Ponyo

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: anime / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 17 of 100

‘Ponyo’ is a deceptive film. The story – an instantly recognisable take on Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ – is straightforward and unencumbered by subplots or a proliferation of supporting characters à la ‘Spirited Away’ or ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’; and yet Miyazaki communicates as much about the wide-eyed joyful innocence of childhood as he did in ‘My Neighbour Totoro’, as much about the environment and mankind’s often destructive relationship to it as he did in ‘Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind’, and as much about responsibility and the work ethnic never mind the youthfulness of the protagonist as he did in ‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’.

By the same token, ‘Ponyo’ seems to have the simplest visuals of any Studio Ghibli production. As Tim has pointed out in his absolutely spot-on review at Antagony & Ecstasy, “The gentle look of the film, halfway between watercolors and colored pencils, gives ‘Ponyo’ the certain air of an illustrated storybook.” Tim develops this observation to note that ‘Ponyo’ has the effect of rendering any adults in the audience – and there were a few at the mid-afternoon screening I attended – “to a more infantile state”. Again, absolutely true. Even I stopped being a grumpy old sod for an hour and three quarters (well, except when I wasn’t entertaining murderous thoughts about the little bastards in the front row who wouldn’t stop talking; not to mention the parents/guardians with them who obviously didn’t give a crap*) and simply ended up staring at the screen in bliss and gratitude.

Why bliss? Because ‘Ponyo’ is a dreamily beautiful fable, flawless in its conception, and feelgood in a way that American cinema can seldom do without tipping over into emotional manipulation. The story is simple, but arguably all the more heartfelt for being simple. The characters are immensely appealing (even though I didn’t have the option of seeing this in a subtitled cut and had to put up with Miley Cyrus’s younger sister and an equally prepubescent member of the Jonas clan squeakily providing vocals for Ponyo and Sosuke), the undersea world is riotous blaze of life and colour, and the story’s one and only turn into darker territory (matters relating to a storm which threatens to flood an entire community) is done so excitingly that I doubt even the youngest viewer would find it too scary.

Why gratitude? Because in an age where the majority of child-friendly animated films are CGI, Studio Ghibli continue to produce old school 2D animation with a zest and imagination that makes you wonder why anyone would want to boot up a computer when they could simply draw. And in ‘Ponyo’, they have taken story so sweet and unpretentious – so slight – that it could easily have been risible, and made of it instead a work of art.

*My fault for attending a matinee screening during half term week, I guess.

Visual Poetry: My Neighbour Totoro

My Neighbour Totoro

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: anime / In category: 1 of 10 / Overall: 9 of 100

If I’d seen ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ two years ago when I drew up the Personal Faves list (with its caveat of two films per director maximum) I would have included it in a heartbeat. As it is, I selected ‘Spirited Away’ and ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ to represent Miyazaki’s oeuvre.

The more I’ve explored the Studio Ghibli output (mainly at my wife’s urging: ’twas she who introduced me to anime), the more I’ve come to regret including ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ on the PF list. Sure, it’s a great film – and one of the few Ghiblis to benefit from its dubbed English language soundtrack, mainly thanks to Billy Crystal’s best work in ages as the voice of the fire demon Calcifer – but I’ve come to realise that I much prefer ‘Porco Rosso’ and ‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’ to ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’. And based on just one viewing, I have no hesitation in ranking ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ as one of the jewels in Studio Ghibli’s crown.

My only reservation over Miyazaki’s work has been a tendency, in just a very few films, to over-earnestness that threatens to render tone and pace sluggish even as the visuals soar. A very minor quibble, though, particularly when those visuals are just so damn gorgeous.

‘My Neighbour Totoro’ is Miyazaki’s gentlest, simplest, most lyrical film. The plot hardly matters (but just for the record: pre-teen Satsuki and her four-year-old sister Mei move to the country with their father while their mother recuperates in hospital; Mei meets the spirits of the forest; said spirits come to the rescue when Mei gets lost after an argument with Satsuki; the end) – what is important is the detail, the evocation of childhood and the countryside, and the life-affirming reconciliatory final sequence.

Mei’s first encounter with the otherworldly comes in the form of the soot gremlins (these li’l fellas …

… whom you may recognize from ‘Spirited Away’) who occupy the nooks and crannies and rafters of the family’s bath-house. They flee whenever Mei comes near them. Determined to sneak up on them, she inadvertently discovers the existence of other creatures. These guys, to be exact:

Like the soot gremlins, they beat a hasty retreat. Mei laughingly pursues them through the forest. The forest deepens; trees seem closer together; branches interlace. But none of this scares Mei or detracts from her innocent delight in discovering the creatures and chasing playfully after them. Emerging into a clearing, she encounters Totoro.

One of the most lovable aspects of ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ is how completely it celebrates childhood. Satsuki and Mei’s father is good-natured and attentive; he loves his children but isn’t over-protective. When Mei talks about Totoro, he doesn’t dismiss her claims as the product of her imagination but tells her she was lucky to have met one of the spirits of the forest. He also instills in his daughters an appreciation (and respect) for the natural world. Environmentalism is a key theme in Miyazaki’s work, but whereas films like ‘Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind’ and ‘Princess Mononoke’ are intense and challenging in the way they make their point, ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ incorporates the theme in a very genial and lyrical manner.

Mei’s innocence, exuberance and delight in the smallest of things is mirrored by Totoro himself. A lovely scene has Satsuki and Mei waiting for their father at a bus stop. Mei, tired from a long day, has had a piggy-back ride from Satsuki and is falling asleep even as she clings to her sister. Despite a heavy rain, Satsuki uncomplainingly waits at the stop. From beneath her umbrella, held low so that it covers both herself and Mei, she sees someone take up position next to them. Someone large, furry and with claws. As Mei did before her, Satsuki makes the acquaintance of Totoro. The creature (I was about to type “monster”, but a less monstrous ten-foot clawed being I can’t imagine; even Sully from ‘Monsters Inc’ is edgier than this guy) has a leaf on his head, from which the pooling raindrops plop onto his nose. This would probably annoy most of us. Totoro seems to like it. Satsuki passes Totoro a spare umbrella and mimes to him how to use it. Totoro gets the picture and hoists it above his head. The leaf/raindrops/nose scenario is consequently curtailed, much to Totoro’s puzzlement. The rain patters on the umbrella. The noise perks his senses. Then a much larger, denser drop of water detaches itself from an overhanging tree branch and impacts on Totoro’s umbrella with a thud. He’s delighted. It happens again. Totoro emits a joyous roar, throws out an arm and leaps into the air. He comes back down heavily and a cascade of pooled rainwater showers down from the leaves. The commotion wakes Mei, who grins in delight that Totoro has joined them.

It’s a simple – almost wistful – scene, devoid of narrative purpose but rich in detail (Miyazaki lingers on the single light that sheds a dim yellow light into the rainswept night; on the pools of rainwater; on a frog that wryly observes Totoro from the other side of the road) and eloquently nuanced with only barest of dialogue. It concludes in abrupt burst of energy as Totoro’s bus arrives. The bus is a cat. Yes, you read that right. No, I didn’t make it up. I have the screengrab to prove it.

Totoro and the cat-bus rally around Satsuki when an unparalleled argument between the sisters, exacerbated by concerns that their mother has suffered a potentially life-threatening relapse, sees Mei disappear into the countryside, trying to walk to the hospital. While this sequence might seem like the only real dramatic incident in the film, it’s actually the culmination of several downplayed but poignantly observed moments that demonstrate how Satsuki is on the cusp of adolescence, particularly in her slowly developing friendship with a boy from a neighbouring household, while Mei remains a wide-eyed and effusive child, fascinated by the world around her and all the magic and mystery it holds.

It is Miyazaki’s refusal to overstate this aspect (much as he refuses to over-sentimentalize the almost obligatory happy ending) that makes ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ the purest, warmest and most immediately likeable of his films.

PERSONAL FAVES: Spirited Away

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Film in 2003, 'Spirited Away' was my introduction to Miyazaki. I saw it on the big screen in a subtitled print (Miyazaki's subsequent films 'Howl's Moving Castle' and the forthcoming 'Ponyo' were dubbed for theatrical release) and it was one of those rare and delightful occasions where I fell in love with a film immediately and wholeheartedly; loved every frame of it; floated out of the cinema high on the pure joy of spending two hours under the spell of a genuinely feel-good film made with love and intelligence and attention to detail.


The plot - or at least the mechanics that set the plot in motion - could be straight out of a horror film. 10-year-old Chihiro's parents make a wrong turn en route to their new home and end up in a strange deserted township. Victims of their own greed, a curse befalls her parents. Then darkness falls and insubstantial, ghost-like shapes appear in the streets. Chihiro flees. Sseeking refuge at a huge old bathhouse, she discovers that yet more spirits, some benign and some quite definitely malevolent, are waiting ... and that her destiny is inextricably bound up with theirs.

The visual style is that of an opulent fantasy, sometimes creepy, sometimes delightful.

The film itself is quite simply a love story. In the most explicit (and superficial) sense, it's a love story between Chihiro (or Sen as she becomes known, having been tricked into forfeiting her name) and Haku, half youth half dragon, the unwitting apprentice to despicable witch Yubaba. Like Sen/Chihiro, his true name has also been stolen.

It's a love story about the cameraderie of friendship. Chihiro's parents are self-centred and foolish. Nonetheless, her adventures in the spirit world are motivated by a desire to free them from Yubaba's curse; and during these adventures she benefits from the support of a makeshift family of friends: a multi-limbed old man in charge of heating the bathhouse who commands a fur-ball army of sprites lathered in coal dust to keep the furnace stoked; an older girl slaving away as a cleaner who takes her under her wing; a river god bloated with a human waste pumped into his realm whom Sen cleanses; and a mysterious spirit called No Face whose personality reconfigures according to the characters he meets. Faced with the greedier denizens of the bathhouse, No Face becomes ravenous, rapacious and repellent. In Sen/Chihiro's company, he is calm and accommodating.

Most of all, though, 'Spirited Away' is a love story about the power of imagination. Chihiro's parents are scornful of the world they find themselves in, take advantage of what's on offer, and pay the price. Chihiro, though initially scared, integrates with her new surroundings and finally, as Sen, embraces them, particularly in her alliance with Yubaba's considerably more humane sister Zeniba.

Miyazaki's realisation of the spirit world, of its infrastructure, of the trompe-l'oeil architecture of the bathhouse, is breathtaking. He creates a world as believable as it is fantastical, a world his characters live in, rather than just a backdrop against which a story takes place. A world with structure and protocols and systems of transport.

It's a world I've lived in every time I've watched the film and been reluctant, when normality is restored at the end, to leave.

Whisper of the Heart

Thanks to my wife Paula for the following article:

The opening credits of ‘Whisper of the Heart’ play out to "Country Roads", an incongruous choice given that the song is all about the rural idyll – fields, mountains, open spaces – and the film is set in the bustling sprawl of Toyko.

Shizuku, a 14-year old girl with a talent for writing, spoofs the song as "Concrete Roads". A copy of her lyric falls into the hands of self-assured 15-year old Seiji who passes judgement: "It’s just as corny as the original."

Shizuku, a typical young teenager for whom this minor slight is the end of the world as she knows it, storms off muttering "Stupid jerk, stupid jerk, stupid jerk."


The scene is funny, true to life, and beautifully animated – it’s the point at which, only a short while into the two-hour running time, ‘Whisper of the Heart’ completely won me over and remains one of my all-time favourite Studio Ghibli productions.

Although not directed by Hayao Miyazaki – it was made by his protégé Yoshifumi Kondo, who tragically died aged just 47 a few years after ‘Whisper of the Heart’ was released – it certainly has the look and feel of a Miyazaki film, owing in no small amount to the master himself having storyboarded it. More than that, though, I think it’s a case of ‘Whisper of the Heart’ being a Studio Ghibli film. A Ghibli is a Ghibli the way a Pixar is a Pixar and that in itself is a guarantee of quality. You don’t really have to worry about who directed it.

‘Whisper of the Heart’ defies easy synopsis – it’s more about family interrelationships, friendship and first love than an actual clearly-defined narrative – but two wonderfully random plot devices set things in motion. The first is voracious reader Shizuku’s realisation that every book she checks out of the library has already been borrowed by the same person. She’s intrigued; it fires her imagination.

The second comes in the very obsese shape of a cat named Moon. Casually sharing Shizuku’s seat during a train ride, Moon trots off as the train stops and Shizuku finds herself following him across town. He leads her to an antiques shop whose avuncular owner is Seiji’s grandfather. He shows her a figurine of a cat in top hat and tails, a cane elegantly clutched between its paws, which he tells her is called The Baron. He avows that he’ll never sell the piece until its reunited with a matching, female, figurine. Again, Shizuku’s imagination is sparked.

Moon and The Baron: cats as catalyst. Shizuku begins writing a story inspired by The Baron. The world of her imagination drifts in and out of the real world. A lovely scene has her imagine The Baron and his companion riding the airwaves through a skyline dotted with floating planetoids; the camera pans down into the more corporeal atmosphere of the sky above Toyko and down further as Shizuku goes racing to the bottom of a flight of steps. In another memorable moment her imagination takes the discovery of a jewel by the heroine of her story (which is fast becoming a novel) and replaces the gem with a dead baby bird. It’s a reminder of the dark areas a child’s imagination can drift into, as well as a potent metaphor for the stresses and insecurities Shizuku experiences as she engages with the writing process, scared that she doesn't have a literary gem inside of her.

Kondo depicts realistic issues in Shizuku’s thorny relationship with her elder sister, her parents’ concerns over her isolationism as she shuts herself away to write (eventually, though, her father comes through in full support, urging her to follow her heart), and the tentative and sometimes prickly beginnings of her romance with Seiji.

‘Whisper of the Heart’ is fairly slowly paced but as rich in characterisation and emotion as it is visually. The humorous and the heartfelt are perfectly balanced. There’s an inspired reference to earlier Ghibli film ‘Porco Rosso’ that’s as cleverly placed as it is unexpected. The animation is detailed and evocative. And "Country Roads" sounds so much nicer in Japanese.

by Paula Fulwood

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

My partner Paula is a big fan of Japanese anime and has introduced me to a strand of cinema I didn't previously know much about. The work of Hayao Miyazaki has impressed me in particular, with 'Spirited Away' and 'Howl's Moving Castle' now installed on the 100 personal faves list. Until I get round to blogging about either of them, I asked Paula to write about her personal favourite Miyazaki film. My thanks to her for the following article.

'Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind' was Hayao Miyazaki's second film but his first collaboration with Toshio Suzuki, who became his producer. The success of this film led to the foundation of Studio Ghibli. Miyazaki went on to make Japanese box office successes 'Porco Rosso', 'Kiki's Delivery Service' and the Oscar-winning 'Spirited Away'. Other Studio Ghibli directors include Asio Takahata, Hiroyuki Morita and Hayao's son Goro Miyazaki.

'Nausicaa' seems to have been a template for future Studio Ghibli productions: already in evidence are Miyazaki's love of aircraft ('Porco Rosso', 'Laputa: Castle in the Sky', 'Howl's Moving Castle'), environmental concerns and the natural world ('Princess Mononoke', Asio Takahata's 'Pom Poko'), changing times/conflict/the threat of war ('Porco Rosso', Takahata's 'Grave of the Fireflies', 'Howl's Moving Castle'), young heroines forced to make a choice or at a crossroads in life ('Kiki's Delivery Service', Yoshifumi Kondo's 'Whisper of the Heart', 'Spirited Away', Morita's 'The Cat Returns'). Miyazaki also seems to have strong feminist sympathies and you can see this very clearly in nearly all of his films: 'Spirited Away' is the story of a young girl who needs to be strong and become more mature for the sake of her parents who have have been captured; in 'Howl's Moving Castle'; a young women who initially has very little confidence in herself and her appearance learns that she has a lot more strength of personality when she is cursed with a spell that ages her; the heroine of 'Kiki's Delivery Service' is a young witch who must spend a year away from home and discover her powers.

'Nausicaa' is set in the future after the collapse of the industrial world. The eponymous heroine is a young woman who lives in the Valley Of The Wind; the film details her special ability to communicate with insects and her harmony with the natural world, as well as her forays into the toxic jungle which is gradually covering the planet. Other kingdoms are on the verge of making the same mistakes that led to the seven days of fire (the collapse of the industrial world) because they fear the spread of the toxic jungle. Nausicaa and her people, however, have learned to live with the threat of it by using forces such as fire in moderation. Nausicaa and her people's way of life is threatened when the warlike Tolmekians attempt to force them to join in a campaign to destroy the toxic jungle.

The first thing that captured me was the opening credits: it tells the story of the seven days of fire in the form of a tapestry, a purely visual explanation of what happened before and during the seven days as well as the immediate aftermath.

What I love about the film is the fact that the industrial world has collapsed and Nausicaa's village is at one with nature: they are agricultural, working the land, using the power of the wind and fire but only in moderation ("too much fire and nothing will live"). I also love the character of Nausicaa herself, her ability to understand insects and the fact that she discovers why the toxic jungle is poisoned. She is a strong character who even the older villagers look up to. She doesn't fear the insects, she respects them. There is a lovely scene where some of the villagers want to kill an insect that has become injured and fallen into the Valley; out of fear, it is summoning other insects to rescue it. Whereas the villagers advocate killing it to prevent an onslaught of other insects, Nausicaa calmly uses her insect charm and manages to lead it away. I also love the three old men who serve as hostages after the Tolmekians invade - although they only have a couple of scenes, their comic banter and irrepressible good-humour is needed in a film with such serious themes.

The Giant Warriors - the hulking war machines that rampage during the seven days of fire - while terrifying, are also very poignant and make me think of a line from 'The Matrix': "we marvelled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI". In 'Nausicaa', humankind gives birth to the Giant Warriors which as a result wreak destruction upon the planet.

The film is relevant to today's society. The Tolmekians are representative of interventionist governments who mistakenly believe that heavy-handed militarism is a solution, when it fact in makes the situation worse.

Despite heavy themes and concerns, the film is beautiful: Miyazaki conjures visual poetry in Nausicaa's relationship with the natural world. The tapestry in the opening credits is a work of art, not just depicting the seven days of fire, but foretelling a legend that, by the end of the film, is fulfilled - a symbol of hope from the outset. Even the insects, who can be destructive and aggressive when needed, are shown as wise and very protective of each other. The music, too, is very beautiful, Joe Hisaishi's score perfectly complementing the images and the story.

The animation - like all Studio Ghibli - is striking and very detailed; although it doesn't have the bright colours of 'Porco Rosso', it suits the themes and concerns of the film.

In short, 'Nausicaa' has a serious concept but is also heart-warming, especially the ending - not a happily-ever-after ending, but a hopeful one.

by Paula Harrison