The Crunchyroll streaming library already exceeds a staggering twelve-hundred titles (adding up to tens of thousands of episodes) and over a hundred live-action series. They recently scooped up the licenses for a bunch of full-length movies and glittering golden oldies.

Sherlock Hound features some of Hayao Miyazaki's earliest work. As you might surmise from the title, in this version, Sherlock Holmes is a dog. And so is everybody else. Lots of fun. I reviewed the series here.

In Magic Users Club (watch the OVA first), we learn that sitting on a broom (sans a pillow) hurts your butt, and the best way to deal with an alien spacecraft is to turn it into a giant cherry tree. (The first scene of the OVA has no sound because there is no sound in space.)

Patema Inverted and King of Thorn explore the unreliability of human perspective. I reviewed the former here.

Patema Inverted literally asks which way is up. King of Thorn wonders if really you know what time it is. Both require mighty suspensions of disbelief to get past the premises. But there's tons of material for anybody who enjoys musing about philosophical what-ifs.

In terms of narrative structure, King of Thorn reminded me of the "No Reason" episode of House.

Crunchyroll doesn't yet have the 3DCG Appleseed movies but it does have the 3DCG Vexille, a pastiche of every post-apocalyptic, mecha, and military anime series ever made. Watch it as a work of social commentary rather than for its dubious cinematic merits. I reviewed it here.

Voices of a Distant Star is Makoto Shinkai's brilliant debut film (and the best version of Ender's Game that isn't Ender's Game). I reviewed it here. I didn't much care for 5 Centimeters per Second, but it is the most beautiful teen soap opera ever made.

Welcome to the Space Show takes a gang of kids from rural Japan on an Art Deco roller coaster ride through a fractious galactic empire ruled by a reality TV show host. As the title suggests, it's a dazzling and hilarious trek through the stars.

Night on the Galactic Railroad is based on the fantasy novel by Kenji Miyazawa, an agronomist and social activist who died in 1933 at the age of thirty-seven. Little known for his poetry and fiction in his lifetime, he is now considered one of Japan's great literary figures.

Night on the Galactic Railroad inspired Leiji Matsumoto's anime classic Galaxy Express 999. This morally complex work of science fiction won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1978 and the Animage Anime Grand Prix prize in 1981.

Video links

5 Centimeters per Second
King of Thorn
Galaxy Express 999 (Tubi)
Magic User's Club
Magic User's Club OVA (YouTube)
Night on the Galactic Railroad
Patema Inverted
Sherlock Hound (YouTube)
Voices of a Distant Star
Vexille
Welcome to the Space Show

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, crunchyroll, fantasy, matsumoto, miyazaki, movies, science fiction, shinkai, streaming

With Hayao Miyazaki again coming out of retirement to direct his (absolutely positively) last film, Renato Rivera muses about the Studio Ghibli legacy. At this stage, Miyazaki is a one-man show, recruiting free-lancers to work under the Ghibli banner on one-off productions.

Directors like Mamoru Hosoda, Makoto Shinkai, and Hideaki Anno are readily mentioned as heir apparents, but Rivera points our attention to what lesser-known Studio Ghibli alumni have been up to.

Debuting this summer is Mary and the Witch's Flower, with ex-Ghibli staffer Hiromasa Yonebayashi at the helm (The Secret World of Arrietty and When Marnie Was There).


At least based on the previews, what we have here is Kiki's Delivery Service meets Spirited Away (and perhaps Howl's Moving Castle), which certainly has me interested.

And for something completely different, an ad campaign from Francois, a Kyushu-based bakery chain. It's been going on now for ten years now. Edited together, the ads tell the ongoing story of Cassis and Arle.

The work of Ghibli veterans, it's Kiki's Delivery Service (Kiki lives above a bakery) meets Whisper of the Heart meets Only Yesterday




In these videos it's easy to spot almost identical scenes from original Ghibli productions. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I put it down to great artists stealing. Often from themselves.

Labels: anime, miyazaki, pop culture, studio ghibli, television

Mamoru Hosoda was briefly slated to direct Howl's Moving Castle but left after what really were "artistic differences." All for the better, as it turned out. Miyazaki took over and made a great movie. And now Hosoda is well on his way to matching his record.

Hosoda is one of the few directors I consider self-recommending: the name alone in the credits is enough.

If anybody stands to inherit Miyazaki's mantle, it's Hosoda, whose films rival Ghibli productions for their consistent quality, dramatic depth, a sheer entertainment value: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006), Summer Wars (2009), and The Wolf Children (2012).

And this year, The Boy and the Beast. The description sounds like supernatural version of The Karate Kid: the bellicose, bear-like swordsman Kumatetsu takes Kyuta under his wing and trains him to be a fighter.


The setting is Shibuya in Tokyo, except that a connection to an alternate realm has turned this Shibuya into a kind of postmodern Narnia. (Blood Blockade Battlefield sports a similar premise, though in New York, so maybe we've got a sub-genre going here.)

Funimation has licensed the film for North America; it's scheduled to open in theaters in 2016.

Speaking of the Miyazakis, Goro Miyazaki's Ronia the Robber's Daughter, based on the children's fantasy novel by Astrid Lindgren, has been made available to international distributors. The series ran for 26 episodes on NHK between fall 2014 and March 2015.


The series is currently streaming on Amazon.

And speaking of Studio Ghibli, GKids is distributing Only Yesterday, Isao Takahata's 1991 slice-of-life melodrama, with voice-over work by Daisy Ridley, no less. (And GKids now lists Ocean Waves, the last Ghibli film to be released in the U.S., on its website too.)

Related posts

The Girl who Leapt through Time
Summer Wars
The Wolf Children

Labels: anime, funimation, gkids, hosoda, japanese culture, miyazaki, movies about japan, nhk, studio ghibli

This is one of those funny juxtapositions that tests just how big an anime geek you are.


Sitting on the back of the truck is a baby ohmu (okay, a plastic replica), a species of giant bug dreamed up by Hayao Miyazaki for his post-apocalyptic epic, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

In the movie, a baby ohmu is kidnapped by the bad guys in order to stampede the rest of the herd into destroying the last defensive redoubt outside of Nausicaä's village.


When ohmu really get their dander up, their eyes glow red. These particular ohmu are not happy campers. So you'll want to steer clear when the parents show up (triggering a classic eucatastrophic climax).

Labels: anime, apocalyptic fiction, japanese culture, miyazaki, pop culture

Along with Mamoru Hosoda, Makoto Shinkai comes closest to capturing the cinematic "look and feel" of Studio Ghibli (Shinkai cites Castle in the Sky as his favorite anime). However, I think Hosoda hews much closer to Miyazaki's (and John Lasseter's) emphasis on story driven by plot and character.

Shinkai waxes moodier than I usually care for, emphasizing affect over effect. But, boy, can he capture moods! His visual palette is stunning, exquisite, and deeply evocative. Voices of a Distant Star is less a film than a narrative poem. (It's also the best version of Ender's Game that isn't Ender's Game.)

(Click on images to enlarge.)

The excruciatingly gorgeous 5 Centimeters per Second vividly captures (especially in the last scene) a very real moment of self-realization. You want honest emotions? Like, man, I'm grokking it totally. But I'm not sure I'd call it "entertaining." Not beyond the dazzling cinematography.

In other words, 5 Centimeters per Second may be the most beautiful work of literary fiction ever created.


One exception in the collection is Children Who Chase Lost Voices. This retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice (Izanagi and Izanami) visually merges the worlds of Totoro and Princess Mononoke in a young adult adventure through the underworld. Death and loss is still the subject, but less meditatively.


Mono no a'wa're is Shinkai's specialty, referring to the classical Japanese aesthetic concept of the beauty that can be found in loss and in the transitory nature of things, "a gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life."

A'wa're isn't about being nihilistic or deliberately depressing. It's the simple recognition that nothing lasts forever, and if you know where to look there's beauty in that too, so it doesn't have to completely bum you out.

Shinkai's oeuvre truly comes together in Garden of Words, a story told in images that suffuse the senses like a Monet exhibition. No cinematic rain has ever felt wetter. Though here Shinkai does drive toward a specific resolution that pays off in the final frames (stick all the way through the credits).


Senri Oe's 1988 hit single, "Rain," inspired the screenplay. In the movie it's performed by Motohiro Hata.

In Garden of Words, Shinkai has given a well-established romance subgenre (in Japan) a poignant twist. Once you realize that, the film is worth watching again to see how he advances the plot without showing his hand, and how many subtle touches come alive with the additional context.

Netflix still carries The Place Promised in Our Early Days in its dwindling DVD catalog. All of the titles are available at Amazon in one form or another. She and Her Cat is included as an extra on the Voices of a Distant Star DVD.

 • She and Her Cat (short; cats)
 • Voices of a Distant Star (short; science fiction)
 • The Place Promised in Our Early Days (science fiction)
 • 5 Centimeters per Second (contemporary)
 • Children Who Chase Lost Voices (fantasy)
 • The Garden of Words (short; contemporary)

Labels: anime, crunchyroll, hosoda, miyazaki, personal favs, shinkai, studio ghibli

On the surface, The Wind Rises is a biopic about Jiro Horikoshi, the aviation engineer who designed the Mitsubishi Zero. That Hayao Miyazaki broached the subject at all earned him criticism in some quarters for not being sufficiently contrite about Japan's role in WWII.

This criticism is not only absurd, it is mostly tangential to the substance of the film. (Though Miyazaki is guilty of making it all look gorgeous.)

There are people who are simply opposed (selectively, of course) to depicting war in anything but Manichaean terms. To be sure, Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima was too morally relativistic for my tastes, but this is not a narrative trap that Miyazaki stumbles into.

To start with, The Wind Rises isn't about the Zero at all, but instead follows the development of the Mitsubishi A5M. First flown in 1935, it shared its unique inverted gull wing design with the Junkers Ju-87 Stuka and later the Vought F4U Corsair.

And it's not really about that either.

The Wind Rises is about war primarily because of the time period. The movie mostly takes place during the 1920s and 1930s and reflects Miyazaki's ambivalence on the subject. The most indelible images are of the destruction visited upon Japan, and he isn't subtle about who is in the wrong.

Vacationing at a resort in Karuizawa, Horikoshi is drawn into a puzzling conversation with a mysterious German visitor by the name of Castorp (a character in The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann).

Castorp:	It is a nice night. Here ist der Zauberberg.
Horikoshi:	The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann. [Like many Japanese engineers, he'd spent time in Germany.]
Castorp:	Yes. A good place for forgetting. Make a war in China? Forget it. Make a puppet state in Manchuria? Forget it. Quit the League of Nations? Forget it. Make the world your enemy? Forget it. Japan will blow up. Germany will blow up, too.
Horikoshi:	Do you think Germany will go to war again?
Castorp:	Yes. They must be stopped.

Miyazaki's Castorp was perhaps inspired by Richard Sorge, a German journalist who worked in Japan as a double agent for the Soviet Union. One of the greatest spies of all time, he was also the greatest Cassandra, seeing his reports on Operation Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor ignored.

Castorp tells Horikoshi that the German aviation pioneer Hugo Junkers has run afoul of the Nazi government: "He bites the hands that feeds him. And he will lose. The Nazis are a gang of hoodlums."

This comparison to Horikoshi's "see no evil" approach to his work is made explicit in the parallel story of Horikoshi's romance with his wife Nahoko. The relationship blossoms as Horikoshi's airplane prototypes break apart and plummet to the ground one after the other.

Then at the moment of his technical triumph, she succumbs to tuberculosis. His success is rewarded with her death—the ultimate price of his obsession—as was Japan's in a few short years.

At its core, The Wind Rises is about moral compromise and the creative process (see, for example, the depiction of Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen), told as a traditional "Showa drama."

"Showa" (the era name of Emperor Hirohito) here refers to period melodramas that take place during the first half of the 20th century. As in The Wind Rises, Showa dramas are often bracketed by Great Tokyo Earthquake in 1923 and the firebombing of Tokyo in March of 1945.

The former draws the curtain on "Taisho Democracy," the latter symbolizes the folly of WWII, after which life must be wrenched forth from the ashes. (A more optimistic sub-genre begins in 1945 with the Occupation and ends in 1964 with the Shinkansen and the Tokyo Olympics.)

So Miyazaki concludes his swan song following a familiar theatrical formula that brings us back to the beginning of his oeuvre.

The Wind Rises should be viewed in the context of his two great flying films: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the post-apocalyptic epic that founded Ghibli Studios, and Porco Rosso, his tribute to the "Lost Generation" of post-WWI aviators.


The aircraft that fill Horikoshi's dreams resemble Nausicaä's jet-powered glider, while bombers lumber through the sky (as they do in Nausicaä's world) and crash and burn. To fly is to live, but when flight is brought to the fight, the inevitably result is death and destruction.


Like Nausicaä, the protagonist of Porco Rosso only barely survived the aerial gauntlet and has paid the price. He is a Hemingwayesque fighter ace whose PTSD turned him—literally—into a pig (hence the title).


One day on patrol, he observes a band of silver far above him. Soaring skywards, he discovers an aviation graveyard in the sky, his friends and foes piloting their ghost planes in a great eternal round. They tell him that now is not his time to join them and he must return to the world below.

The Wind Rises concludes with the same visual metaphor, as a squadron of Zero fighters flies up to join that great sepulcher in the sky (and perhaps here, having announced his retirement, Miyazaki bids farewell to his body of work).

But this is not Horikoshi's time either. Accompanied by his spirit guide, the Italian aircraft designer Giovanni Caproni (playing the same role as Piccolo in Porco Rosso), he departs the aeronautical graveyard for a burning Tokyo that will, in time, rise once again.


The title of the movie comes from "The Graveyard By The Sea" by Paul Valéry: "Le vent se lève! . . . Il faut tenter de vivre! "The wind rises! . . . We must live!"

Because in 1945, that was the only thing left for the people of Japan to do.

Related posts

Twilight of the Zero
Miyazaki's European flying arc

Labels: anime reviews, history, japanese culture, japanese movie reviews, miyazaki, showa period, studio ghibli, technology, ww2

As previously mentioned, singer Aska's arrest for meth possession had the silver lining of reminding Hayao Miyazaki fans of a music video he directed for Chage & Aska back in 1995. Alas, this flurry of publicity resulted in the video getting pulled from an upcoming box set.

The video was originally released with two Chage & Aska tracks: "On Your Mark" (Japanese lyrics) and "Castles in the Air" (English lyrics). "Castles in the Air" strikes me as much more relevant to the specific content and was probably written with the video in mind.

Miyazaki tells a complete story, albeit in a non-linear fashion. There are echoes of Castle in the Sky and the flying gunships go back to his first Studio Ghibli film, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and even Blade Runner (that had a profound effect on the anime aesthetic).

Perhaps most tellingly, in the opening sequence of Nausicaa, a similar girl with wings appears in the "prophesy scroll."


All fused with the time-rewind plot device that dominates the Tom Cruise sci-fi flick, Edge of Tomorrow. (Incidentally, Edge of Tomorrow is based on All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, illustrations by Yoshitoshi ABe. Yes, there is an official translation.)

It's tempting to interpret the opening sequence in the video as a commentary on the March 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system by the Aum Shinri Kyo cult and the subsequent police raids. But production of the video had already been completed by then.

In this interview, Miyazaki points to the 1989 Chernobyl meltdown (the massive sarcophagus looming above the abandoned town). He would have been aware of the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. (If it bleeds in the U.S., it leads in Japan too.)

Of course, Occam's Razor also suggests that Miyazaki stitched the script together with whatever spare narrative parts were lying around at the time. He admits to sifting through the lyrics and making them mean what he wanted them to mean.

But for those of us who delight in deconstructing pop-culture sci-fi texts (regardless of authorial intent), you can find a summary of the story here and way too much analysis here.

There are several versions of the video floating around the Internet. You can find versions of "On Your Mark" on YouTube. Even if you don't understand Japanese (and frankly that doesn't help much either), it's a heckuva performance.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, criticism, miyazaki, music, personal favs

The two social upheavals that ushered Japan into the modern age—the Meiji Restoration (1868) and the Occupation (1945-1952)—were imposed upon and accepted by the populace with such efficiency and acquiescence that the existing status quo was never truly displaced.

It simply stepped to the side to make room for yet another political order, as it had several times before. The result is a society simultaneously running multiple operating systems, a living paradox that few Japanese feel compelled to settle or resolve.

The traditional adorns the post-modern, the very old lives beside the very new, with no fear of the one displacing the other. Japan's economy presents a model of "flattened" capitalism dreamed of by Piketty and his peers, that at the same time preserves the baked-in social stratification left over from 250 years of Tokugawa rule.

Extreme permissiveness thrives alongside extraordinary conformity. In a society that at times appears devoid of moral limits, a police force with almost unfettered powers ruthlessly enforces the lines that must not be crossed. With few checks and balances, the accused are presumed guilty until predictably found guilty.

The most recent case of a crossed line is Ryo Aska, the "Aska" (on the right) in the popular rock duo of Chage & Aska. When he got busted last month for possession of ecstasy and meth, the boom was lowered on him like a battered ram.


It's a case that might bring to mind the travails of Robert Downey Jr. from a decade or so ago. Except that when Robert Downey Jr. ended up behind bars, Walmart didn't immediately sweep the shelves clean of any movie or television series in which he had ever appeared for fear that his sins would taint their good name.

Aska should be so lucky if he only had to worry about the ire of the retailers. Reports the Wall Street Journal:

Chage and Aska's label, Universal Music LLC, released a statement Monday saying it would halt shipments of all of the duo's works and retrieve all previously distributed products from stores.

Yes, there is such a thing as bad publicity. The way the Japanese media treats it—including the stolid NHK—you'd think Eliot Ness just nabbed Al Capone (and all before any formal indictment or arraignment). Michael Cucek sees this laissez-faire-meets-iron-fist approach as part of a nationwide scared-straight strategy:

By selectively, infrequently, but mercilessly applying themselves to cases, the police and the courts [in Japan] create strong incentives for the citizens to police themselves . . . Tak[ing] note of what happens to those who become trapped in the pit of the law (don't call it "justice") system, [they] will strive, of their own volition, to never, ever become trapped in that system themselves.

On the other hand, do keep in mind the words "selectively and "infrequently." The incarceration rate in Japan is 55/100,000 population, compared to 149/100,000 in Britain and 716/100,000 in the U.S. Unless he's an idiot, Aska is unlikely to do "hard time."

A silver lining briefly glimmered as the scandal brought to light the obscure "On Your Mark" music video Hayao Miyazaki created for Chage & Aska back in 1995. But it only came to light because the release of a box set of Miyazaki's films was delayed so—you guessed it—the offending title could be removed from the collection.

Appropriately penitent.

If Ryo Aska is a good boy and plays according to the script, he'll eventually be rehabilitated. Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, a member of the aging boy band SMAP, could give him some pointers. Back in 2009, Kusanagi was arrested in Tokyo's Hinokicho Park at three in the morning, drunk as a skunk and buck naked.

Kusanagi only had to spend a month in the wilderness. He donned the requisite sackcloth and ashes and "Tokyo prosecutors decided against indicting Kusanagi because he had expressed regret and had already suffered social embarrassment."

Aska, however, is accused of a more serious felony. Robert Downey Jr. ended up sentenced to an "extended stay in rehab." Aska can at best hope to follow the example of singer Noriko Sakai.

In August 2009, Sakai received a three-year suspended sentence for drug abuse (a tiny amount of meth). Even before sentencing, she had lost all of her endorsement deals, her clothing line was pulled from stores across Japan, and her record label withdrew her CDs from distribution and suspended downloads of her songs.

Her entertainment career didn't resume until November 2012.

Right now, the big decision before Aska is making the carefully-timed transition from proclaiming his innocence to bowing and scraping and publicly atoning for his personal failings. And then figuring out what to do until he can start working gigs again.

Related posts

On Your Mark
Lawyering up
Justice for all (Japanese)
(Less) crime and (less) punishment

Labels: japan, japanese culture, law, miyazaki, music, nhk

A three-minute retrospective featuring the movies Miyazaki has written, directed, and produced.

Labels: anime, miyazaki, studio ghibli

Comic Book Guy gets engaged to Kumiko, a comic book artist from Japan. Her father flies to Springfield to talk some sense into her. Recruited as the go-between, Homer takes him to a Japanese restaurant for a man-to-man. A few too many glasses of snake wine later:


A drunken stupor whisks them off to a full-blown homage to Hayao Miyazaki.

Starting with Spirited Away (the mask-wearing ghosts). Then My Neighbor Totoro (Otto's cat school bus). Porco Rosso (Chief Porky Wiggum). Kiki's Delivery Service (Patty and Selma flying to the DMV). And Howl's Moving Castle (Apu's moving Kwik-E-Mart).

Labels: anime, miyazaki, personal favs

I've got a soft spot for feel-good, post-war Showa dramas that take place during the 1950s and early 1960s. Pure Horatio Alger stuff, an entire nation pulling itself up by the bootstraps. From up on Poppy Hill plays the heart strings with all the right chords.

Unlike most Ghibli films, From up on Poppy Hill has no surrealistic or fantasy elements. As a girl-meets-boy high school melodrama, it could be favorable compared with Whisper of the Heart, that takes place a generation later.

The story begins with Umi managing her grandmother's boarding house on a hill overlooking the Port of Yokohama. Her mother is doing post-doc work in the U.S. Her father was killed during the Korean War when his ship hit a mine, so she also watches after her brother and sister.

Upon meeting Shun, however, our super-competent protagonist is thrown for a bit of a loop.

Shun literally falls out of the sky while staging a publicity stunt in an effort to save the ramshackle old building that houses the high school's clubs from the wrecking ball. The delightful Ye Olde Curiosity Shop depictions of the clubhouse alone are worth watching the movie for.

Shun publishes the school paper, and had already caught Umi's attention with a haiku not-so subtly directed at her. Recruited to the cause along with her sister, Umi naturally devises a highly practical approach to the problem, which Shun quickly sees the wisdom in.

Halfway through the movie, however, the quiet pace of their high school romance is unsettled by a dramatic plot twist that revolves around Japan's peculiar family register system. (This particular plot twist is a not-uncommon one in Japanese melodramas.)

So now it's a race (some actual racing about does take place in the final act) to save the clubhouse and their relationship. But even then, nobody wigs out. Everybody's got his head screwed on right. Thankfully, even the grown-ups are grown up.

This backwards glance at the Japan of a half-century ago is certainly steeped in nostalgia. Though thinking about the Japan I experienced twenty years later, the cluttered, warmly-lit nooks and crannies of Tokyo and Yokohama at times looked awfully familiar to my eyes too.

I've bought croquette and tonkatsu at shops just like that.

From up on Poppy Hill is a gentle melodrama about good, decent, hardworking people. There's no reason for that to ever grow old.

The English script adaptation and dub are excellent, with Sarah Bolger and
Anton Yelchin (Chekov in Star Trek) in the leads, and featuring the voices of Chris Noth, Gillian Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Beau Bridges, Bruce Dern, and a few lines from Ron Howard.


A note about the names: Umi (海) means "sea." Sora (空) means "sky." Riku (陸) means "land." Shun (俊) means "sagacious."

Labels: japanese movie reviews, miyazaki, personal favs, showa period, studio ghibli

Hayao Miyazaki latest film, a biopic about the designer of the Zero fighter plane, is not Miyazaki's first film about (real) fighter planes. In Porco Rosso, an Italian fighter pilot's WWI experiences have turned him (literally) into a pig. He declares: "I'd much rather be a pig than a fascist."

And speaking of the Miyazakis, From Up on Poppy Hill, a post-war Showa melodrama directed by Miyazaki's son, Goro, is scheduled for a September release on region 1 DVD.

Goro's first effort, Tales from Earthsea, is a good example of a bad adaptation. It is technically proficient, but anybody not familiar with the Earthsea series (like me) would just end up confused.

Even Le Guin had mixed feelings about the film and the editorial choices made about what was kept, cut, and changed.

I saw NHK documentary about Hayao Miyazaki when Earthsea was coming out and it was clear that he thought the "suits" had rushed the "heir apparent" into the director's chair before he or the project was ready.

He was so grumpy at the in-house screening it made me cringe. But Goro must have a thick skin and learned a lot in the meantime as From Up on Poppy Hill has been very well received.

Related links

Twilight of the Zero

Labels: miyazaki, movies about japan, nhk, showa period, studio ghibli

Mamoru Hosoda started out his career working for franchise productions (Digimon, One Piece). With The Girl who Leapt through Time (2006), Summer Wars (2009), and now The Wolf Children (2012), he's proved himself one of the best and most original anime directors in the business.

The Wolf Children deserves a place alongside Miyazaki's "quiet fantasies" such as My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Whisper of the Heart. Like Miyazaki, Hosodo embraces the sentimental while avoiding the maudlin, communicating a deep sense of poignancy and loss that Miyazaki rarely achieves.

This is less the loss that comes from melodramatic tragedy (the father dies early on, in what is more of a preface to the rest of the movie) than the inevitable loss that comes from simply living a life to its fullest.

Hosoda has masterfully fused two fundamental concepts of Japanese aesthetics: wabi-sabi, the beauty of the old. Not that of antiques in a museum but objects allowed to age and wear in their natural settings. And awa're, "an awareness of impermanence or transience of things, and a gentle sadness at their passing."

This is a story about family, community, and coming-of-age in rural Japan, a part of Japanese society that is itself inexorably aging and wearing away. As he did in Summer Wars, Hosoda has taken a genre fantasy and moved it to the Japanese countryside (which, to much of his audience, is no less fantastical a setting).

The rural drama in Japan has become a genre of its own (a common variation is the island drama).

The best-known example outside Japan is probably Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro. A lesser-known Yoji Yamada classic is Harukanaru Yama no Yobigoe ("The Call of the Distant Mountains"). A wanted man on the run (Ken Takakura) is taken in by a widowed farmer's wife (Chieko Baisho) in Northern Japan.

In Home: Itoshi no Zashiki Warashi, struggling businessman Yutaka Mizutani gets transferred to the sticks. The traditional old house (similar to the one in The Wolf Children) he rents for his family turns out to be haunted by a zashiki warashi, the ghost of a child who brings good fortune to those who treat it well.

Like the zashiki warashi in Home, it's pretty much impossible not to read scads of metaphors into The Wolf Children. There's the obvious (little kids are wild animals), but Hosoda is tackling a much bigger theme: how the maladaptive adapt to societal norms. Or in some cases, how they simply choose not to.

Rarely has the truism that children grow up to pick their own paths in life been stated so unpretentiously and in such a heartfelt manner.

Thankfully, though, Hosoda doesn't let the "message" get in the way of taking the story literally either.


I saw The Wolf Children on TV Japan. It's been licensed by Funimation and is available on DVD and Blu-ray.

Labels: anime reviews, fantasy, fox and wolf, funimation, hosoda, miyazaki, movie reviews, movies about japan, science fiction, tv japan

In the latest Toy Story 3 trailer, you can spot a Totoro plush toy (from Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro) at the :48 mark (sorry, no embed code). Pixar's John Lasseter is largely responsible for keeping the Ghibli library alive at Disney and for producing some excellent dubs.


For those of you not familiar with Totoro:


Incidentally, Miyazaki's witch girl Kiki (Kiki's Delivery Service) makes a cameo in Whisper of the Heart (look for her riding her broom over Shizuku's desk). And speaking of Studio Ghibli, the first trailer for The Borrowers.


The titles read: "Never be seen by humans. That is the law of the little people who live beneath the floor."

Labels: miyazaki, movies, studio ghibli

Studio Ghibli's next project is Mary Norton's The Borrowers. Hayao Miyazaki will write the screenplay, direction is by Hiromasa Yonebayashi (who previously did key animation for Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away, and Ponyo), and longtime Ghibli veteran Toshio Suzuki will produce.

The setting is the Tokyo suburb of Koganei. This shouldn't affect the essence of the book. Quite to the contrary, the story demands exactly the kind of charm and whimsy that Miyazaki brought to My Neighbor Totoro (wrote and directed) and Whisper of the Heart (wrote and produced).

And one of Miyazaki's first projects was an adaptation of Anne of Green Gables.

Labels: anime, anne, miyazaki, studio ghibli

As a general rule, Ghibli films that Hayao Miyazaki has written or directed are based on Japanese mythology and fairy tales (Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Ponyo on a Cliff), or belong to his "European flying arc." The latter take place in Europe (or reference the region), include exuberant flying sequences, and feature a spunky teenage girl as the heroine.

Excellent English dubs of these films have been produced and released by Disney, with impressive talent behind the microphone. For example, Michael Keaton, Brad Garrett, and Carey Elwes (sporting a Texan accent) face off in Porco Rosso, with Kimberly Williams as the spunky teenage girl and David Ogden Stiers (sporting an Italian accent) as her grandfather.

The following list classifies the films according to period and setting.

Castle in the Sky (1986)

Victorian steampunk with a Dickensian tone. A young girl literally falls out of the sky into Muska's arms, setting off an Indiana Jones-type adventure to discover the legendary "Castle in the Sky." In hot pursuit are sky pirates (a Miyazaki favorite) and sinister government forces (Mark Hamill voices the Darth Vader character).

Howl's Moving Castle (2004)

Late Edwardian. The movie begins with a Disneyesque depiction of the ideal, early 20th century European burg. But before long, Howl's playing of all sides against each other (as in Kurosawa's Yojimbo) has drawn Sophie and him inexorably into the latter stages of the Great Game and finally into the devastation of the Great War.

Porco Rosso (1992)

A classic "Lost Generation" piece set in the Northern Adriatic. The leads could have been played by Bogart and Bacall straight out of To Have and Have Not. The "Red Pig" is a cynical WWI ace living with the guilt of being the sole survivor of his squadron while battling a bunch of bumptious, bumbling sky pirates.

Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)

Miyazaki homages the Northern Mediterranean in this coming-of-age story based solidly in the 1950s. The setting is his most picturesque, sans the dark political overtones of Howl's Moving Castle and Porco Rosso. Kiki is an enterprising young witch who starts her own bicycle messenger service (well, by broom, of course).

Whisper of the Heart (1995)

The story takes place in present-day West Tokyo, but Nishi-san's Curiosity Shoppe comes straight out of the Hans Christian Andersen school of architecture. Nishi-san bought the Cat Baron in Germany before the war, which we see in a glowing flashback. Shizuku's boyfriend goes to Cremona, Italy, to study violin making.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984)

Miyazaki's first Studio Ghibli production. Princess Nausicaa fights to save her village from being overrun by marauding environmental forces and warring armies. Though it takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, Nausicaa's village has a distinctive medieval European look, as does her arch-enemy Kushana's armor.

Labels: anime reviews, miyazaki, personal favs, studio ghibli

On the occasion of the Modern Library edition of Anne of Green Gables--thus elevating it to the status of "classic"--Meghan O'Rourke argues that this tribute is wholly and entirely deserved.

And I--a long-time Anne fan (and as a young man entirely captivated by Megan Follows)--heartily concur.

Anne has a huge following in Japan. Isao Takahata, Hayao Miyazaki and Yoshifumi Kondo--who would become the creative core of Studio Ghibli--produced a 50-episode television series based on the books in 1979.

Kondo's Whisper of the Heart features an Anne-like protagonist (who wants to become a writer), as do many of Miyazaki's heroines, from Kiki's Delivery Service to Howl's Moving Castle.

Today (meaning tomorrow), NHK's Good Morning, Japan ran a story about the opening of a new Anne of Green Gables exhibition in Tokyo, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the book's publication.

Labels: anime, miyazaki, nhk, personal favs, publishing

Castle in the Sky is a visually dazzling though somewhat less emotionally rewarding transitional work between the first and third installments of what could be called Hayao Miyazaki's "flying arc." As with Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1986), the story turns upon the quest for the technology of a vanished civilization, the threat of environmental catastrophe it could unleash upon the world, and fate of the young girl who holds the key to both.

And like Kiki's Delivery Service (1989), Miyazaki creates an alternate-history Edwardian Europe as a backdrop, replete with Dickensian villages emerging from a medieval past into the sunlight of a modern era, its skies crowded with whirling, chattering, steaming Rube Goldberg-powered dirigibles and autogyros. It's as if Miyazaki was determined to commit to celluloid every Popular Mechanics cover illustration published between 1900 and 1950.

The cautionary tale that Castle in the Sky tells--of power corrupting absolutely--lends it a far darker tone than Kiki's Delivery Service. Although the violence is less explicit than in Nausicaa (the more brutal consequences occur mostly off-screen), the abrupt shifts from pratfalls to people dying en masse is disconcerting. This dramatic imbalance extends to the conflict between Sheeta (an obvious counterpart to Nausicaa) and the evil, conspiring Muska. Compared to other Miyazaki villains--the corrupt monk Jigo in Princess Mononoke, General Kushana in Nausicaa--bad guy Muska is all black hat and not much else.

The best parts of the movie feature the sky pirate Dora and her four bungling sons. Both as comic relief and even in terms of character design, the not-so-dastardly-after-all quintet hearkens back to Miyazaki's pre-Ghibli work directing Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro. Except that Lupin III is a slapstick adventure series. I don't sense that was Miyazaki's intention in this case. The result is that a mixed message lacking the ideological consistency of Nausicaa or Princess Mononoke.

Yet it holds up remarkably well on subsequent viewings, and visually is a wonder to behold. The intricate design of the floating city, the details of the aircraft, and the daredevil flying sequences are flat-out breathtaking. Simply as a showcase for the amazing span of Miyazaki's creative genius, Castle in the Sky should not be missed.

Disney again does an outstanding job with the English dub. The leads are handled competently, though Anna Paquin as Sheeta acquires an English accent a third of the way through, loses it, gets it back in fits and starts. Cloris Leachman is perfect as sky pirate Dora, as is Mandy Patinkin as her number one obsequious son. Mark Hamill as the dastardly Muska wooing Sheeta to the dark side of the force delivers his best performance since Star Wars. (Hey, you think, maybe he could play Darth Vader!)

Labels: anime reviews, miyazaki, personal favs, studio ghibli

As can be surmised from the title, the titular character is a dog. Nothing unusual there for a children's cartoon. And then you realize that everybody's a dog.

Now, Disney and Warner Bros. have been anthropomorphizing animated animals for a century. But characters like Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are presented as caricatures of human beings. That is, nothing in the world they occupy explains their existence. They're mutant creatures who happen to live like (and often alongside) human beings, along with other inexplicably sentient pigs, dogs, and rodents.

Okay, they're just cartoons, and I've got no aesthetic bone to pick with Disney or Warner Bros. on this account. My point is that, in contrast to every other bunch of anthropomorphic cartoon animals, the world of Sherlock Hound is delightfully consistent. All sentient creatures are canines (dogs, wolves, foxes, coyotes, jackals), as if somewhere back in the mists of evolutionary time, mankind's common ancestor belonged to the species Canidae.

This is a children's program, so this backstory pretty much goes without mention (except as a running gag whenever they visit a museum). But if you're simply going to replace all the humans with bipedal, doggy-looking characters, what's the point? Well, they're really cute. And the "casting" is quite clever: Holmes is appropriately a fox. Moriarty is a Little Red Riding Hood-eating breed of wolf. Watson is a Scottish Terrier. And Inspector Lestrade, naturally, is a British bulldog.

Hayao Miyazaki wrote and directed six of the first two-dozen episodes, and the series strongly reflects his influence. Miyazaki's Holmes is less Conan Doyle than Jules Verne, and the mysteries he tackles are less brain teasers than cinematic Rube Goldberg machines, something Miyazaki does very well. For a more cerebral animated Holmes, I recommend Case Closed, whose boy detective, Conan, does justice to the name.

Crunchyroll is currently streaming the series.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, miyazaki, mystery

Of all the Studio Ghibli productions, my sentimental favorite is Yoshifumi Kondo's Mimi o Sumaseba ("If you listen closely"), written and produced by Hayao Miyazaki (note the Kiki doll hanging over Shizuku's desk), based on the delightful manga by Aoi Hiiragi.

Shizuku, the teenager at the center of this coming-of-age story, lives an ordinary life with her danchi-dwelling middle-class family. Miyazaki's adaptation shifts the family down a socioeconomic rung from the manga. But this affectionate and straightforward depiction of lower-middle class Tokyo family life proves one of the pleasant surprises of the film.

You can find communities like this in western Tokyo, where the Kanto plain begins rising into the Japan Alps (the same setting as Initial D). Scenes in the movie bring back memories of the Odawara hills (at the foot of Mt. Fuji), and of bedroom communities on the Nankai line heading southeast out of Osaka toward Mt. Koya.

I lived in a similar danchi (apartment building) in Osaka, though newer and a bit more upscale. But the depiction is spot on, down to the futons airing out on the balcony railing.

Another thing that sets Mimi o Sumaseba apart for me is its depiction of the creative process. It's rare that a movie can talk about any aspect of literature, especially writing, without falling into glib stereotypes about "being an artist."

Miyazaki and Kondo find the right balance by analogizing physical craftsmanship (making musical instruments) with the harnessing of thought through the written word. In either case, artistry is ultimately the product of hard work and sacrifice, and not simply the unconstrained currents of the unfettered imagination.

All of Hiiragi's core themes, characters, and settings--especially the Earth Shop and Sir Cat--are faithfully preserved. In any case, this is not a case of the book being "better" than the movie, or visa-verse, but each standing well on its own and complementing the other.

The dub is well done, with voices by Harold Gould, Courtney Thorne-Smith, Jean Smart, and Cary Elwes putting in a cameo as the Count (the featured role in The Cat Returns, a companion film to Whisper of the Heart). Oh, and John Denver's "Country Roads" (vocal by Olivia Newton John) is in the original, too.

Labels: anime reviews, danchi, miyazaki, personal favs, studio ghibli