Tag: anime

I’m getting lucky, and they are showing lots of anime feature films in my area. The Charles has an anime night program going. Yet, the latest anime I saw there, Only Yesterday, wasn’t part of the bill. It’s a special repertory release from GKids. It’s an old Studio Ghibli film from the early 90s.

Directed by Isao Takahata, Only Yesterday tells the tale of Taeko an OL on vacation in the country helping to farm because she likes it. She’s drags herself out there and the heavy baggage of her childhood. She brings her younger self along trying to explore the mystery of her life. How did she get to be who she was? It’s a very interesting story. Not one that gets animated, but like many anime it does. I love that there is an animation community that wants to use the form to tell plenty of different stories.

This is an awkward piece. I must quote my favorite, “Beause I am neither Japanese, fourteen years old, nor a girl.” It’s not really aimed at my tastes even though I like shojo manga. The pace was too slow and the introspection too much for me. I do give props to a fine film if you were its intended audience.

3 of 5 stars.

I’m trying to watch any anime film showing in the state. I caught The Boy and The Beast at one of the fancier cinemas in the suburbs. It was the dubbed version. Nothing wrong with an English dub. It’s just I think we lose the nuance in the switch of voice actors from Japanese to English.

This one is a Mamoru Hosoda joint. He’s the latest up and coming feature length anime director to be touted as a Studio Ghibli replacement. He’s not bad. I’ve enjoyed several of his anime features, but he just doesn’t spark me as interesting. He’s no Kon, but then who is.

3 of 5 stars.

And Studio Ghibliends their Miyazaki era with a quiet film, When Marnie Was There. It’s not one of their greatest, but it continues the tradition of excellence they are known for.

Marnie is a story about a lonely young girl, orphaned, living with adopted parents, shipped out to the country to spend summer vacation away from Tokyo. She takes this as a sign that her adoptive parents are tired of her. Also, because they receive a stipend from the government to take care of her, Marnie gets the idea she is not really loved. While in the country, she keeps meeting a mysterious girl who lives in a derelict house. Only she can see her and the magnificence of the house when it was filled with people. She feels a connection to this girl. How? Why?

Although, the story was contrived to end with, the film was decent. Ghibli films always are. The animation is high quality.

I caught the English dub. I was hoping for subtitles, because I believe that Japanese anime needs to be seen with the original voice actors.

Watch only if you are a Ghibli completist. I am, so I did.

3 of 5 stars.

At the start of the US version of the The Wind Rises, the distributor is Touchstone Pictures. At the start of the Japanese version, it’s Toho Studios. I smiled and chuckled when that shining Toho emblem blazed away before the Totoro of the Studio Ghibli mark. The Touchstone Picture mark didn’t do anything for me. Will my reaction color how I perceived the US dub versus the original Japanese soundtrack? Of course it will!

The Wind Rises is the last film directed by the great animation director, Hayao Miyazaki. He sails off to retirement with my favorite of his. It beats out Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke as a film. That’s because Miyazaki finally tells a story that could’ve been done as a live action film, and he makes an anime highly similar to something Satoshi Kon would’ve done. Miyazaki fulfills my tenant of a great animated film: using the animation medium to tell mature stories. The film is not one of his flights of fancy, but a well grounded story that soars because of his deft touch.

The film is about the aeronautics designer for the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces, Jiro Horikoshi. He designs planes for a living and his designs rained death and destruction on the world. Except that Jiro is a gentle soul only designing airplanes for their majesty in flight and not for their destructive nature. His superiors direct him to make them so; he makes them so that they are elegant. One of the critiques of the film is that Miyazaki lightly touches on this aspect of the creation of war machines, yet in every moment of planes engaging in war Miyazaki, through Jiro, shudders and recoils at the thought of using such beautiful machines for such ugliness.

Jiro is an engineer who expresses his creativity through the designs of his craft. That his works of art cause death and destruction do not take away from the diligent and excellent work he does. The engineer’s job is to design. It is not to lead a nation to war. To complain about Horikoshi’s work is to complain as if one had the higher moral authority. Yet, who can do such a thing? We all have ugliness somewhere in our nation (see 12 Years A Slave).

The film follows Jiro as a young dreamer to the wizened, middle aged man father of the Zero. It deviates to tell of Jiro’s love with a younger lady. She completes him and pushes him to finish his work. She also is sickened by tuberculosis so their love is tragic.

Miyazaki has made a great film which time will only validate as such. I was saddened that Disney’s Frozen beat it out. The category of Best Animated Feature Film should be renamed as Best Cartoon because I doubt that Frozen is a better film. I doubt that it is any better than the Lion King, and I’m not a big fan of hakuna-matata.

I’m glad I caught The Wind Rises in the theatre. It was at the Charles with the Japanese version and Hunt Valley with the US voice cast. Both were sparsely attended. My favorite sequence in the film is the Great Canto Earthquake especially the sound of it as it crashed through the land. *GOONG*

5 of 5 stars.