Favourite Miyazaki film

its the most fun of his movies

x-post "Pronounced lack of plot" as in setting the film up for stuff that is alluded to but which never happens. Like, the set-up is all there, but the delivery is off. It'd be a bit like "Spirited Away" if the girl finds the spirit world, wanders around for a little, then goes home. The end. It'd be nice to look at, but it'd be lacking. Even Alice needs something to do in Wonderland. In "Ponyo," there is just no obstacle to surmount, no challenge, despite hints of global environmental imbalance and impending catastrophe. At one point one character says another is to be tested, very dramatically, then we flash to that character about to enter a dark tunnel. What's in the tunnel? What will he face? Um, nothing. He walks through the tunnel. At another point, a character notes of a magical well that it would be a disaster were any living creature to come in contact with it. Then a living creature comes in contact with it, and ... nothing? I'm still not sure. Hence this weird "what's missing here?" vibe to the movie.

I absolutely adore Totoro, but Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke were really boring for me. Not sure why.

gbx, did you watch it?

Hence this weird "what's missing here?" vibe to the movie.

I certainly felt this, but honestly it didn't bother me that much. I mean, the scene where Ponyo is running on top of the giant fish is one of the best scenes in the history of animation. I felt that I got my money's worth + a weird taste in my mouth at the end (especially because of the song).

turns out cogliostro is the only one available to watch instantly on netflix so i guess that's the one for me ^_____^

Cagliostro is brilliant though. One of his best, alongside Porco, Spirited and Totoro.

I loved Ponyo running with joy across the giant fish! Sort of wish the movie ended right after that, when she reunited with Sosuke. Everything following that was totally pointless, if not completely nonsensical (and not in the fun way). The extended sequence of her feeding that baby? The whole notion of her getting sleepy and reverting to fish form? The entire "Cocoon"-esque ending in the jellyfish/bubble by the old folks home? The fact that no one noticed/cared the moon was hovering a few feet away? No follow-up on the hundreds (?) of ships trapped in that wall of ocean, let alone the massive near-destruction of the world? It was as if the whole village was just enjoying a day spent punting along the rising water, which is fine, but which totally lacked portent, given the wizard's build-up of the dangerous imbalance with nature.

I can go with it up to a point, but don't really understand the hyperbolic praise being lavished on it, especially compared to Miyazaki's more obvious peaks. If he wanted to craft a crazy dream-like world, he should have done so. This one lacked resonance.

no fuck that you should watch castle of cogliostro next!!!!! nausicaa is really pretty weak

― a narwhal done gored my sister nell (cankles), Tuesday, August 18, 2009 12:09 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark

you're really pretty weak

Is Ponyo custom-made for ichthyologists or what?

Her dad's reaction to her turning into a human (or at least the weird chicken-fish-girl) for the first time reminded me of a dad encountering his first daughter hit puberty. "Revert! REVERT!" And the mom's just bemused.

lol at Capt Lorax. wtf?

http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd120/hipsterrunoff/photographs/hro/1aeda2dc.jpg

nuh uh

Do kids like Totoro? A friend was asking me if I could lend him any films to entertain his kids (to stop the usual 3 on repeat melting his brain). But it seems a bit...unfocussed...for children.

i LOVED totoro as a kid but what i did was make up a big stupid action thriller plot going on "behind" the actual plot, because i was an american. so if your friend's kids are philistines like me, don't worry, it can still work.

saw totoro when i was ~10 years old and loved it

i loved spirited away when it came out, but at this point i can't think of a movie i'd be less interested in revisiting. totoro is much more pimp

spirited away is worth revisiting. so's totoro.

yes, kids love Totoro. (based on kids I have shown it to between 3 and 12)

Didn't really get into Totoro, but then I did see it after Spirited and Howl's. The film I'm most likely to revisit is Howl's these days - it gets a bad rap because the ending's one of the worst examples of deus ex machina I can think of, but there's a lot of great stuff in there.

i honestly don't think any child should get to the age of twelve WITHOUT seeing totoro

The film I'm most likely to revisit is Howl's these days - it gets a bad rap because the ending's one of the worst examples of deus ex machina I can think of, but there's a lot of great stuff in there.

Visually, yes. The plot's all over the place though.

One of my kids pulled Totoro off the shelf at the library -- he liked the image on the cover of the DVD -- so I rented it even though I wasn't sure it would hold their attention. They're 3 and 6 and used to faster-paced entertainment. But they actually both really liked it, the 3-year-old in particular kept watching it over and over. So, yes, recommended.

was babysitting little cousins ages upon ages ago (this might have even been back in the 90s) and little kids will apparently watch any ghibli movie totally rapt.

(keep in mind spirited away hadnt even come out yet at that point and i've got no idea if this still applies to newfangled kids with their newfangled cgi.)

(and i didnt show them grave of the fireflies or anything.)

i thought howl's was rad but im a big fan of the source book & i kinda liked how unfocused and goofy it was idk

how was the first one where i went "oh god what if he isn't infallible" but dude has been substitute jesus and granpa for me ever since i saw "warriors of the wind" (ugh) on hbo at like age 8 so i'm probably not to be trusted

christ that new dub of cagliostro pisses me off. not like the '80s streamline dub was perfect by any means but ugh. also fuck u netflix for giving me this and no sub option for streaming.

this reads/watches like it was translated by babelfish, but it's still pretty great. we're talking like three hours of interviews/behind the scenes footage, though. it still kind of amazes me how much actual DRAWING he does on these movies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi3LRn7EKx8

ghibli/miyazaki for me from canon to spectacular to good:

totoro/kiki/porco rosso/laputa/yamadas/grave of fireflies > mononoke/spirited away/nausicaa/only yesterday/pom poko/panda go >howl/ponyo/cagliostro/whisper of the heart

and then there's earthsea.

kiki is sooooo underrated

"fly"

Kiki's probably my third favourite ghibli, so charming and some great life lessons too

Did you all see the trailer for Ghibli's adaptation of The Borrowers, 'Arrietty' http://t.co/q9nTu5V ? They're doing separate dubs for the US and UK. This one's the British one.

this looks...a little too precious. the non miyazaki/takahata ghiblis have been kinda all over the map, quality-wise.

also, yay: Porco Rosso 2: The Last Sortie[8] Unknown (2012) Hayao Miyazaki

i keep forgetting about that.

i kinda feel bad for goro. he's turning into the jakob dylan of the miyazaki family.

mononoke is my favorite. inexplicably misinterpreted by 99% of everyone (pro or con) as "nature good humans bad".

99%, eh?

yeah i considered mononoke a minor work for a long time, but it's probably top 3 for me now. spirited away at the bottom obv

billy bob thornton as jigo was one of the few inspired celeb v/o casting moves ever

xxp well i hear it get praised or dismissed as an "environmentalist fable" a lot when really it's a movie about the ancient-to-modern shift (common to lots of cultures' autobiographies), when the spirits and the people inevitably fall out of touch. the only person in it who's evil (as opposed to partisan or confused or despairing) person in it is billy bob thornton, who is an opportunist perplexed at the end by his defeat by the more compassionate ("can't win against fools").

for me it's first amongst equals, i guess; lots of the others are great too. i liked ponyo but thought most of the magic stuff was vestigial: i just wanted a movie about the kid and his mom and the dad at sea and the old ladies in the home and the boats tethered to the houses floating up like balloons in the flooded town. and howl's had gorgeous stuff in it but the setting was totally incoherent, which was a huge disappointment to me after the first five minutes (shopgirl in a wartime city is harassed by soldiers in street, not in overt EVIL RAPEY SOLDIERS way but in "young men experiencing simultaneous terror/boredom of being stationed in temporarily peaceful city fuck around with a pretty civilian because they can, which is not Okay but is certainly Understandable" way) made the movie look like it was gonna have mononoke's sense of time & place & historical stress.

obv should be "the only person in it who's evil (parenthetical) is billy bob thornton"

no, i agree. i was just being dick-y. i was re-reading that interview (from after the nausicaa manga finished in '94) someone mentioned above (i think?) where he says he "didn't like" the way porco rosso turned out, but i think they were misreading him. what he says is that he started out wanting to make something lighthearted and slapstick about a flying pig but then his adult concerns kept creeping in and it poluted his original conception. of course that's the stuff that gives porco rosso its (for lack of a better word) edge.

i think when it comes to the environmental stuff he's essentially a very pessimistic, conflicted man (in the interview he keeps saying stuff on the order of "anything other than direct action isn't going to achieve anything, and even then you're just picking up litter"), who believes we're killing the planet but doesn't feel like giving up his car and moving into the woods, who has somehow found his way into a self-enforced career making entertainments suitable for the whole family, where he makes himself (by his own admission) iron out the ambiguities in his thinking, but then the complexity starts creeping back in, which pisses him off. mononoke is probably just the movie where he allowed himself the most free reign with keeping things morally ambiguous. (later in the same interview he says that he thinks all anime should be for children, but then the next movie he'd make would be mononoke, so maybe he was just getting a morally ambiguous movie aimed more at adults out of his system?)

obviously it's an old interview, from a time when studio ghibli's financial success was only starting to feel secure, so it can't be taken for how he thinks now that he's japan's biggest money-maker and can basically get away with anything he wants. but i just think it's funny that all the nuance and moral grey areas and whatnot are what he's praised for in comparison to american animation and what he feels are "flawed" about his own movies (at least up until mononoke). like he actually seems to think he'd be happy if he could make one totoro after another because HE'S so confused about things and he doesn't think that confusion belongs in his movies. i find that struggle to squeeze an individual filmmaker's adult concerns into the template of a kids movie one of the most interesting things about him, but apparently he didn't always agree. of course he's also gotta be the only guy who'd finish off his longest and most personal work by basically claiming "everything's fucked and the planet would be better off without humanity" and then open a preschool in japan.

oh wow did not know that stuff, have never read/seen an interview w/ him. thanks!

he's so careful w/ antagonists, at least in his more recent period. either they have good reasons or they're honest within fairy-tale-style rules or they don't exist at all. i love how spirited away is mostly a movie about a girl who gets a job: dealing with weird customers, bitching with co-workers after hours, hating the boss but eventually understanding she has a business to run.

interview is here if yr interested. it's a bit disjointed but i dont know if that's a translation problem or if it was just kind of a rambling conversation.

http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/interviews/afternausicaa.html

there's actually a ton of interviews there.

i love that nausicaa.net hasnt changed a thing in like a decade+

btw you nailed it strongo - that tension between inspiration & cynicism has basically defined miyazaki's career. i think the cynic in him is winning these days though. i mean, re:

the non miyazaki/takahata ghiblis have been kinda all over the map, quality-wise.

― death to ilx, long live the frogbs (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Sunday, July 3, 2011 1:04 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark

ghibli's approaching a crossroads, sort of like where disney was in the 70s when the nine old men were drifting away or dying. they relied on those guys for decades without really doing anything to nurture fresh talent, and the disney golden age ended up shuddering to a halt instead of smoothly transitioning into the next era.

miyazaki has little regard for the work of anyone besides himself and his mentor takahata, and i think miyazaki hates the idea of anyone spoiling his legacy with subpar work after they pass. ghibli's resources are formidable, and if they wanted to they could easily develop ghibli into a creative powerhouse where young talent is nurtured. but the lack of interest in that future is why anything by the junior ghibli crew ends up being a crapshoot.

Did you all see the trailer for Ghibli's adaptation of The Borrowers, 'Arrietty' http://t.co/q9nTu5V ? They're doing separate dubs for the US and UK. This one's the British one.

― Alba, Sunday, July 3, 2011 4:51 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

oh wow, i loved the borrowers as a kid. that actually looks pretty faithful... but i hope the rhyming voiceover is only on the trailer since it made me want to kill everyone involved with knives.

secret world of arrietty...due in Feb...

http://kottke.org/11/10/the-secret-world-of-arrietty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_World_of_Arrietty

I guess Miyazaki is playing an advisory role these days.

for anyone in toronto tiff lightbox is doing a studio ghibli series during march and april w/almost all of miyazaki's films but also takahata and others