Favourite Miyazaki film

I saw Totoro again last night, wish I hadn't voted for Spirited Away now.

Finally picked Totoro, but dang, that's hard. To be honest, I've liked every bit of Miyazaki I've seen.

Grave of the Fireflies was Miyazaki? I don't think so. Hmmm. That movie wrecked me over. But in a good way.

I don't think I ever want to see Grave Of The Fireflies again. Great film though.

Favourite non-Miyazaki Ghibli film = Pom Poko.

Hmmm, looks like it might be a surprisingly strong turn-out for Kiki (which is great, but relatively low-key and overlooked).

Laputa was always my fave

Grave of the Fireflies is Takahata, not Miyazaki. Which is why you don't see any of his usual stuff in it - flying, young woman who grows up strong and fearless, wind through tall grass, environmentalism, etc.

Totoro is objectively a better movie, no weak points, but Spirited Away is my favorite for including some epic/dark/whatever parts. (The beginning, the train ride...) Mononoke is overrated and Porco is underrated.

Yeah, Mononoke was a relatively disappointing note for him to have originally retired on. I was volunteered with some japanese exchange students during the summer of 98, and even they agreed. Spirited Away was much stronger, and i need to see a subbed-copy of Howl's Moving Castle to fully get it.

Grave of the Fireflies opened as a double-bill with My Neighbor Totoro. Which, I don't know, I just can't imagine watching them sequentially.

I've only seen the last four on the list, but Porco Rosso. The flashback to the war is one of my favorite scenes ever in anything.

I rented Totoro for my daughter based on the board. It's a lot more linear, kiddie, and therefore not as interesting to me as Spirited Away, although unfortunately I am a Lynch type. But she liked it.

Spirited Away is on the tube right now. It's awful good.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

The top three are as I predicted, Kiki in fourth is a surprise.

I am surprised Howl's Moving Castle got so few votes, it was awesome and beautiful and suspenseful made me cry.

Got so few...vote?

howl's is my least favorite - the castle itself was neat but story and protagonists were pretty dull.

I liked it a lot better than Porco Rosso, which I admit I didn't really get the appeal of.

Kiki deserves better, but I guess at this point it's really hard to compete with the ones that got English box-office releases, and Totoro has had a pretty long home video circulation (I remember ads for it airing during like, David The Gnome reruns and so on). It's really, really good though, you guys.

Still need to see Howl's and Porco, myself.

Spirited Away is on the tube right now. It's awful good.

Yeah, we watched this last night on TCM as well. It's strange and scary, just like being a kid.

Missed the vote, but I would have picked Totoro. I can't think of another movie aimed at children that is quite so poignant and trippy at the same time.

Spirited Away and Howl's would be close second and third for me. Kiki and the Cat Returns were also pretty good. The rest I didn't really care for so much.

I don't understand all the love for Mononoke, it is probably my least favorite of his. It was very slow and not too interesting.

Things I love about Totoro:

How they totally embrace and take pleasure in the fact that they live in a haunted house.

How the grown-ups are all completely supportive of the girls' interactions with Totoro and other fantastic creatures. The fantasy element is taken as a normal part of nature. An American or European film would have stressed the conflict between real and fantasy worlds.

How the film doesn't sugarcoat the trauma caused by their mother's illness and the general absence of parents.

Catbus!

http://www.pyzamstuff.com/funpix/animals/MonorailCat.jpg

FANTASY IS REAL, YOU GUYS

Howl's Moving Castle gets better with each re-run. I've even started to allow the incredibly abrupt ending which I now see as a very neat way of pulling together all the threads. Although I still think it's a bit of a cop out, the scarecrow suddenly transforming and saying "Hi! I'm that one guy who was being talked about very briefly by two bit-roles right near the beginning of the film. I'm going to go and end this war and make everything go back to normal". I do love the film though.

Still need to see Totoro. Had no idea it was so highly rated.

No way is Kiki better than Laputa. :-(

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20011223/REVIEWS08/112230301/1023

mononoke is pretty boring.

I am totally appalled that cagliostro only got one vote but I suppose Lupin fans aren't really the same as Miyazaki fans, much

e.g. Me

There's a chapter in Peter Carey's Wrong about Japan where he watches Totoro with a Japanese friend who clues him into the hundreds of details of cultural and personal reference embedded in the story. My favorite bit is still the wonderful night dance of the three totoros with Mei and Satsuki, getting the plants to sprout.

haha wtf I totally missed this.

I am in the midst of a Neil Gaiman fanboy freakout and discovered that (apparently?) he did the American translation of P. Mononononononoke(?).

Castle In The Sky/Laputa has the best dub of all the dubbed ones. I probably would've voted for Totoro, the most infinitely rewatchable of his movies, or Nausicaa, which (for me at least) was the most jaw-dropping with the wow gosh bang craaaaazy anime stuff.

Oddly the only Miyazaki movie to make my mom visibly squirm in her seat is Cagliostro (Lupin's crazy rooftop escapade).

Nausicaa is beautiful. Wasn't that his first film?

> Castle In The Sky/Laputa has the best dub of all the dubbed ones.

but which Laputa dub, the newish one with dawson o'leary's voice? i found that worse than the previous version i had, more fake, trying too hard.

gaiman did mononoke script, yes. just a pity they got claire danes to do the voice. gag me with a spoon.

I love Claire Danes! And yeah it was the new one with Dawson & Rogue from X-Men when they were cute little youngsters. Also Cloris Leachman as the pirate mom. I guess it's a matter of taste really.

I think Cagliostro was technically first but Nausicaa was his first writing/directing/production venture, and maybe the first Studio Ghibli film?

I watched some documentary on his career once upon a time, probably high.

I watched Kiki's Delivery Service last night and found it really touching. It's not epic like Spirited Away or even Laputa, but there's so much attention to detail; plotwise, character-wise and animation-wise. Really beautiful and melancholy.

Did you guys hear about his next film, Ponyo On a Cliff, yet?

http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/ponyo/faq.html

It's being done in watercolor with completely analog equipment as kind of a last hurrah for Ghibli's traditional animation style. To me the plot sounds like a remake of Totoro (kid in rural setting pals around with magical friend) w/ more emphasis on the parent-child relationship and a potentially sadder ending. Which means it's basically a shoe-in to become one of my favorite movies of all time.

The movie was half finished as of a weeks ago, it's due out next summer. Here's some concept art:

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a175/spir7u/gake20no20ue20no20ponyo_1b.jpg
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a175/spir7u/ponyo3b.jpg
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a175/spir7u/ponyo2b.jpg

The creepy Howl-looking guy is the boy's dad, btw.

WOW, holy crap. That looks great.

Looks very aquatic, awesome - check out the kid swimming with the jar over her head. Also all the stuff with what is either some kind of underwater dome or a jellyfish.

the scene in Kiki at the beginning when she is lying on the hillside and all the animated grass is blowing in the wind around her is the single most incredible moment of animation I have ever seen.

When are we going to get Tales of Earthsea over here? It was released almost a year ago in Japan.

Oh here we go:

Licensing problems are in the way of a North American release of Gedo Senki, with the Sci-Fi Channel, which released the miniseries Legend of Earthsea in 2004, currently holding the rights to the property. Under the current situation, the film cannot be released earlier than 2009, when Sci-Fi's rights expire.

GODDAMIT! That adaptation ws really, truly balls, and now it's holding up my Ghibli fix.

Gedo Senki is better than the Sci-Fi version, but not by much, which makes sense considering it was storyboarded and directed by a former landscaper with virtually no animation or writing experience who just happens to be Hayao Miyazaki's son. It's disappointing because if you read his production blog he seems to know what he's talking about (and he also reveals some really depressing childhood memories; Hayao was so absent from his son's life that Goro studied his dad's movies as a desperate substitute for face-to-face interaction) but he just wasn't cut out for directing. As an adaptation it's severely jumbled and as a Ghibli movie it's uncharacteristically violent, mean-spirited, and cliche.

That said, the R2 DVD will have subs and even a Disney dub done in anticipation of the eventual R1 release and I'm sure there will be rips of it a day or two after it comes out.

I saw Miyazaki once. Standing outside a downtown hotel, by himself, smoking. It was surreal. I decided it couldn't really be him, this not being Japan or even a major city. Later, I found out he'd been in town to talk to Ursula K. Le Guin about the earthsea rights. I wouldn't have bothered him but it still makes me mad, I owed him a smile at least, not a confused gawk.

Don't fret it, I don't think he speaks a word of english anyway!

Oh, and if I'd been here for the poll, it would've been a toss-up between Totoro and Spirited Away.

fucking hate this shit

I'm surprised Totoro got such a high rating. Saw it the other night and wasn't really that moved. For a gentle narrative-lite Miyazaki movie I much preferred Kiki's Delivery Service.

You have no soul.

Watched this yesterday and I don't know if it's because I was very tired but I think I'm gonna have to rewatch it again soon because so little of it made sense to me.

It was a visual feast, so many amazing bits. And not just the visuals but the sound design was so immersive. I'm glad I watched the sub first, but I also dislike having to rip my eyes away from the sensual feast on screen to read the dialogue with these films.

As ever, sometimes it's the small nits of these films that seem magical. There was a little sequence towards the start where the Boy takes his shoes off and walks barefoot on the wooden floorboards of the house, and I swear I could smell the scene of the wood.

With most of Miyazaki's movies I expect a certain amount of "things that don't at first make sense". I gelt the same anoit Howl's the first time i saw it and kow it's a firm fave. Maybe it's something to do with the visual language that jars my understanding, but on first viewing I felt that not enough of it linked up properly for me to truly make me feel involved in the plot.

Like, there were significantly long sections where I was just thinking " okay what is happening and why?" Or simply feeling that it was sequence after sequence of random events that didn't seem to segue properly together. The characters were constantly going in and out of different doors, turning into different characters, and seemingly turning into each other.

I'm sure it will make more sense on subsequent viewings but it did feel like a messy cake with spaghetti hoops on top to me - so many layers and metaphors and doors within doors within doors. It was A LOT. But maybe that's a good thing?

I couldn't figure out if Natsuko was his aunt or his mum reincarnated or just an unrelated person, for example. I don't know why she shouted at him and told him she hated him. I couldn't figure out why Himi was ostensibly his mum. I didn't really get why the Heron started out malicious and then decided to be helpful. I couldn't figure out what the stone and the blocks were meant to be, or why the one old lady turned into a young lady with completely different character traits.

The whole thing bamboozled me as well as my other friend who came with me. Meanwhile our two other companions felt the plot was very simple and straightforward, so who knows. We all watch films differently.

Apologies for all the typos. New phone don'tcha know

I've got to say I think I preferred the real world parts, slow as they were. I spent that part thinking "okay I'm ready for the freaky otherworld now", but as soon as that happened it just seemed to become a layercake of random events - like a story being made up by a six year old as he goes along: "Oh let's have a water mum effigy and now the floor is melting and now the old lady is a young lady and now it's a sea world and we're going fishing and the baddie heron is now a goodie gnome, then let's have some cute marshmallow people and now PELICANS and now CANARIES and now a flame room and now the step mum is ANGRY and now the stepmum is his aunt and his mum is a girl and now there's a big stone and now there's uncle Einstein who's going to talk about Miyazaki's legacy and now they're in the real world again oh wait they're not...." etc.

I love fantasy and otherworld stuff, and I think Miyazaki achieves this in most of his films really well. But this felt extremely disjointed with everything being thrown in mostly because it looks cool.

If there is symbolism and allegory in there, cool, but i felt there was A LOT of it all crammed into one space and it was hard for me to work out what was significant and what was just there for the heck of it

Unlike something like Spirited Away, which felt non-stop action packed and viscerally overwhelming, this one has a LOT of Ma in it. Also, due to that negative space, the foley work and sound mixing is incredible! I kinda can't wait to watch it again with some really nice headphones just so I can listen to all the rustling, scraping, steps and breathing again.

― octobeard, Saturday, December 16, 2023 11:12 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Interesting you feel that way about Spirited Away. I felt like that film was incredibly well paced in terms of action/reflective scenes (the Sixth Station sequence, Granny's house, quieter, less consequential parts where Chihiro is just doing housework etc...
Whereas TBATH felt incredibly stuffed, almost claustrophobic once they left the real world - it was dizzying.

To use an analogy we both might enjoy: I feel like this is Miyazaki's NTS Sessions to Spirited Away's LP5: Totemic, labyrinthine, sense-bombarding to the point of overload

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH2q9ZJMaAU

Miyazaki's manga Shuna's Journey is beautiful. Every panel a work of art. I highly recommend everyone check if their libraries have it. It got reprinted last year in an English translation.

Finally saw this last night with my brother JoeStork. We both felt sort of shell-shocked at the end of it and then, as we talked about it, came down on the side of really liking it. Also we both absolutely loved the giant murderous parakeets with their hilariously dumb faces and their huge butcher knives.

I was impressed by how long and grim the first part of the movie - the real-world part - is. There's such a long stretch with very little dialogue and this feeling of unresolved jangling grief hanging over all of it, and the almost silent sequence with his first day at school and everything that follows it is so horrifying in its intensity while telling you almost nothing about what is actually happening in Mahito's mind. Other than, of course, that he is desperate. And it's telling that he goes straight to self-injury rather than tell his father what happened to him. This is a child who has learned to keep his thoughts to himself and not to ask for things. (And frankly I wouldn't try to talk to that dad either. What a dipshit. Why do both of these perfectly nice-seeming women feel the need to marry this dude?)

Anyway, it's so rare for anything to be paced slowly these days, let alone something aimed at children, and Miyazaki does this without even offering the rewards of, say, the slow and quiet parts of Totoro, so that there were moments where I thought, "This is beautiful in a grim way but I don't know if I can put myself through watching it again." And yet I ended up feeling like it was essential to establish the stakes of the movie, how much Mahito needs to be able to save someone.

I liked how understated the reveal is that Mahito does indeed save his mother, just as the heron promised he could - that the year where she disappeared into the tower and the time that he is spending there are happening simultaneously, and that when she leaves through a separate door at the end, she is returning to her life in the real world.

ponyo

Shoulda called it Disturbance At Heron House

ha!

It's coming on Netflix, right? I want to watch it again. It has stayed with me. I think it's pretty great.

Oh, boo hiss, that's only outside the U.S. It'll be on Max here with the rest of the Ghibli films. Well, I'm sure we'll renew our Max subscription at some point.