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

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

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

Labels: anime, miyazaki, studio ghibli

This is one live-action film I never saw a need for. It doesn't debut in Japan until next March and who knows when it will get here. But I'll lower my expectations and hope to be pleasantly surprised.

If you haven't seen the Studio Ghibli/Disney version, you're missing a great animated film (with a top-notch English language cast too), especially if you're looking for strong female role models.


A lesser-known anime classic in this vein is Magic User's Club. The humor is on the juvenile side at times, but it takes a clever approach to the old alien invasion storyline.


And in the process we learn that sitting on a broom (sans a pillow) hurts your butt, and the best way to deal with a malevolent (well, very nosy) alien spacecraft is to turn it into a giant cherry tree.

Labels: anime, japan, japanese tv, magic, movies, studio ghibli

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

Buckwheat noodles with deep-fried tofu strips simmered in a hot broth are known as kitsune (fox) soba in the Tokyo area and tanuki (raccoon) soba in the Osaka area.

The kitsune and tanuki often pair up in Japanese folk and fairy tales, with the fox as the Dean Martin character (the cool hipster) and the tanuki as Jerry Lewis (the comic relief).

A good example is Studio Ghibli's Pom Poko, which has a bunch of bumbling raccoons trying to save their land from a housing development. They don't get a lot done until a smooth-talking fox shows up.

Pom Poko is also the only Disney flick that includes a running joke about a rather particular part of the male anatomy. Tanuki are well-endowed down there, making them symbols of fertility and wealth.


Usually depicted sporting a straw hat, carrying a bottle of booze in one hand and the Edo period version of a checkbook in the other, they're always ready to either get down to business or party hearty.

Labels: anime, japanese culture, serpent notes, serpent of time, studio ghibli

Disney is officially releasing Arrietty, Studio Ghibli's version of The Borrowers, on February 17. At least based on the trailers, I prefer the U.K. dub to the U.S. version. Mary Norton was British, so it's not at all clear to me why there should even be an American English version.

Labels: anime reviews, movies, studio ghibli

NHK's daily (six days a week) 15-minute long, family-friendly morning melodrama (Asadora) is doing something a bit different this time around: a non-fiction series. The story is based on the autobiography of Nunoe Mura, wife of famed horror mangaka Shigeru Mizuki.

During WWII, Shigeru Mizuki was an infantryman in Papua, New Guinea, and lost his left arm in a bombing raid. Originally left-handed, he had to teach himself to draw with his right. When the war ended, he considered staying behind in Rabaul, but returned to Japan.

His affection for New Guinea has since been reciprocated, with a street in Rabaul being named after him. (The Taiwanese also remain relatively well-disposed toward the Japanese, probably because the Imperial Army treated them better than the Chinese Nationalists.)

Mizuki's most famous work is Ge-Ge-Ge no Kitarou ("Kitarou of the Ge-Ge-Ge"), so the Asadora series is titled Ge-Ge-Ge no Nyoubou, or "Ge-Ge-Ge's Wife." The "Ge-Ge-Ge" are a tribe of youkai, or spirits and demons. Mizuki is largely responsible for popularizing Japan's rich youkai mythology.

Ghibli's Pom Poko belongs to the youkai world, while the creatures in Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke are more Shinto in orientation. They live alongside the gods of Japan's creation myths and various Chinese and European imports. The Venn diagrams overlap quite a bit.

By comparison, think of the difficulty in classifying all the gods and demons in the Western tradition (Greco-Roman, Christian, Norse, just to name a few), along with the pagan religions, fairy and folk tales (original and revised versions), plus recent inventions like Dracula and Frankenstein.

The propensity for human being to create transcendental realities seems bred in the bone (if not the genes). Not satisfied to just create them, we then arrange them into insanely complex taxonomies. This, incidentally, is why evangelical atheism is ultimately doomed to plow the ocean.

Labels: asadora, japan, japanese tv, manga, pop culture, religion, shinto, studio ghibli

On a more serious cinematic note, Studio Ghibli's Princess Mononoke makes for a better critical comparison to Avatar. Like Jake in Avatar, Ashitaka journeys into a magical forest protected by a willful princess. The archenemy is Lady Eboshi, who needs the lumber and iron ore in the forest for her foundry.

The difference is, Hayao Miyazaki doesn't reduce things to simplistic, black and white terms. He let Lady Eboshi compellingly argue that the gains from economic development accrue to the most dispossessed. The boars defending the forest are boorish and ugly, and tend to turn themselves into cannon fodder.

And when the modern goes up against the primitive, no matter how pristine and spiritual it may be, the primitive will—sooner or later, rightly or wrongly—get its butt kicked. As Kate says about the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, "Yeah, sure, Winnie the Pooh versus lasers. My vote is on the lasers."


Another good Ghibli comparison is Pom Poko, in which a bunch of tanuki (racoons) band together to kick the humans out of the Tama New Town housing development. The effort fails for the same reasons such efforts usually fail: zeal can't compensate for incompetence, and little furry animals can't compete with bulldozers.


In Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki has Lady Eboshi presciently declare that, "When the forest has been cleared and wolves wiped out, this place will be the richest land in the world." For a time, it literally was. Miyazaki is not denying this fact, nor his own good fortune at being able to share in it. He is saying, "Yes, but."

Yes, economic progress is good, but there are costs. Yes, the environment is harmed, but we benefit enormously. And having seized those benefits for ourselves, it is awfully self-serving to pull an Augustine and pray, "Give everybody else chastity and temperance now, and thank God we didn't have it then."

We're like the tanuki, who shout and protest loudly, only to discover in the end that golf courses make for nice habitats. There's a great scene at the beginning of Pom Poko, reminiscent of Life of Brian, where the tanuki get sidetracked talking about all the great human stuff (television, garbage cans) they can't live without.

Labels: criticism, environmentalism, kate, movies, studio ghibli

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

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

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

The Cat Returns is the most light-hearted and purely comedic of Studio Ghibli films. It is a sequel to Whispers of the Heart (1995), to the extent that two secondary characters (the cats), The Baron and Muta, are here principal characters. Otherwise it’s a standalone effort, though the English title might make a bit more sense if Whisper of the Heart had been released first. The Japanese title, Neko no Ongaeshi, translates as "The Gift of the Cats," or more specifically, "the gift that keeps on giving whether you like it or not."

The story begins with Haru (Anne Hathaway) rescuing a cat from getting run over by a truck. The cat turns out to be the son of the King of the Cats (Tim Curry, as a kind of unreformed 1950s hipster), who decides he likes this kid and that she’d make a good daughter-in-law. After failing to persuade her with presents, such as dozens of little gift boxes stuffed with mice, they kidnap her and drag her off to the Kingdom of the Cats, an Alice in Wonderland place where Haru finds herself shrinking to cat proportions herself.

It is then up to The Baron (Cary Elwes), along with Muta (Peter Boyle) and a giant crow (Elliot Gould) to rescue her. At this point the movie very much turns in a cat version of an Errol Flynn swashbuckler, made even sillier by a steady stream of sight gags (made funnier by the fact that they’re all--cats!) that veer off into Coyote & Roadrunner territory. The film’s one significant failing is that, unlike Miyazaki’s carefully realized fantasy worlds, the internal workings of the Kingdom of the Cats quickly lose any logic further than the next joke.

Still, they’re pretty good jokes and, after all, this is director Hiroyuki Morita’s first feature effort. You have to applaud a Studio Ghibli project determined not to take itself seriously in the slightest. And Morita does rein things in sufficiently in the denouement to deliver the requisite object lesson without too much saccharine.

And to give credit where it’s due, Disney has again done an outstanding job producing a dub track every bit the equal of the original, which is frankly always a bit surprising considering Disney’s seemingly grudging indifference to the Ghibli library it spent a hefty sum licensing. Someone there must be determined to do it right or not do it at all. To top it off, they brought Cary Elwes back for the far superior Whisper of the Heart, a truly wonderful movie about books and writing and imagination.

The theme song for The Cat Returns was written and performed by Ayano Tsuji. NPR interviewed her on its Weekend Edition 21 January 2006 program. You can listen to the audio here. The Studio Ghibli production of Whispers of the Heart is based on the manga by Aoi Hiiragi. A magazine like Cricket really should serialize it. It'd be perfect for a pre-teen female audience.

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