Favourite Miyazaki film

in which ilxor dog latin doesn't get it

i know you have a soft spot for this one, but if there's something more to get, it's shot past me. Still, even bad Miyazaki is good. I don't dislike the film so much as I think it's all a bit loose and unfinished-feeling compared to others.

me indulging my soft spot

ponyo (the only good film) is now on netflix

― mark s, Friday, 3 April 2020 20:05 (three months ago) bookmarkflaglink

obviously i am watching it, i will always watch it

― mark s, Friday, 3 April 2020 20:06 (three months ago) bookmarkflaglink

i like ponyo a lot. it does work better as a young kids movie than a lot of the other ghibli movies, and i like that there isn't really a "bad guy" in the end, just an overprotective father.

I really want to start showing these to my son, but holding out until we can get HBO Max on our Roku to watch on our main TV instead of the laptop. Feel like these deserve a bigger viewing experience for his first time.

I've got to admit I sometimes share DL's nagging irritation at obtuse character motivations and dangling plot threads in Ghibli films, but thankfully I'm usually able to take a mental step back and experience them in a more impressionistic way.

they almost all have some sort of rushed ending or a pacing issue, but I came to really appreciate HMC despite its deus ex ending

JVC – No HBO Max on Roku is such a pain in the ass. I tried to sideload a screen mirroring app and accidentally rooted my whole Roku.

I think Miyazaki is an amazing storyteller, but he's got a very different interest and understanding in narrative structure than most filmmakers. He tells these cool, closely-observed stories that're paced on minute observation, subtle emotional currents, tiny details and then ... I think he realizes he's got to close the story, so he kind of slaps-together an ending that fulfills the basic criteria of closure, even if the story wasn't building toward it. Since he often bases his work on stories by European writers, I think that he kinda just goes 'oh, how'd that end in the book? What provided closure? Let's try that.'

Howl's Moving Castle was a fantasy tone poem, all full of mystery and weirdness... until the very end. And then, suddenly, there was a story about a missing prince the closes everything? And it was a scarecrow? There was a war? I can't even remember. The ending of Ponyo felt similarly unanticipated... A couple of the reviews said something along the lines of 'it follows a childlike logic....' which is a nice way of saying 'the end doesn't exactly answer the question of the beginning.' In Miyazaki's most successful films (Totoro, Kiki, Spirited Away, maybe even The Wind Rises) the stories themselves are so dreamy and meandering that a non-traditional ending doesn't draw attention to itself. YMMV.

dog latin –– deus ex is an interesting way of framing the ending! I'e always thought of the endings as more like more non-sequiturs. it strikes me that if Miyazaki's process was to watch a finished film and go back and add a scene here or there, he could 'fix' the ending with a couple of quick plants in the first act. but ... he doesn't seem to think/work that way?

the uneventfulness of kiki and totoro make their narratives feel vingette-y, and that rhythm attaches strangely to the more eventful movies. i love literally everything about princess mononoke but i could understand someone having issues with the pacing of it especially the ending

ponyo is just a fuckin psychedelic color blast tho

watching PONYO (2008)

Argh, am I going to have to throw it on too?

true love conquers all, the only logical ending

the uneventfulness of ... totoro

have you seen the 3rd act?

I think Miyazaki is an amazing storyteller, but he's got a very different interest and understanding in narrative structure than most filmmakers. He tells these cool, closely-observed stories that're paced on minute observation, subtle emotional currents, tiny details and then ... I think he realizes he's got to close the story, so he kind of slaps-together an ending that fulfills the basic criteria of closure, even if the story wasn't building toward it.

Yes, I'd agree with this, and if I find myself in too much of an analytical mode while viewing it can be a bit frustrating.

Watched Howl’s Moving Castle all the way through for the first time last night and truly couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. Pretty though.

i haven't seen HMC but i thought people were generally down on it. maybe thats just anime nerds though

iirc miyazaki doesn't write scripts for his movies beforehand which is probably the main reason why they're all like that. he just goes straight to storyboarding

I love HMC but it doesn't make tons of sense

HMC makes a lot more sense on successive viewings. the problem is that the film uses the backdrop of war without making it very explicit about what's going on. we're much more involved in Sophie's personal journey than Howl's exterior life as a wizard.
The war is so backgrounded that it's very easy to miss the snippet of (literally) background conversation explaining that the war is taking place because Prince Justin has gone missing, and the King and Madame Suliman are forcing conscription onto wizards and/or stripping them of their powers

apparently the book makes sense, I should read the book

http://miyazaki.fool.jp/takaharu/?p=1317
http://miyazaki.fool.jp/takaharu/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2018y10m08d_173233488.jpg

i guess kiki's delivery service is about puberty or whatever but every time i watch it it's like... oh it's disillusionment with the adult world and about artistic paralysis. these are the themes that continue to resonate with me

when the old woman makes a cake for kiki.... i cry every time

for me, it's "fly"

both for me. it's got some of the most relevant-to-me-as-an-adult themes of any kids' film i can think of. all-time fave.

first time i saw it, i was in a real slump. i'd lost my job, couldn't get the motivation to find a new one and was generally sinking into a hole. the film was like therapy

One of the themes of Kiki that I don't feel is talked about enough is the disparity between the smalltown and city life. The film exhibits it most with the younger characters in the city of Koriko who come off as spoiled, unappreciative and don't respect elders.... Even Jiji senses it from the urban cat. Such disparity is definitely not universal to Japan* and for those of us who traveled far away from rural areas to make a living and take up residence in a large city, it's definitely something that quietly appeals to me.

*Japan has a very complicated relationship with the countryside/remote areas of Japan as 92%(!!!) of the population lives within the urban boundaries of large cities, so Japan has perhaps a more severe snobbery towards quaint countryside culture. Many newcomers to big cities quickly lose their local dialectical accents in an attempt to blend in.

it was an early in-the-theater date with my partner (i think the first movie we saw together!) so it has special significance and we try to see it once a year when gkids screens it... not this year of course.

Xpost
Albert, if you haven’t already seen Takahata’s Only Yesterday it sounds like you’d be into it

Also maybe Makoto Shinkai's /Your Name/ though that involves a lot of emo teen whatnot that didn't really work for me. But very much a "small town/city" movie.

Kiki was first described to me as a movie about freelancing. I watched it and thought of it as a movie about burnout. I think it sort of picks up and reflects to you whatever aspects of adult career responsibility you happen to be struggling with at the moment.

yes

xp to rob: haha yes... Only Yesterday not only explores urban/rural dynamics but also serves as propaganda for organic farming in Yamagata-shi haha.

i teach in an architecture school, and I daydream about someday helping run a creativity/inspiration/mental-reset film series. Kiki would always be in there, along with Mystery of Picasso.

What a cool idea! What else is on your list?

lily, that's insightful!

aw thanks Lily! haha the list usually gets about this far in my head and i just start thinking "man, kiki is so great" and get distracted.

might be the kind of thing that would be best if it polled multiple professors for ideas, or was a collaborative thing with students... different sensibilities, different ways of thinking about creativity and stuff.

maybe other art documentaries.... i haven't seen that many. the ones about Andy Goldsworthy (Rivers and Tides, Leaning Into the Wind), i find really soothing and maybe similar to Mystery of Picasso (where painting is a form of play and nothing is a precious masterpiece) since they're about impermanent art. the work is more meticulous and tedious in a way but seems restorative and meditative which i think is something a lot of students would like to feel. my kids this semester responded more than usual to the early Bauhaus period, heavily influenced by Arts and Crafts and Expressionist ideas about making --- they want to be off screens and working with their hands, they really respect it and certainly romanticize it somewhat. but i can also imagine some other kind of student really responding to something maximalist, saturated, dynamic, etc.

(i would also include Kedi, the Turkish documentary about street cats and their wonderful world, which sits alongside Kiki in my Letterboxd top 4.)

Rescreened tonight with my family and my wife has a theory that I think forks might entertain:

Kiki is celiac and her residence (the flour-coated storage room converted to bedroom) triggered the loss of her magic as well as depression, anxiety, loss of ambition.

i... i like this theory?
(she's going through puberty tho)

(also the mom in totoro is pregnant)

The mom in Totoro is the only survivor of the accident that killed the rest of the family, they are all dead

Some other theories: Tombo (or Osono's husband... or the man who works in the clocktower that the dirigible crashes into) impregnated Kiki and she gave birth secretly off-camera (but is all alluded to via Jiji and Lily) and suffers post-partum depression.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncs4AGA8Sfc

Ghibli have finally gone full CG. Not a direction I had expected (or hoped) they would ever go in.

It's a baffling decision given Miyazaki's previous hard-line stance on the matter. I always appreciated in previous films that they used CG in a limited way but which served the material - e.g. the movement of Howl's Castle. This just looks like a blatant attempt to compete with Pixar, Sony et al. Not great.

hmmmm...

Yeah looks like total shit compared to their usual work. Is that a proper trailer or an animatic type thing or...

https://www.awn.com/news/fans-already-disgruntled-studio-ghiblis-earwig-and-witch

I have a lot of time for his work on Ronja the Robber's Daughter (think Gillian Anderson tested out her Thatch impression on it!) but Goro M is shaping up to be a terrible custodian of Ghibli.

Supported completely by his father, Goro states, “I was the only one among the people at Ghibli who knows that method of creation… I made the anime with a young staff and didn’t consult with the old guys at all.”

This is super cursed and also the funniest goddamn thing I’ve seen all week pic.twitter.com/OOAblOwomM

— JR (@USofJR) February 24, 2021

I need to be careful who I share that with, but it *is* incredible

Howl's Moving Castle would be vastly improved by a special edition that replaces Billy Crystal with anyone else

no argument