Bird Brain

Film: The Boy and the Heron(Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka)
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

My original plan was to watch The Boy and the Heron (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka if you want the original Japanese) on Sunday and post the review that night. Alas, I fell asleep about 45 minutes in. My follow-up plan, then, was to skip back a few minutes to the last thing I remembered and watch after my lectures on Monday night. And the same thing happened. I fell asleep again, managing to get to about the 1 hour 15 mark before I had no idea what was happening. I’d try desperately hard to focus, and five minutes later, my eyes would be rolling back into my head.

What does this mean? It means that evidently, despite how much I really wanted to like it, I found The Boy and the Heron to be the movie equivalent of Sominex. I like Miyazaki’s films as a rule, so this came not only as a surprise but as a supreme disappointment.

Nick's Picks: Kiki's Delivery Service

Films: Kiki’s Delivery Service (Majo no Takkyubin)
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

This is the seventh in a series of twelve movies selected by Nick Jobe.

Six or seven years ago, I’d never seen a film from Hayao Miyazaki. Kiki’s Delivery Service (Majo no Takkyubin) is my seventh, and not the first that Nick has had me watch. This is from early in Miyazaki’s career, which can be kind of a mixed bag. On the one hand, there’s The Castle of Cagliostro, which is entertaining but hardly great. On the other hand, there’s My Neighbor Totoro, which is damn near perfect. Kiki leans a little more toward the Cagliostro side of the spectrum. It’s Miyazaki, after all, but it feels like second-tier Miyazaki.

Fortunately, the story we’re given isn’t filled with much of the science fiction/fantasy anime problem that I often experience. Frequently, I feel like I just don’t know what is going on. In Kiki’s Delivery Service, there is only one piece of license from the real world taken. That license is that witches exist, and thus magic exists to some extent in terms of the witches’ potions, spells, and ability to ride brooms. Kiki (Kirsten Dunst, I watched the English language version) is a young witch. The tradition is that at 13, witches go off on their own to a new town to train for a year, and Kiki has decided that since the night is supposed to be clear and have a full moon that she will leave to find her own path that night. Her mother (Kath Soucie) is worried because she never had time to teach Kiki a lot of the spells and potions she’ll need. Kiki’s cat Jiji (Phil Hartman) is also a little worried about the sudden plan to leave.

Jiro Dreams of Flying

Film: The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

When the subject of film animation comes up, there are a few legendary names that are mentioned immediately. Walt Disney, Ralph Bakshi, Ray Harryhausen, and these days studios like Pixar and Aardman come to mind immediately. But perhaps no name is as well beloved by modern audiences for animation than that of Hayao Miyazaki, and with good reason. Miyazaki’s films are well loved for the same reasons that people love Pixar films. They are made not merely with care and passion, but with a genuine love of storytelling and a sense of wonder. Miyazaki’s announced retirement in 2013 upset a great number of people, which makes The Wind Rises, his last film, something special.

What soon becomes evident is that unlike Miyazaki’s previous films, The Wind Rises is only moderately based in the world of fantasy, and even here, the fantasy elements exist only in the dreams of the principle character. We begin with young Jiro Horikoshi (voiced in the American version by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) in the early part of the last century. Jiro wants nothing more than to be a pilot, but his poor vision and thick glasses prevent him from doing so. In his dreams, he converses with Italian airplane designer Caproni (Stanley Tucci), who tells him it is much better to create planes of true beauty than to fly them.

The Wizard of Odd

Film: Howl’s Moving Castle
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

I don’t typically love the look of anime. It frequently delves into the oppressively cute, and there’s a part of me that objects to this almost as a gut-level reaction. This tends not to be the case with the work of Hayao Miyazaki, whose work tends to be of surpassing beauty and evidently limitless imagination. Howl’s Moving Castle is evidently not based on an original story by Miyazaki, but the artwork is purely from his fervent and fertile imagination. As with all of the others of his films that I’ve seen, Howl’s Movie Castle is a film of surpassing beauty.

I went into Howl’s Moving Castle completely cold, knowing only that it’s a Miyazaki film and that my kids like it. I had hopes, though, because I’ve at least liked every other Miyazaki film that I’ve seen to this point. That implies pretty heavily that I didn’t like Howl’s Moving Castle, I know. I did like quite a bit of it, but of the four Miyazaki films I’ve seen now, I think it’s my least favorite.

Nick's Pick: My Neighbor Totoro

Film: Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro)
Format: DVD from Byron Public Library through interlibrary loan on rockin’ flatscreen.

This is the eighth in a series of monthly reviews suggested by Nick Jobe at YourFace.

Nick really hates it when people say that they don’t like anime. I get that. Anime isn’t a genre any more than foreign is a genre, no matter what NetFlix has to say about that. However, I find that most anime passes over me without making much of a favorable impression. Even the critically acclaimed stuff like Akira leaves me cold. Sure, I’ve liked a few, but I generally feel like I’m missing something culturally, like there should be something I’m getting that I just don’t. So it was not with a little trepidation that I put Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro) in the spinner. I was also interested in it; I’ve heard good things.

That being said, Nick’s given me something of a poser with this film in terms of writing up a review. Why? Because Tonari no Totoro doesn’t have a vast amount of plot to deal with, and dealing with plot is sort of my thing. I’ll do my best, but I’m guessing this might run a little short. For the purposes of this review, I watched the Disney release of this film rather than the original Studio Ghibli or the original English release.

Anime-niacs

Film: Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke)
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

If you say that you don’t like anime, fans will tell you that it’s an unfair thing to say. Anime, they will tell you, is a style, not a genre. Anime comes in all different stripes and genres, so claiming to dislike it is very much like saying you don’t like movies. Fair enough—it’s a style and not a genre. In general, though, it’s a style I don’t like that much. I never feel centered watching most anime. There never seems to be enough exposition for me to feel like I know what’s going on. Fans of the style typically cite Hayao Miyazaki as the best choice for a hater.

Okay. I’ve seen a few Miyazaki films. This, in fact, is the second time I’ve seen Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke). I will admit that there is a particular beauty to this film, and a toughness I didn’t recall. But I still don’t really understand what the hell is going on through a lot of it. Incidentally, I don’t typically watch dubbed versions of films, but with animation, it seems to matter less. Also, the English language version of this film feature some pretty good voice talent, so I went with it.

Another World

Film: Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

My podcasting partner Nick Jobe reacted with a certain amount of amusement when I told him that I wasn’t a big fan of anime. His reason for this is that anime isn’t so much a genre of film as it is a method of presentation. Anime doesn’t mean girls dressed in sailor outfits, demons, and giant robots. It’s just that a lot of anime films include elements like that. It’s sort of like saying you don’t like foreign films—“foreign” isn’t a genre, no matter what NetFlix, Blockbuster, and the Academy Awards may have told us. So Nick recommended I watch Hayao Miyazaki’s Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) (Spirited Away). As it is on The List, I couldn’t really say no.

One of the biggest problems I tend to have with anime as a style is an almost total lack of exposition. Frequently in anime films, we’re tossed into a world laden with spirits or machinery or demons or magic or a combination of these things, and none of it is explained. Characters have bizarre powers just because they do. There’s no context for much of what happens, and I just get confused. And so I give up.

I’d like to say that this is a problem with this film, but it really isn’t, and the reason it’s not is a slice of brilliance. A young girl named Chihiro (Daveigh Case, and from this point on, the actors mentioned will be from the dubbed version) is moving to a new area with her parents (Lauren Holly and Michael Chiklis). They get a little lost and wander into an area that appears to be an abandoned amusement park. Hungry, her parents find cooking food and consume all of it. But it’s food for the spirits, and consuming it turns her parents into pigs.

To rescue them, Chihiro is helped by another spirit named Haku (Jason Marsden), who tells her to go ask for a job in the spirit bathhouse. She will need to be wary of the witch Yubaba (Suzanne Pleshette) who runs the place, but Yubaba has sworn an oath to give a job to anyone who asks for one. Now, while working at the bathhouse, Chihiro (now called Sen—Yubaba gains power over people by stealing their names) must find a way to help her parents.

Along the way, Sen/Chihiro gets assistance from Yubaba’s identical twin sister (also Suzanne Pleshette) and a demon called No-Face that truly has no face and wears a mask above his giant, toothy maw. The adventure takes her through a number of places in the giant bathhouse and on a mysterious train ride.

And it is a magical adventure, and a disturbing one in places. The creatures that appear in this other world are sometimes terrible and dangerous, and it seems that Chihiro/Sen is in some very disturbing trouble at times. Of course, all kids movies have something of that sort of danger in them—without the danger, there’s not much of a movie. But here, some of these things seem a little beyond the pale for the very young. No-Face, for instance, has a nasty habit of eating living creatures that work at the bathhouse, and then speaking in their voice. Later, after he has eaten a huge amount of food (and three creatures), he vomits everything up in a huge flood of black sputum. It’s pretty nasty, and while older kids won’t have a real issue with it, I can certainly see little kids being a bit traumatized.

Additionally, and this is quite significant, I think I would have been much better served by watching this film with the original Japanese voicework instead of the English dubbing. Typically, I watch foreign films with subtitling and not dubbed versions whenever possible, but dubbing bothers me far less with animation than it does with live actors. However, in this case, Sen’s voice in the English version is an incredibly annoying, high-pitched little girl voice that raises the hair on the back of my neck. Having completed the movie in English, I watched a bit of the original Japanese, and it was far better.

Am I an anime fan? I still can’t say I am. There’s something about the style of the artwork that tweaks me. But that’s the sort of thing that can’t really be helped, can it?

Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi is unique in its look and is a completely unique story in many ways, at least in my experience. It follows a tried and true pattern though of a young child having a magical adventure in a mysterious, beautiful, and dangerous land. Like many similar films, a great deal of what happens is the young child attempting to get home and save someone, in this case, her parents. But with that said, the vision of this film is extraordinary. I may not understand this world I’ve been thrust into for a few hours, but there is real enjoyment in looking at it.

But in this, the film still fails in a significant regard. Not being completely familiar with Japanese culture leaves me a bit on the outside looking in here. I think this spirit world might make more sense to me were I more steeped in Japanese traditions and lore. But I’m not, and this world is never explained, and so a part of me is always at least a little confused.

Why to watch Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi: The story is weird and marvelous.
Why not to watch: Little ones might have a real issue with giant vomiting ghost monsters.