoro looks kind of like a Snorlax," referencing a Pokemon even I was familiar with.

It wasn't easy to get my hands on -- I couldn't rent it from iTunes and it's not on any streaming services I subscribe to -- but after a couple weeks my library reserve did come through. I scooped it up yesterday.

We started out on a potentially worrisome note. I'd showed my son the cover and it piqued his interests, but shortly before we began watching he asked "Is it going to have battles in it?" I knew it wouldn't. In fact, I'd considered starting with something like Princess Mononoke because I knew it probably would have battles, but the Flickcharters advised against it -- too violent and nightmarish for a six-year-old. (So maybe we'll save that one for after he turns seven in August.) "I don't know," I lied. "I guess we'll find out."

So we put the younger one down for his nap and started watching.

Almost immediately I was put at ease. It was clear this was a world in which he felt comfortable already. He's watched hours of Pokemon and has recently discovered the similar Digimon. Anime is his bag, baby.

But I still worried about whether it would hold his attention, a sweet fantasy story with nothing in the way of physical conflict.

I needn't have worried about that either. Even just the two central little girls discovering their new house in the country was enough to draw him in, but when the soot sprites recede from the door to the bathhouse opening, he was properly fascinated. Hooked.

My only concern from then on came in the form of him asking how soon we were going to meet Totoro. The film doesn't actually introduce us to its title character until the 30-minute mark. But the wait was worth it. He loved Totoro, and we both especially loved the "cat bus" (does it have a name?) who shows up later. Totoro got me started, but the cat bus was the perfect emblem of the type of wonderful fantasy world in which we were now ensconced -- a fantasy world that it now seems crazy has largely eluded me to this point.

At one point he turned to me and said, "This might be the best movie I've ever seen."

Score.

And the score is much more satisfying than if I had just introduced him to a bit of anime involving "battles." It was heartening to see that my son has not lost his sense of wonder, and that an innocent world beautifully rendered can captivate him just like Pokemon using their moves on each other. I was similarly captivated, so it was a relief that my viewing companion wasn't squirming on the couch next to me.

One concern that I've had -- that I still have going forward with this series -- is that by watching these movies for the first time dubbed in English, rather than in Japanese with English subtitles, I wouldn't be giving myself my best first impression of them. It's something I wrote about here. But this English voice cast was on point. None of that sense of the words being disembodied from the actions or characters. In fact, the performances of the two little girls were particularly excellent. I was in love with the little girl Mei. So adorable, and so adorably voiced. If I understand correctly, Totoro may be one of the only movies where the English voice cast is this good, so I may have a bumpy road ahead of me. But then again, I suspect this whole series will feel a tad bumpy trying to meet the impossibly high standard set by Totoro. It's a tough act to follow.

Despite the fact that I can't possibly love the next movie -- maybe Kiki's, maybe something else -- as much as I loved this one, I am indeed licking my chops about our April viewing choice, and I suspect my son is too, though I haven't actually told him that this is a formal "viewing series."

Instead, I'll just choose a random April Saturday afternoon and show him a BluRay cover of our next movie, and I hope it will remind him of the experience we shared when we both discovered My Neighbor Totoro.

The anime language test

Most true cinephiles would never watch a movie that had been dubbed. There just wouldn't be any question of it. If they somehow stumbled over a dubbed version, they'd shut off the TV the moment they realized the mistake. They'd walk out of the theater if there existed any reputable theater that would actually show a dubbed film.

Interestingly, though, this anti-dubbing absolutism does not apply to anime.

It may just be me that observes this distinction, but I don't think so. Dubbing in the animated form should be just as off-putting as live action dubbing, especially since most animated content takes great pains to match the mouths up to the words. Japanese animation, however, is a slight exception to the rule. Although the mouths are generally designed to fit the words, the movements are (probably deliberately) left more ambiguous in order to better accommodate foreign audiences.

I personally have always watched anime with English dialogue, in part because it can be harder to focus on the lush imagery if you are constantly reading subtitles. But lately I've started to wonder if watching the movies dubbed has been a factor in why I don't love anime the way some people do, or the way I love other forms of cinematic animation.

So when I started the anime classic Ghost in the Shell on Friday night, and heard the dialogue start in English, I impulsively changed the language option to Japanese with English subtitles.

And loved the movie.

Now, there's no way to tell exactly how I would have felt about it if I'd watched it in English first. You can't watch something for the first time twice.

But given that the movie is barely 75 minutes, I decided that I could watch it in English a second time, and record my observations. The movie isn't due back at the library until Tuesday.

That might not complete the impossible task of replicating what it was like to watch a movie for the first time, but I was pretty sure the results would seem useful. I also hoped that without having to concentrate so much on the plot and the dialogue, I could soak in the images a bit better. So I threw it on again Sunday night.

And definitely liked it less in English.

But did I like it less because of the spoken language, because I had perhaps overrated it to begin with, or simply because the first viewing of any movie has an advantage over all subsequent viewings in terms of offering surprises, unknowns and discoveries?

Who knows.

I did reach a conclusion of sorts. What I appreciated so much about Ghost in the Shell on first viewing was not its plot (it's complicated and could benefit from an additional 30 minutes of world building, which will surely come in the 2017 live action version starring Scarlett Johansson) nor the strength of its animation (it's neither the best-looking nor the worst-looking anime I've seen). Rather, it's the atmosphere this movie creates. Ghost in the Shell establishes a melancholy, dreamy world in which androids consider how human they are -- making it a bit of a spiritual cousin (or, ripoff) of Blade Runner.

But that world has only a fraction of the impact when the characters are speaking English. This is an essentially Japanese world, with Japanese cityscapes and a fundamentally Japanese aura. My favorite sequence of the film is a transitional interlude in which the terrific (very Japanese) score is playing over a bunch of what you would consider B-roll of this world. It made me realize that it is this world in particular, and the exotic quality it has for a viewer in my position, that entranced me so.

Add a bunch of people speaking English, and it just creates an abrupt disconnect. As is the problem with any instance of dubbing, these voices coming out of these mouths just sound funny. And it's not because the characters are very clearly Japanese and the speakers are very clearly not -- in fact, many of the characters sort of seem white. It's because the dialogue is not native to the movie, and something about that will always be off.

Who knows, maybe it is those subtle differences between the movement of the mouths and the words that are coming out.

I have to pause to acknowledge another relevant factor: the talent of the voiceover artists. If Ghost in the Shell were being released in 2015 instead of 1995, its English voice cast would certainly feature known Hollywood actors with mellifluous voices bringing tons of baggage about our previous associations with them. That could be good or bad, but at the very least it would most likely be skillful. The English voice cast here is comprised of working professionals, anonymous folks who are probably not being careful directed, but doing more or less their own interpretation of the vocal inflections required by the dialogue. They responded to a need, rather than really contributing to the film's artistic thrust.

The benefit of having a Japanese vocal cast, then, is that I am much more poorly equipped to determine whether they are delivering the lines successfully or not. Those Japanese voice actors might have been terrible, but I'd never know it because I don't speak Japanese. Their deliveries sound good to an untrained ear like mine, and they do the ever-important work of making the movie feel how it was originally designed to feel.

Armed with this knowledge, that I want an authentic experience more than an easy one, I look forward to seeking out more anime in the future. I can't watch the ones I've already seen and not loved again for the first time, but I can dig deeper into some underexplored back catalogues, such as Studio Ghibli. Rather unbelievably, I've seen only three movies produced by Studio Ghibli, which is pretty scandalous for someone who calls himself a cinephile. And that includes only one movie directed by the great Hayao Miyazaki (that would be Spirited Away).

It does make me wonder about my favorite anime film of all time, Grave of the Fireflies (one of the two other Ghibli movies I've seen). I feel quite certain that I saw that in English, yet it impacted me profoundly. Perhaps they got a better English voice cast than Ghost in the Shell got, or perhaps the movie is just so damn good that I could have watched it in Greek without subtitles and still been blown away.

If you ever figure out the perfect formula for determining why we love the films we love, let me know.

Anime I can get behind

A couple weeks ago in this space I wrote that anime doesn't have a huge amount to offer me.

And then I saw Grave of the Fireflies.

I'd heard the movie discussed in film circles with the highest levels of praise, and I'd also heard how it was supposed to be very, very sad. But a part of me didn't trust that this praise wasn't coming from people whose other favorite movies are Akira and Princess Mononoke.

Still, after hearing another breathless mention of it about a week ago, I decided to promote it to the top of my queue. I watched it on Saturday night.

Wow.

In case you don't know the plot, Grave of the Fireflies is about two Japanese children who become homeless orphans in the waning days of World War II after their house burns and their mother is killed during Allied bombing strikes. The boy, 14-year-old Seita, serves as a de facto parent to the girl, 4-year-old Setsuko. They try to forge their way through an uncaring world dominated by individuals, even family members, who are forced to look out for themselves first. Making matters more melancholy, we know from the very beginning that things don't turn out well for at least one of the kids. The film starts with narration from Seita in which he gives the date September 21st, 1945, and says "This is the day I died."

Yikes.

As I sat there, gobsmacked, watching this movie, I naturally considered why it worked so well for me, while other anime movies generally do not. Here is some of what I came up with:

1) The animation is simple yet beautiful. One of my complaints in my February 17th post was that anime seems to be technologically stunted; anime released today does not look significantly better than anime released 25 years ago. Grave of the Fireflies was actually released 24 years ago, and it looks great. Some of the backdrops are rich and beautiful, and some of the imagery is perfectly elegiac in its simplicity. (I'm thinking of this one shot of a burst water pipe that kind of transfixed me.) But I think the age of the movie freed me up from worrying about perceived technical deficiencies and allowed me to just get lost in the story. Which I did.

2) The emotions are generally muted. A standard complaint I have about anime is that the line readings are incredibly unsubtle, either for melodramatic or comic effect. You'd think a movie about children starving as they steer clear of bombs and corpses would have a high melodrama factor, but Grave of the Fireflies does not. In fact, pretty much everything is underplayed and understated, making it all the more effective. When real emotion does creep in, it's totally earned.

3) It's grounded in reality. One thing I realized as I was watching this movie is that most anime involves some sort of fantastical element. This is not always a bad thing, and can in fact be a very good thing. But it definitely sets certain expectations and can strain narrative logic if not done well. Grave of the Fireflies is totally and utterly realistic. It's about human beings in real-world conditions, and could have easily been shot live action. Except then I don't think the effect would be quite as powerful.

4) It's not intended for kids. I've already told you that the kids' mother dies, so I'm not really spoiling anything more if I tell you how. You don't see how she initially becomes injured, but you do see her in a makeshift hospital, covered from head to toe in bandages with blood seeping through in various spots. From the first time you see her in this state, you know there's no way she's surviving. And in fact, the next time you see her, her bandaged body is being trucked out to be burned, covered in maggots. That's hardcore. As an aside, there's a great red herring related to her character. In the opening scene before the bombing, when they're all headed off to a bomb shelter, Seita asks her if she has her heart medication. She says she does. You expect this to come into play later in the story, but the nature of her injuries entirely removes her heart from the realm of her concerns.

Anyway, yeah. You should see it.

The stunted frustration known as anime

I saw a poster for The Secret World of Arrietty the last time I went to the movies. And as I get when I see any poster for an animated movie whose story origins are unknown to me, I got excited by the possibility of it being our next great discovery in animated film.

And then I saw the trailer.

Oh anime, you've suckered me again.

I didn't immediately get it, looking at this poster, that the movie was anime. Some of the hallmarks are there, in the eyes of the larger character, and in the general milieu of sprites and other small creatures, possibly of the spirit world.

But the trailer cleared up any doubts for me. Here it is:

Here's my problem with anime:

It's the one form of animation that never seems interested in looking any better.

The action is still a bit jerky. The mouths still don't line up correctly with the words being spoken. And the eyes, the signature of the form, are still exactly the same as when the style was first hatched back in the 1960s.

I'll give you that some of these "deficiencies" can be mitigated by good storytelling. I've enjoyed the storytelling in a number of anime movies I've seen.

But except in very rare cases, the willful insistence on never advancing keeps me at arm's length.

And I find this an especially strange impulse (or lack of impulse), since the Japanese have long been technical innovators in nearly every other endeavor known to man.

Even animated styles that are purposefully rudimentary have grown over the years. Let's take South Park, for example. Originally, the characters and sets were all, literally, shapes cut out of construction paper. That was, you would agree, key to their charm. But I don't think that today, approaching two decades since South Park started as a five-minute short that made the rounds on video tape years before there was such a thing as viral video, we would still tolerate the construction paper approach. Which is why slowly, gradually, imperceptibly, South Park has grown into a very sophisticated animated entity. Next time you watch the show, check out the backgrounds. Check out the character designs. Just check out the detail. Computers have made the show full-blooded and actually beautiful to look at -- without sacrificing the aesthetic that first made it seem so original.

The same can be said for such long-running shows as The Simpsons and Family Guy. If you compare the first seasons to the most recent ones, the style has stayed essentially the same, but the detail has gotten so much richer. I'd say we're better for it.

I know what you're going to say -- the details are much richer in anime than they were at the start, and the characters' faces do conform more to the words they're speaking and the emotions they're expressing than back in the 1960s. I can't argue with you there.

But I can argue the degree to which they've improved. I can argue that in the year 2012, you should not still be animating human beings who speak just by randomly opening and closing their mouths.

The funny thing about anime is that it splits people into two basic camps. One camp agrees with me. They undertake anime mostly out of a sense of duty, giving their attention to the occasional film that scares up enough critical attention to demand a viewing from any serious film fan or fan of animation. And sometimes, they even develop a limited affection for those films. (For me, one of those films is Paprika, which we actually own.)

Then there's the other camp. For that camp, anime can do no wrong. And you might even say that the more rudimentary the art appears, the more it conforms to what they expect. It's a specific form with a specific series of expectations, which sometimes include loud and piercing line readings and melodramatic emotions.

Maybe I should just not judge. Maybe I should just accept what camp I'm in and agree to disagree with the other camp.

But my incompatibility with anime is brought home to me anew each time my hopes are briefly raise for a film like The Secret World of Arrietty. And of course, you should read this post with all the standard disclaimers that this particular movie might be good, that it certainly seems to contain the possibility for wonder. I hate to be a bully toward anime when the story has such potential to be sweet and magical. I mean, I did take one look at that poster and start to imagine myself away into that world.

But then I took one look at the trailer and imagined myself right back out of it again.