studio ghibli

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

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A.I. tech bros’ latest attack on the basic dignity of everyday life targeted Studio Ghibli of all things, proving that absolutely nothing is sacred to these ghouls. There’s a recent software upgrade to the Plagiarism Generator technology that was advertised in the form of “Ghiblifying” pre-existing images with digital filters that adapt them to the visual style of the legendary animation studio. Nevermind the blatant copyright infringement that amalgamates already underpaid artists’ work into digital-age corporate slop. Nevermind that the studio’s broad cultural association with Hayao Miyazaki—and Hayao Miyazaki only—disregards the work of fellow directors & animators under that brand who have their own distinct style. The most insulting insinuation about the “Ghiblified” A.I. image trend is that it reduces decades of finely crafted animation to a few vague visual signifiers that could be summed up in a single word: “Cute.” Like the A.I.-generated Wes Anderson videos before it, this recent dispatch from Tech Bro Hell makes Studio Ghibli’s work look simpler, safer, and more twee than it is in practice, mining its surface aesthetics without engaging with the substance beneath. It’s just as empty & lazy as it is profane.

What would these “Ghiblified” A.I. images look like, for instance, if they pulled their visual cues from Isao Takahata’s work instead of Miyazaki’s? Would it capture the full span of life’s tenderness, cruelty, warmth, and pain, as gorgeously illustrated in The Tale of Princess Kaguya, or would it reduce the immensity of that film’s beauty to a few strokes of an algorithmic color-pencil? Would it convey the collectivist environmentalism of Pom Poko‘s radical politics, or just automatically equip all figures pictured with comically large scrotums? The real gotcha example, of course, is what an A.I. “Ghiblified” photo implicates about a film as devastating as Takahata’s WWII drama Grave of the Fireflies. I’m not sure how valuable the cutesy surface aesthetics of the studio’s character designs are in the context of a story about children starving to death during the societal disruption of war. In-film, the contrast between the characters’ classic anime cuteness (which Roger Ebert summarized as “enormous eyes, childlike bodies, and features of great plasticity”) and the real-life atrocities those characters suffer makes for horrific emotional impact, perfectly illustrating the inhuman evil of war. Using those visual signifiers out of context to cutesy-up your beach vacation photos is incredibly crass, then, if you take more than a half-second to think about it.

The biggest emotional gut punch of Grave of the Fireflies arrives in the first couple minutes, before you even get to know the children at the center. We’re introduced to our coming-of-age protagonist Seita in his dying minute, actively starving to death in a train station while passersby treat him as an inconvenient obstacle during their daily commute. When he passes, he leaves his body behind to reunite with the spirit of his even younger sister, Setsuko, who has apparently been waiting for him to join her in a firefly-lit afterlife. Both children’s fates are succinctly & poetically spelled out in this one quiet moment, so all the audience can do when the timeline dials back to 1945 is slowly watch it happen with no way to stop it. Seita & Setsuko are orphaned in the final days of WWII by firebombing raids and Naval attacks that leave both their parents dead. They live in a world sandwiched between mass graves below and falling ash from above, but they can at least depend on each other for community. Seita takes on housing & feeding his sister as his sole responsibility, dodging any pressure to join the war effort that would distract from her survival. As the opening warns, he fails, but he does manage to leave her with some joyous memories along the way despite the pain & indignity of starving to death, unhoused. It’s incredibly tough to watch.

Grave of the Fireflies indulges in all the usual youth-nostalgia and hand-drawn natural wonder that typifies Studio Ghibli’s broader approach to 2D animation, but it’s mostly in service of making the emotional tolls of war weigh as heavily on the heart as possible. It turns out that even when gorgeously animated, war is Hell. Worse than Hell, maybe. The most insidious images I saw during last week’s A.I. Ghibli Fest were from the official Twitter account of the Israeli army, cutesifying their real-time, real-world bombing & starvation of Palestinian children en masse as if they regard Grave of the Fireflies as an aspirational roadmap rather than a dire warning of past evils that should not be repeated. Of course, most people using the Ghiblified A.I. generators have much cuter, gentler works from the studio in mind, like My Neighbor Totoro (presuming they have any direct familiarity with the studio at all, beyond walking past advertisements for routine repertory screenings at the local AMC). When Grave of the Fireflies was first released in Japan, it was paired with Totoro on a double bill that confused & traumatized unsuspecting children who weren’t prepared for such a heavy night out. That late-80s programming choice underestimated the full scope of what Studio Ghibli offers as a movie studio that produces daring, emotionally complex art decades before the A.I. C.H.U.D.s repeated the same mistake. They’re not in the game to sell twee digital filters and stuffed commemorative plushies; Grave of the Fireflies is alone proof of that.

-Brandon Ledet

The Boy and the Heron (2023)

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Full disclosure: I’ve been struggling with what to write about The Boy and the Heron for over a week now. It’s obviously a beautiful movie, made with loving care, attention to detail, and bizarre imagination that one has come to expect from Hayao Miyazaki, and has all of his hallmarks of adorable and anti-adorable creatures, but also has a narrative that feels more incomplete than normal. I should also disclose that, although I am a forever proponent of watching these films with subtitles rather than with dubbing, my viewing experience was of the dubbed version of the film, and I’m not certain if there are differences between the two versions that could explain some of what I’m missing. 

Mahito Maki is a twelve-year-old boy who awakens one night to learn that there is a fire raging through Tokyo, and that the hospital where his mother is located is in the center of the conflagration. He runs toward the fire’s destruction, but his mother is lost. Some time later, his father, a manufacturer of air munitions, evacuates his family to his wife’s ancestral estate, currently occupied by his late wife’s sister, whom he has married in the interim since the opening scene. Mahito has trouble bonding with Natsuko, whom everyone remarks upon as being nearly identical to his late mother, and he further isolates himself by intentionally gouging a nasty wound in his head that is then presumed to have been the result of violence from bullies, and he is allowed to remain at the estate rather than having to go to school. Exploring the area, he finds a run-down structure and enters it through a doorway that is not completely sealed; later, he learns from one of his stepmother’s seven attendants, Kiriko, that this was the library of his great-granduncle, who was obsessed with magic and who disappeared in his youth, prompting the tower to be sealed. Mahito also finds himself the subject of the attention of a large grey heron, which speaks to him in a language he understands and tempts the boy to follow him into the tower. Fashioning himself a bow and an accompanying arrow (fletched with a recovered feather from the heron), Mahito enters the tower with Kiriko when searching for Natsuko, who has disappeared; deep within a hall, they encounter the heron again, who tempts Mahito with an image of this mother. Mahito manages to injure the heron in its beak because of the transitive magical properties of the heron’s feather, turning him into a grotesque bird man, who is ordered by a wizard to assist Mahito in his journey, and the heron, Kiriko, and Mahito find themselves transported to another world.

This isn’t a new story, not really. Children going to fantasy worlds is one of the oldest tropes of children’s literature, whether that world be Narnia or Oz or Neverland or Wonderland or Fantasia or the Labyrinth (etc.), and, from what I can tell, the novel from which The Boy and the Heron takes most of its narrative inspiration, 2006’s The Book of Lost Things, is also one of these narratives. In that novel, the main character’s stepmother has already given birth to his half-sibling (rather than being pregnant still, as in the film), and so there are even more parallels to fantasy media of this kind; I haven’t read the book, but a review of several summaries implies that the presence of a new baby is part of the incitement of the protagonist’s journey, as in Labyrinth. The tropes here are from all over. Just like the Pevensies in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Mahito has been evacuated from a city center during WWII (although we’re not supposed to think too hard about the fact that Majito’s father is making military equipment for the Axis); the recent death of the boy’s mother is even more strongly felt here than in The NeverEnding Story; and this film manages to ride the line that divides the Oz books from their most famous adaptation with The Wizard of Oz, as Mahito’s journey is clearly real, as Dorothy (et al)’s travels into Oz were in L. Frank Baum’s novels, but said world contains images that are derived from things that he has seen in the real world, as in the 1939 picture. 

What is new here also seems to have come largely from Miyazaki. There’s nothing in any of the summaries of The Book of Lost Things that indicate recurring bird images and motifs as part of that novel’s narrative (the book seems to largely feature canines and lycanthropes), but we all know that this man loves flight; it’s all over his work. Here, this is seen in the “real” world via Mahito’s father’s work as an air munitions manufacturer but which translates into several different species of birds in the “fantasy” world, all of whom have different natures that present to Mahito as things which at first seem cruel or wicked to him but which ultimately prove that the apparent violence of nature exists not because of malice in the world, but simply because existence does not conform to us as individuals. There is the heron first, whose motivations are unclear and who exists more as a trickster, whose behavior is inscrutable. Second are the pelicans, who first attack Mahito and are later seen descending upon and devouring this film’s cutesy sprite creatures, the Warawara. Although they seem to be malicious in this attack at first, a dying gull tells Mahito that their people are starving as a result of having been brought to this place, where they have no other natural food source. Finally, we meet the parakeets, who are largely anthropomorphic and willing to eat human flesh. The last of these do have some malicious intent, just as Mahito’s emotional climax of the film requires that he recognize that he has malice within himself as well, which saves him from the same fate as his great-granduncle. It’s this same realization that he has come to an age where he has to force himself to grow and mature as a person by recognizing that he can feel negative emotions and not act upon them that leads him to finally accept Natsuko and go home. After he has a fun adventure with the time-traveling child version of his mother, of course. 

I’m not sure that this one is destined to become an indisputable classic like some of Miyazaki’s other work, but that’s what we always say about late additions to the canon of an auteur with a career that has already proven that it will have a lasting legacy. It’s clearly a deeply personal film, and when making something that is created with an intentionally idiosyncratic worldview (rather than aiming for something more like universal appeal), there’s always the danger of making it insular and inscrutable. I certainly expect this one to have a smaller audience of devotees than something like Princess Mononoke or even Howl’s Moving Castle (which was greeted with a similarly lukewarm/confused audience reception as The Boy and the Heron upon initial release, to my recollection), but if there’s one thing that I’ve learned over the years, it’s that there’s no Miyazaki film that isn’t someone’s favorite, and that will apply here, too. It could even happen to you. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Arrietty (2010)

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It comes up here from time to time, but my favorite fictional thing is a story about tiny people in a normal sized world. I’ve talked about my childhood love of Honey I Shrunk the Kids and how that translated into a fondness for the (first two) Ant-Man movies, but a lot of it can be traced back to my utter absorption into one specific series of novels I read in my youth: The Borrowers, by Mary Norton. There’s nothing more magical to me than tiny beings using normal-sized objects in novel ways: the knight from a chess set as a kind of decorative bust; a watch, sans band, hung on a wall as a clock; a postage stamp framed as a piece of art. I never understood why those books were so much less well known than other fantasy novels of the same ilk, and I never could figure why Arrietty Clock, who was just about the coolest girl in the world, was less famous than Lucy Pevensie, Dorothy Gale, Pippi Longstocking, or Wendy Moira Angela Darling. There have been numerous adaptations over the years, but one of the best came out when I was too busy with grad school to take note of it, but I finally have, and it’s a delight. 

Arrietty was released in Japan in 2010 before seeing a U.K. release the following year and U.S. distribution through Disney in 2012, under the title The Secret World of Arrietty. I refuse to call it that (can you imagine if The Wizard of Oz was titled Dorothy’s Secret World or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was called The Secret World of Lucy?), but I do want to list it here for those of you who will want to seek it out for your own enjoyment. I’ll also recommend that, since the film is available on HBOMax in both the original Japanese and the U.S. English version, that you check it out in its original language, in spite of my love for Carol Burnett, who voices the Haru equivalent in the English dub. I was particularly fascinated to see this adaptation, which sets the story in (seemingly) 1980s Japan rather than Edwardian England, as I’ve always thought of this as a quintessentially English story, like Mary Poppins or the Narnia series, and although the idea of updating the setting to the U.S. seems heretical to me, I knew the Studio Ghibli aesthetic would more than make up for any displacement. 

Arrietty is a fourteen-year-old girl who lives with her mother Homily and father Pod. The three of them are “borrowers”: humanoid beings of 4-5 inches in height, who live alongside and parallel to full-sized humans. The former survive by “borrowing” from the latter, whom they call “human beans,” keeping themselves hidden and their existence secret. As the story opens, Arrietty has finally reached an age when she is to be taken on her first borrowing expedition into the home of an older woman named Sadako, who lives with her housekeeper Haru and who has recently taken in her great nephew Shō, a boy roughly Arrietty’s age who suffers from a heart condition. In the novel, Arrietty’s family lived in the base of a clock (hence their surname there), but here, they live largely beneath the house in a beautifully detailed home of their own; they access the larger house through a series of secret holes that are accessible only to them because of their size, although the passageways between them require a bit of exploration and adventure to navigate, and vermin like rats pose a threat to them. Shō spotted Arrietty in the garden when he first arrived and is fascinated by her, and he startles her when she and her father are on one of their expeditions, causing her to drop a precious sugar cube, which the Borrowers are forced to forsake. Shō further attempts to befriend Arrietty, with whom he shares both a profound loneliness and a deep melancholy, as she is likely to be among the last of her kind and has never known anyone other than her parents, while he has spent his short life as an invalid with few friends and little hope for a future despite an upcoming operation. Despite his best intentions, however, their friendship endangers the Borrower family in ways that neither could have predicted. 

This is not a perfect translation of the novel(s), but it is a marvelous and lovely example of how to translate a denser text for the screen. Some changes are small; I already mentioned above that the family lives in a crawlspace rather than a mantel clock, but there are also character changes that shift the story subtlely, and not for the worse. Shō is much friendlier from the outset than the unnamed boy in the novel, who has a bit of the old British superiority complex despite having been raised mostly in India; that is completely removed here, as is the fact that he had little English literacy as a result of having lived abroad. In the novel, it is this fact and Arrietty’s willingness to read to him that helps the two to bond, while here, the things that he does for the Borrowers he does purely out of the goodness of his heart. There are also fewer Borrowers here and the Clock family’s isolation is more profound as a result; Pod mentions to his daughter that there used to be others of their kind elsewhere in the house but that they have either moved on or been killed. The Clock’s relatives like Uncle Hendreary (Pod’s brother) who are rumored to have moved to a nearby badger sett and the boy’s attempts to transmit letters between the two families are cut, which also adds to the textual richness of the questions regarding any other Borrowers out there in the world; until we meet feralish Borrower Spiller later in the film, we’re unsure whether Arrietty and her family are the last of her kind, deepening her kinship with Shō. This also eliminates a lot of the squabbling between the various Borrowers, which is a fun comedic element in the novels as they get into rather large rows for such tiny specimens but makes for a more concise narrative here. 

But what’s most impressive here, of course, are the visuals. The backdrops are painted with that lovely Ghibli precision, and the style lends itself well to creating the sumptuous verdancy of an ivy-draped garden from the perspective of a four-inch teenager. Because Arrietty and her family are so tiny, the idiosyncrasies of every teacup, sideboard, and wainscot are terrifically magnified, and all of it is lovingly rendered in gorgeous detail. Great attention is paid to smaller characteristics as well; in one scene, Homily pours tea for her family, and it comes out in (relatively) huge globs because of the surface tension of the water, a characteristic that carries over to the behavior of rain in a different beautifully animated section of the narrative. A glob of cheese on toast, likewise, does not flatten, but retains its bead-like shape. All of these details combine to make the film incredibly immersive, and it’s all the more to its benefit. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: The Cat Returns (2002)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Studio Ghibli novelty The Cat Returns (2002), an anime fantasy film about a kingdom of anthropomorphic cats.

00:00 Welcome

02:40 My Winnipeg (2007)
03:40 The Twentieth Century (2020)
05:40 The Snyder Cut (2021)
11:30 Hannibal (2001)
13:15 Red Dragon (2002)
14:30 Hannibal Rising (2007)
15:40 The Boy Next Door (2015)
18:20 What Lies Below (2020)
25:00 Godzilla vs Kong (2021)
28:00 Mothra vs Godzilla (1964)
30:15 Godzilla vs Mothra (1992)

32:17 The Cat Returns (2002)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Mary and the Witch’s Flower (2018)

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Mary and the Witch’s Flower is the exact kind of movie that’s destined to be undervalued & taken for granted on sight. The first picture from the Studio Ghibli spinoff production company Studio Ponoc, it’s automatically going to suffer many unflattering comparisons to classic Hayao Miyazaki works like Kiki’s Delivery Service & Spirited Away. Adapted from the 1971 fantasy novel The Little Broomstick, which heavily features a school for witches & wizards, the film is also likely to be compared unfavorably to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (which likely borrowed just as much from its source material as it did elsewhere; Rowling’s work is practically a pastiche). Instant familiarity is destined to temper a lot of enthusiasm for Mary and the Witch’s Flower, but that kind of dismissive ungratefulness doesn’t consider just how rare of a treat this kind of thoughtful, traditionally animated work actually is on the modern children’s film cinema landscape. Given how much of a sucker I was for the goofy magic of The Worst Witch (speaking of works that likely heavily inspired Harry Potter) and the anime-lite tones of Little Nemo’s Adventures in Slumberland at the time, I’m convinced this would have been my favorite movie as a kid, were it released in the early 1990s. Anime has gradually become the last refuge for thematically thoughtful, intricately crafted traditional 2D animation. It’s worth celebrating a new studio’s arrival as a contributor to keeping that tradition alive instead of brushing them off for feeling like they’ve always been around. Besides, as a subject, witchcraft is just inherently badass.

The titular Mary is a bored preteen wasting away the final scraps of her summer in her great-aunt’s gorgeous country home. This idleness inspires her to follow a couple mischievous kittens into the woods in a down-the-rabbit-hole experience that lands her in a magical realm of witchy universities, mad scientists, and wild hybrid beasts that resemble psychedelic Pokémon. She accidentally stumbles into a Chosen One plot arc in this new world thanks to a magical flower & a sassy broomstick that temporarily grant her extraordinary witch powers. From there, it’s a race against the clock for Mary to save a damsel in distress Anime Boy from the clutches of the evil schoolmarm & her side kick scientist and to put a stop to put their cruel animal experiments before she’s found out to not be the Chosen One at all, but rather an intruder & a fraud. The story Mary and the Witch’s Flower tells isn’t nearly as complex thematically as it is impressive visually. The lessons learned here are, again, familiar to classic children’s media narratives: learning to be confident in your own abilities and accepting the things you cannot change about yourself (especially your physical attributes). The movie is much more interesting in the way it wakes its young audience up the magic of the mundane. Simple, everyday activity like the pleasure of gardening and the science of electricity is framed as a kind of real-world witchcraft, enticing children to find interest in both magic & science and the grey area between them. It may not be a mind-blowing feat in intricate storytelling, but it is adorably animated and easy to love. This is the exact kind of immersive comfort food I would have ground into dust, were it released in the days of obsessively repeated VHS viewings.

Instead of focusing on how Mary and the Witch’s Flower isn’t quite as intricately animated as Ghibli classics or as immersive in its books-long world-building as the Harry Potter series, I was swept away by its warm, familiar charm. It’s an increasingly rare treat to see traditional animation on the big screen in recent years, anime or otherwise, and I greatly appreciate the arrival of Studio Ponoc (and the surprisingly trustworthy distribution company GKIDS) for keeping the experience alive. The onscreen witchcraft was dazzling. The glockenspiel-heavy score occasionally felt like a G-rated Suspiria. The world it created was a fantasy space I’d love to mentally dwell in for a magical eternity. The only real bummer for me was that the theater was sparsely attended by appreciative cinema & anime nerds instead of being packed with wide-eyed, witchy children. I would have loved for Mary and the Witch’s Flower’s easy familiarity to have been a result of it always being in my life the way titles like Little Nemo & The Worst Witch have; I hope it finds the right kids at the right time so they can have that experience in my place.

-Brandon Ledet

The Red Turtle (2017)

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I made the mistake of believing that, because it was a PG-rated Studio Ghibli release, The Red Turtle would be able to hold my 10 year old sister in law’s attention for its brief 80min runtime. It turns out that this Oscar-nominated animation is less whimsical kids’ fare like a Kiki’s Delivery Service or a My Neighbor Totoro and more of a quiet art film reflection on existential stillness. The Red Turtle is a quiet, lonely fairy tale with no backstory and, more notably, no dialogue. Its grimly whimsical retelling of The Little Mermaid (now with a giant turtle!) feels much more closely aligned with its nature as a French Art Film than its distribution through Ghibli might suggest. I wouldn’t recommend making a small child sit through it (I really should have more thoroughly researched it beforehand myself), but it does have a quiet power in its visual, emotional storytelling style that makes it worthwhile for those with the right amount of patience.

A nameless man shipwrecked on a remote island spends his days building a raft that might lead him back to civilization and his nights dreaming of signs of humanity: bridges, string quartets, etc. His few successful attempts to build a raft are disrupted by a giant red sea turtle that, seemingly without purpose, destroys his vessel by ramming it from below. Angered (and now outfitted with a beard that makes him resemble the Sad Keanu meme), the man exacts violent revenge on the turtle that leaves it similarly shipwrecked on his new island home. At this point, the narrative’s similarities to The Little Mermaid emerge and the walls dividing fantasy & reality gradually break down. The turtle transforms into a human woman, the pair’s guilt over their violent acts & their isolation lead to lifelong devotion, and they form a romantic partnership that lasts decades, making room for both awe-inspiring triumphs & emotionally devastating downfalls as Nature take its course.

The most striking aspect of The Red Turtle is its fascination with the ebb & flow cycles of The Natural World. Plant life is treated with the complex visual detail of a classic children’s book illustration. An intense contrast is established between the muted grays of night & shadow vs. the vibrant colors of day & sunshine. Baby sea turtles & scattering crabs go about their daily business no matter the significance of the times in the human lives that surround them. Violence, love, survival, death, and rebirth flow across time in a full spectrum of the human condition. Even the back & forth cycles of dream & conscious reality are treated with a respectful awe & religious reverence for their Natural power. Without a word of dialogue outside a couple desperate shouts of “Hey!”, The Red Turtle finds a lot to say about the Natural course of human existence (and I suppose, by extension, turtle existence).

I don’t mean to scare parents off from sharing The Red Turtle with young children. The film’s themes sometimes stray toward the somber & the cruel, but there’s nothing especially traumatizing about its overall narrative. The film is more “adult” in its requirement of patience for stillness & quiet. If you’re watching movies with a child who isn’t easily distracted in long stretches of silence, you’re likely to have a better time of it than I did. My personal expectations of a Studio Ghibli animation release clashing with the delivery of a silent French art film was a poor exercise in Doing Research & Reading the Room. When I return to The Red Turtle, it’ll likely be at a time when I can watch it alone in that late night or early morning headspace where the walls between dreamworld fantasy & daytime reality are more malleable than usual. It’s the cinematic equivalent of what’s referred to in pop music as “a headphones listen,” so choose your audience with a lot more care than I did.

-Brandon Ledet

Tales from Earthsea (2010)

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twohalfstar

Not every Studio Ghibli release is going to be an automatic home run & there’s no better reminder of the animation giant’s capability for mediocrity than its mid-00s adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tales from Earthsea. Everything about this animated fantasy epic is competent, but difficult to rouse excitement over. Tales from Earthsea plays like a midway point between Miyazaki & Game of Thrones without ever reaching the heights of majesty or brutality from either end of that formula. Here you get the dragons & cursed swords of the best of the fantasy genre mixed with the magical bloodbaths of Princess Mononoke, but without the entertainment value powder keg that combination implies. Even the film’s director is not Hayao Miyazaki himself, but rather his son Gorō Miyazaki making his very unassuming debut. The result is pleasant, but ultimate forgettable & vaguely defined. You’d have to be really into dragons for this film to truly register.

The film opens with a noble king being murdered in his own castle by his own loving son. Confused & ashamed of his own actions, our reluctant assassin bolts into the wild, a desertscape with sprawling seaside villages that’s vaguely reminiscent of North Africa. There he befriends a cloaked wizard named Sparrowhawk and a mysterious abuse survivor around his own age, all while drawing the attentions of a second, much creepier wizard with an evil, soft-spoken voice & a wicked cruelty streak. Besides the heightened sense of violence & brutality promised early in an opening fight between dragons and carried throughout in details like forced slavery, threats of sexual violence, and a fantasy world stand-in for heroin addiction. Tales form Earthsea also recalls the adult parable leanings of Princess Mononoke in details like an organized wolf attack & the assassin child’s cursed sword, the source of his occasional urge to kill. Unlike with Mononoke, though, no themes are explored to any particularly enlightening end and the film’s big ideas about the balance between lightness & darkness, life & death mostly boil down to a battle between two rival wizards and their stuck-in-the-middle hostages.

From what I understand there were many changes made in adapting & condensing Le Guin’s work for the screen here that left many fans of the book frustrated, including Le Guin herself. Not familiar with this particular work from the author, though, I can only see that there were obvious elements at play that likely made the material look worthwhile for an adaptation (the eerie dream logic of tar-filled nightmares & the idea of a weapon possessing an otherwise kind soul were especially exciting), but they aren’t given a lot of room to develop or evolve here. Like with a lot of Le Guin’s work, which is typically expansive yet intricately detailed, this material likely would’ve been served better as a miniseries instead of a two hour film. Its problems extend beyond its supposed shortcomings as an adaptation, however. You can see it in the blades of grass. You can hear it in the emotionless songs. You can feel it in the CG aided camera movement. Tales from Earthsea is pleasant to look at, but thoroughly indistinct.

-Brandon Ledet

Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Ponyo (2009), and the Weirdly Relaxed Plotting of Hayao Miyazaki Features

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Although the animation medium he works in sometimes pigeonholes his accomplishments, Hayao Miyazaki is truly one of the masters of cinema, right up there with names like Bergman, Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Corman. And just like with a lot of the masters of cinema, I’ve only seen a small fraction of his work and I’m scrambling to catch up. Lately I’ve been making more of an effort to familiarize myself with a wider range  of Miyazaki classics outside re-watching Spirited Away & My Neighbor Totoro multiple times a year, which has lead me to a few less readily recognizable titles like Howl’s Moving Castle & Princess Mononoke over the past year. It’s been difficult for me to distinguish Miyazaki’s work form the rest of the filmmakers at Studio Ghibli in terms of style outside of his fascination with themes like immersion in the natural world & the wonder of flight. While recently watching the features Ponyo & Kiki’s Delivery Service in a single weekend, though, something struck me about the way Miyazaki’s features’ approach plot & pacing I hadn’t yet noticed. Once the director establishes the majesty of his films’ worlds & settings, he’s remarkably comfortable with bringing the story down to a full stop simply to marinate in the immense beauty he’s constructed. I had never noticed before how his films all tend to work this way in their own individual moments of lowkey self-reflection & immersion in setting before watching these two titles in rapid succession. Nor had I noticed how oddly comforting that plot structure can be.

Kiki’s Delivery Service is a simple story about a young witch coming of age as she leaves home to start a new, autonomous life in a foreign city. In an early jaunt of exposition the Miyazaki trademarks of intricate, detailed animation (seen most easily in its shots of wind blowing through tall grass) & wonder with the majesty of flight (she’s a witch after all; she even made her own broom) seem to promise an epic story of witchy misadventures as Kiki tries to find her footing in an overwhelming, sometimes terrifying world. I was more or less expecting The Worst Witch restructured as a big budget adventure epic. The film does feature some dangerous run-ins that fit the mold I’m describing, like an early tussle with some vindictive crows & a climax revolving around a downed zeppelin, but for the most part action & adventure are the furthest thing from the film’s mind. Most people in Kiki’s new city are supportive of the witchy visitor, especially once she becomes familiar & finds a sense of purpose in her broomstick-driven delivery business. For the most part the film’s plot is centered on small scale concerns like “Will she make new friends?” “Will she make her deliveries on time?” and “Will she beat the rain?”  Kiki’s Delivery Service isn’t a tale of a witch venturing out into the world as much as it’s about a witch finding confidence & autonomy within herself, with the film’s most major crisis being whether or not she’ll get her mojo back once her magic begins to fade. The way Miyazaki allows this inner struggle to play out & resonate is to establish a living space (an indoor-kid’s fantasy of an attic loft above a bakery with an ocean view) and allow Kiki to ruminate within it, as if she were morphing inside a cocoon. To pile any more action onto the plot would detract from the impact of Kiki’s inward journey & Miyazaki’s brilliance is in the way he’s comfortable with letting his protagonist’s downtime breathe & slowly mature.

Although its setting trades Kiki’s Delivery Service’s high in the sky adoration with flight for a polar opposite physical realm deep under water, Ponyo follows a similar trajectory in terms of plot & pacing. Miyazaki opens the movie with an immensely intricate galaxy of deep sea wonders, dazzling the audience with a majestic display teeming with underwater lifeforms. This peaceful balance is disrupted when a humanoid fish befriends a small human boy on dry land & shapeshifts to please him, playing out a strange slant on the fairy tale structure of The Little Mermaid. Ignoring the warning that “Fishes with faces who come out of the ocean cause tsunamis,” the two unlikely friends explore a life together at everyone else’s expense, causing a massive flood, as promised, that separates parents – both underwater wizards & overworked nursing home employee mothers alike – from their young children. Again, what’s interesting in the way Miyazaki constructs this fable is that he doesn’t push for big, exciting action sequences at every turn in Ponyo but instead seeks out a languid kind of majesty that’s remarkably confident & emotionally affecting in the way it allows you to sink into the places he’s created. Ponyo’s story works twofold in its development of a heartfelt, but doomed friendship and its sense of loss & confusion in the search of a misplaced loved one. What sticks with you in the film isn’t necessarily specific events or plot points, but rather visual details like a jellyfish galaxy or a candle-powered boat and, yet, an emotional story arc caries through in that setting-specific artistry

I think a large part of the brilliance of Miyazaki’s slow crawl pacing & sparse plotting is the way it allows you to sink into a space. The underwater world of Ponyo & the above-the-bakery apartment of Kiki’s Delivery Service live vividly in my imagination long after the end credits, feeling as real or as tangible as real-life spaces I’ve physically inhabited. As I look back to past films I’ve seen from the director I realize that this aspect has always been a major aspect of his appeal to me. I don’t always remember the finer points of the various adventures & mishaps in his films as much as I remember details like the gloriously crowded bedroom in Howl’s Moving Castle or the inside of the catbus in My Neighbor Totoro or the old woman’s cottage in Spirited Away. I was pondering the other day about what didn’t quite work for me in the recent French animated feature April and the Extraordinary World and I’m starting to think it had something to do with the film’s decision to crowd its runtime with an action chase plot instead of slowing down & luxuriating in the intricately detailed space it had created. The only animated film outside of Studio Ghibli I can think of that similarly pulls this trick off is Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (it even features a Ponyo-like flood), which, no surprise, Miyazaki himself had apparently worked at some point during its long, troubled production. The director’s reverence for defined space over quickly plotted pace has a special touch that allows you to mentally live in his worlds that some less pointed works would allow to fly by in a blur. For some reason it took rapid succession viewings of Ponyo & Kiki’s Delivery Service for me to catch onto that aspect of his work, but looking back I realize it had been there with me all along.

-Brandon Ledet

Princess Mononoke (1999)

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fourhalfstar

I’ve gradually become accustomed to a certain warmth & comfort in Hayao Miyazaki films, where a slow, languid pace allows the plot to trickle as we come to settle in an infinite, domestic space full of immense wonder. Even otherworldly dangers like Howl’s Moving Castle’s bird wizards & Spirited Away’s No Face are tamed & consoled by the warmth & domesticity of Miyazaki’s intricate, natural worlds. His characters always seem to find their way to calmness & peace in interior space, occasionally contrasted with the expensive majesty of flight. Imagine my shock, then, when I recently watched Miyzazki’s Japanese folklore masterpiece Princess Mononoke for the first time. It was like a glorious, unexpected punch to the face. Princess Mononoke might be the single most metal animated feature I’ve ever seen. Its shapeshifting warthog demons, severed arms, decapitations, and eco warrior terrorism were not only unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a Miyazaki film before; they were also inexplicably invigorating in a way that only the best of cinema can be. Its PG-13 violence was shocking, but also darkly beautiful and added a whole other layer of complexity to a director I’ve been gradually less able to fully understand or pigeonhole with each passing feature. It’s an exciting feeling.

The story of Princess Mononoke appears to be heavily steeped in Japanese history & folklore, but its basic elements are fairly understandable to a cultural outsider. A young prince must leave his village on a quest to lift a curse from his arm he incurred while slaying an undead demonic boar. His cursed wound allows him to “fight like a demon,” but being a mighty warrior is a small consolation prize for a spreading illness that will eventually bring his death. On his journey he finds himself stuck between two sides of an impending war. On one end stands an industrial iron-producing village helmed by a warmongering matriarch, representing the modern world. On the opposite end stands the natural world, represented by mythically large talking beasts, ancient spirits, and a Jungle Book-type princess who was raised by a pack of wolves. The prince must negotiate a peaceful balance between the modern world & the natural one before the two sides’ bloodbaths get out of hand, an escalating tension reflected in the way his cursed wound pulsates & worsens each time they clash.

It’s difficult to capture the fierce beauty of Princess Mononoke in words. I can’t describe the pure badass beauty of its titular character riding into battle equipped with a spear & mask on a giant wolf’s back, but nothing could supplant seeing it for yourself. Although his accomplishments are typically contextualized solely within the world of animation, Hayao Miyazaki is truly one of cinema’s modern masters & Princess Mononoke is one of his finest works, as complex & violent of an outlier as it is. The film juggles concepts as varied as war, deforestation, ghosts, industry spirituality, and the basic instructions on how to kill a god, all without ever feeling bogged down or overstuffed. In some ways its story is as simple as a young man fighting on both sides of a war he finds abhorrent in order to put an end to it & find peace. The implications of what that war means and how we define balance in a modern, industrialized world is much vaster & more fascinating, though, a depth Princess Mononoke commands in very few brushstrokes. Besides, it really is just so goddamn metal. You really need to see that girl riding that wolf into battle.

-Brandon Ledet

Illegal Art: Miyazaki’s On Your Mark (1995) & Girl Walk // All Day (2011)

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When Brandon first mentioned that there might be some difficulty finding Girl Walk // All Day in order to watch it as this month’s MotM feature due to its rights issues, the first thing I thought of was On Your Mark. A seven minute experiment that Hayao Miyazaki churned out while dealing with his writer’s block on Princess Mononoke, the short film is an animated music video created for Japanese rock group Chage & Aska. It was originally released in theatres with Studio Ghibli feature Whisper of the Heart (which Miyazaki wrote but did not direct or animate), but has never had a legal release in the U.S., and is often pretty hard to find, even online (I found a version with a quick Google search, but won’t provide the link for fear that it will be immediately discovered and pulled). It was set to be released as part of a stateside Studio Ghibli DVD set, but Aska’s arrest for alleged possession of MDMA and other paraphernalia in 2014 meant that the set was delayed while Disney Japan scrubbed the video. Earlier sets of the DVD released in Japan were even recalled and new discs returned that did not contain the short. A note to international travelers: don’t do drugs in Japan. You’ll see your body of work erased from existence like lost, unnamed pharaohs.

The video itself is utterly beautiful. There’s no dialogue, and I don’t really know if the song itself has anything to do with the images, but the story is relatively straightforward despite being non-linear. There is an outside world that is ostensibly irradiated, and an underground metropolis that is visually evocative of both Blade Runner and Akira. Within this city, a group of policemen crash an airship into a tower filled with armed cultists, and two of them stumble upon a young girl with beautiful angelic wings. The girl is immediately taken by E.T.-esque scientists, and the two policemen who first discovered her break into a laboratory to liberate her. The three fail to escape and plunge to their deaths, but then a Lola rennt style rewind-as- montage leads back to the point where they fell and they instead fly away; the two policemen take the girl out into the sun to release her back into the sky, where she floats away and out of sight.

There are a lot of Miyazaki’s recurring elements in play, most notably his love for the imagery of flight. Whether it’s a flying fortress in Castle in the Sky, Nausicaa zipping around on her flier in Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, porcine fighter pilots in Porco Rosso, or pretty much the entirety of The Wind Rises, Miyazaki loves to make the audience feel like they’re soaring. The three characters have little in the way of characterization, but the policemen show a lot of personality in just their faces and their selfless attempts to save the girl from experimentation. We don’t really need to know much about their world at all, but the narrative of the story is clear regardless. Just as Girl Walk tells a story with no words, so to does On Your Mark. And, as both are constantly facing potential deletion, so to should you take any opportunity that presents itself to catch either film.

For more on May’s Movie of the Month, the 2001 narrative dance video Girl Walk // All Day, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film & last week’s look at five other classic visual albums.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond