Understanding Auteurs: Hayao Miyazaki (Ponyo)

The quality and complexity of the animation has improved steadily with each of Hayao Miyazaki’s feature films.  Princess Mononoke’s (1997) epic canvasses seemed to represent a perfection of Studio Ghibli’s aesthetic, if not hand-drawn animation in general, until Spirited Away (2001) took their distinctive brand of surrealism to even more ornately detailed heights.  Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) seamlessly blended computer-generated images with Miyazaki’s trademark hand-drawn style, resulting in what was arguably the most visually sophisticated animated film of all time. 

Given this consistent increase in graphic ambition, it is somewhat surprising that Miyazaki has chosen a fairly straightforward, classically hand-drawn look for his tenth feature film, Ponyo (2008).  The animation techniques used here seem scarcely more advanced than those seen in the director’s first feature, Castle of Cagliostro (1979), and there is no indication that Studio Ghibli set out to top the spellbindingly grand vision of their previous adventures.  And yet, Ponyo feels in many ways more lively and enjoyable than Howl’s Moving Castle, and is ultimately one of Miyazaki’s most sublimely pleasurable films to date.  Where the dark epic Howl occasionally felt disconcertingly like a greatest hits collection of Miyazaki’s favorite tropes, Ponyo gives the impression that working on a relatively low-key children’s film revitalized the master animator’s creative energies by allowing him to bring the pleasant eccentricities of his aesthetic to the forefront.

Just as My Neighbor Totoro (1988) brought Miyazaki’s style to the surface following the bloated epics Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Castle in the Sky (1986), Ponyo succeeds by clearing away the thick, ultimately unmanageable plot of Howl and telling an elegantly simple yet highly quirky story.  Adapted loosely and freely from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Mermaid,” the plot follows the relationship between a five-year-old human boy named Sosuke and a goldfish he dubs “Ponyo.”  Curious about Sosuke as soon as he adopts her as a pet, and smitten with the boy after he shares some of his ham sandwich with her, Ponyo quickly develops an insatiable desire to become a human.  Ponyo is able to achieve her goal with surprising ease, thanks to her hereditary skill with magic, but her transformation threatens to undermine the balance between the earth and the ocean, causing a huge tsunami.

The basic outline of Ponyo’s story makes it sound like a fairly straightforward fairy tale, but the simplicity of the plot (at least relative to many of Miyazaki’s other films) allows plenty of room for the kind of lovably odd details that set Studio Ghibli’s films apart from those of any other animation studios.  Most of the things one would expect to happen in a children’s film with a similar storyline do not even seem to have occurred to Miyazaki.  As is the case with most of the director’s films from Totoro onward, there are no real villains in Ponyo; the titular character’s father, who spends most of the film desperately struggling to prevent his daughter becoming a human, initially seems like an antagonist but is eventually revealed to simply be a concerned parent.  (He also happens to have the film’s most eccentric and memorable character design, with unkempt strands of red hair spilling over his striped suit).  There aren’t any dreary scenes of adult characters accusing their children of making up stories; Sosuke’s mom is surprised by Ponyo’s transformation into a human, but she quickly accepts the situation.  Nor are there any rational explanations as to why a tsunami causes the ocean to become suspended in midair, perilously close to the moon, or why a nursing home’s submersion under water rejuvenates its elderly inhabitants rather than drowning them.  The casual surrealism of Ponyo’s narrative makes the film feel like it has a direct pipeline into the absurdist fantasies of young children, a tone that far too few films aimed at a young audience manage to achieve.

That tone is aided immensely by the relatively simple animation style that Miyazaki uses in Ponyo.  It’s hard to imagine what a more advanced hand-drawn film than Howl’s Moving Castle would look like, but history suggests that Studio Ghibli could top its overwhelmingly sharp detail if they wanted to.  The animation style of Ponyo is reminiscent of drawings that a skilled and imaginative child artist might make, which is a perfect look for a film about very young children.  And while the style isn’t as obviously sophisticated as that of most of Miyazaki’s action epics, the skill of the animators is apparent in every frame.  The film opens with an absolutely dazzling wordless sequence that introduces the viewer to the underwater world where Ponyo lives, with an incredible array of crabs, various colors of fish, and jellyfish glide gracefully around the goldfish’s father as he drops inexplicable potions into the water.  A later scene involving the aforementioned tsunami is one of Miyazaki’s most impressive setpieces, with an oblivious Ponyo gliding on top of huge, fish-shaped waves as she chases after the car of Sosuke’s mother.  The animation in this film is scaled down to an appropriate level for the film’s kid-friendly story, but it’s still incredible.

Ponyo is a triumph of craft over technology, and its imagination and wit outpace that of virtually all of the computer-animated films being made today.  The story takes off on many odd, inexplicable tangents, and completely avoids the obvious moralizing and inane pop-culture referencing that one expects from modern family films.  It’s possible to argue that the stakes feel a bit low – when Sosuke’s mother disappears into a heavy rainstorm, there’s little question of whether the boy and Ponyo will be able to find her alive – but the calm, carefree pace is another aspect of the film that seems perfectly scaled to the film’s child’s-eye view.  Simply put, Ponyo is the best of Miyazaki’s light children’s films (the others being Totoro and 1989’s Kiki’s Delivery Service), as well as being among his most charming films overall.

Having seen all ten of Hayao Miyazaki’s films to date, I can say with confidence that he is one of the very best working filmmakers.  While a couple of Miyazaki’s early adventure films found his distinctive brand of surrealism constrained by generic fantasy tropes, and some of his latter films continue to have structural problems, the great animator has yet to make an outright dud.  Everything he’s directed from his stylistic breakthrough My Neighbor Totoro onward is essential viewing for any cinephile, particularly those interested in animation.  (Though it isn’t a particularly mature or representative work, I would also say that Castle of Cagliostro is a must-see).   Miyazaki’s vision is equal to that of master cinema fantasists such as Georges Melies, F.W. Murnau, and Jean Cocteau, yet he doesn’t seem to have taken any obvious influence from any other filmmaker.  With many of the high-water marks of Miyazaki’s oeuvre being produced in the second half of his career to date, there seems to be no ceiling on the quality of the master animator’s output.  Where I once avoided Hayao Miyazaki’s films for fear that they would be too impenetrable, I now eagerly anticipate his next wonderfully baffling production.

FINAL GRADES FOR HAYAO MIYAZAKI

Castle of Cagliostro (1979) = B

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) = C+

Castle in the Sky (1986) = B-

My Neighbor Totoro (1988) = B+

Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) = B

Porco Rosso (1992) = B+

Princess Mononoke (1997) = B+

Spirited Away (2001) = A

Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) = B

Ponyo (2008) = B+

Understanding Auteurs: Hayao Miyazaki (Howl's Moving Castle)

Though it’s an adaptation of a British novel by Dianna Wynne Jones, the cinematic version of Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) is essentially an amalgam of Hayao Miyazaki’s previous films.  The protagonist is a young woman who learns to grow up over the course of the narrative, similar to the heroines of My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), and Spirited Away (2001).  She lives in a village that has old-fashioned architecture but is surrounded by futuristic technology, bringing to mind the settings of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Castle in the Sky (1986), while the war being waged just outside of town resembles the background action of both of those films as well as Princess Mononoke (1997).  One of Howl’s main antagonists is an imposingly blobby old lady who recalls the bathhouse owner from Spirited Away, and her shadowy henchmen feel like they could’ve stepped out of that film as well. 

The comparisons between elements of Howl’s Moving Castle and previous Studio Ghibli productions could fill an entire blog post.  For better and for worse, this may be Miyazaki’s most characteristic film.  Some of the variations on the director’s usual tropes are inspired, while others occasionally make Howl feel like a time-marking greatest hits collection.  The familiar coming-of-age structure gets an inventive workout, with heroine Sophie being literally forced to grow up after being afflicted with a curse that turns her into a 90-year old woman.  Her occasional sudden changes in age and appearance are as unpredictable as they are vividly animated.  Many of the other characters undergo transformations – the titular castle owner, for example, turns into a sinister, hulking bird before flying into combat – and while this is nothing new for Miyazaki fans, it does play to Studio Ghibli’s undeniable skill for vibrant, colorful imagery and Miyazaki’s talent for creating memorably surreal creature animations.  Other warmed-over Miyazaki tropes fare less well in Howl.  The ecstatic “everybody turns into their true form by finding their one true love” ending doesn’t have the emotional resonance that Miyazaki was clearly aiming for, largely because it feels like a rerun of the endings of both Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away.

The biggest problem with Howl’s Moving Castle is not its overly familiar feeling – and it should be noted that although the film feels very typical of Miyazaki’s style, it couldn’t be mistaken for the work of any other director – but its convoluted narrative and occasionally awkward pacing.  A number of critics, including Roger Ebert, found Howl to be baffling; when I saw it during its theatrical run, I felt that it was almost completely impenetrable.  On second viewing, I realized that the film is not hard to follow so much as it is overstuffed.  While the film’s epic expansiveness is part of what makes it feel so breathtakingly cinematic, there is simply too much going on, and the themes and characterizations are ultimately less focused than in Miyazaki’s finest work.  A lot of plot and thematic elements are introduced without being followed through on.  One scene has the conjuror Howl petulantly complaining about an accidental and unwanted change to his appearance.  The scene is exceptionally well realized in its own right, with Howl surrounded by a baroque array of random trinkets like the world’s most fantastically spoiled teenager, but the character’s vanity, which is given so much weight in this moment, is barely mentioned in the rest of the film.  It’s fine that Miyazaki didn’t turn Howl’s character arc into an obvious “don’t be a narcissist” message, except that one has the impression that this was the original intention and the film simply ran out of room for it.  Later on, a climactic revelation that a haunted, radish-headed scarecrow’s true form is a handsome prince that is in love with Sophie is an awkward conclusion to a storyline that was never really introduced.

Narrative has never been Miyazaki’s strong suit, and it’s no surprise that his masterpiece, Spirited Away, is also his least plot-heavy film (aside from perhaps My Neighbor Totoro).  Spirited Away is Miyazaki at his best because its dream logic structuring requires only the thinnest thread of plot, allowing the mesmerizing animation to take over without any unnecessary story elements getting in the way of the experience.  Contemporaneous mood pieces like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 (2004) are hardly less dense than Howl’s Moving Castle, but they use their minimal plots as launching pads for their directors’ spellbinding tangents, while Miyazaki’s singular imagery is weighed down by an excess of story.  Many of Miyazaki’s previous fantasy films, from Nausicaa to Mononoke, are poorly structured, but it is especially disappointing to see him revert to heavy convolution so quickly after he successfully abandoned conventional narrative structure with Spirited Away.

Despite these flaws, Howl’s Moving Castle is a must-see for anyone interested in animation or the fantasy genre.  There are enough extraordinary images in the film to make up for the randomness of the storytelling; even when a stale Miyazaki trope is the focus of a scene, there is usually something amazing to look at somewhere on the screen.  As usual, Studio Ghibli has somehow managed to top their previous work in terms of sheer grandeur and exotic beauty, and they have ambitiously incorporated a few computer-generated images into their mostly hand-drawn frames.  The titular castle, an enormous shambling mess of rusty gears and oddly jutting metals, may be the single most impressive of all of the studio’s creations.  Even at its most familiar, Hayao Miyazaki’s work is tremendously offbeat and charming.

UP NEXT  Ponyo

Understanding Auteurs: Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away)

Hayao Miyazaki has spent much of the last two decades of his career attempting to refine and perfect the types of films that he made as a young director.  Porco Rosso (1992) felt like a return to the rambunctious action of Castle of Cagliostro (1979), but with a stronger personal stamp and a greater emphasis on bizarre character quirks.  Princess Mononoke (1997) was in some respects a remake of the eco-themed epics Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Castle in the Sky (1986), but with an even larger scope and less reliance on fantasy genre clichés.  Spirited Away (2001) continues the pattern by returning Miyazaki to the theme of adolescent maturation previously explored in My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989).  But where those films were markedly kid-friendly and charmingly simple, Spirited Away is a darkly surreal work that may top even Princess Mononoke with its wildly baroque animation.  The result is Miyazaki’s best film to this point, and one of the very finest films of its decade.

The basic outline of Spirited Away’s plot is similar to My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service, with a young girl moving to a new town and gradually learning to overcome her insecurities until she becomes a self-reliant, mature individual.  But the menacing form that the new film’s protagonist’s fears take makes the stakes feel much higher than in the earlier stories.  Where the heroines of Totoro were simply struggling to come to grips with their mother’s (ultimately minor) illness, and Kiki was trying to fit in with the other kids, Spirited Away’s Chihiro is separated from her parents (who turn into pigs after eating too much food) and thrown into an Alice in Wonderland-style world full of inexplicable rules and terrifying beasts.  Though virtually everything that happens in the film, from the moment Chihiro’s parents’ car breaks down on their way to their new home, could be interpreted as a dream, Miyazaki does nothing to encourage that reading of the story, and the unclear distinction between the “spirit world” and everyday existence gives the film’s strange world a weight and power that wouldn’t be possible in a more conventionally plotted animated movie.

Of course, the sheer quality of Studio Ghibli’s animation plays the biggest role in selling the illusion of the film’s spirit world.  Their technical skill has improved with every subsequent film, and though Princess Mononoke brought them to what seemed to be the absolute peak of excellence in hand-drawn animation, they have once again outdone themselves with Spirited Away.  What Mononoke had in breathtaking scale, this film has in ornate, unforgettable character design.  A six-armed, bushy-mustached boiler room worker provides some of the film’s early visual highlights, but his memorable scene is merely a warm-up for the many fantastic sights to come.  These include a gang of man-sized talking frogs, a mute but imposing “radish spirit” that is essentially a more sinister version of Totoro, three green severed-yet-living heads that bounce around like jumping beans, an enormous baby whose full girth isn’t revealed until late in the film, and a number of kabuki-masked spirits whose shadowy bodies can change size and shape almost at random.  The most striking figure of all may be Chihiro’s bath house boss, an elderly lady with a tiny, bird-like body that is usually hidden by her preference for baggy dresses and gaudy jewelry, and is dwarfed by her massive, wrinkled head. 

The bath house is also the site of a vividly strange scene in which Chihiro is tasked with washing an enormous “stink spirit,” a creature that appears to be a mobile, sentient hill of dripping mud.  Chihiro’s efforts to clean him up result in a surprisingly intense action scene that is a true tour de force for Studio Ghibli’s animation team, and arguably Miyazaki’s most impressively directed scene to this point.  After being cleaned, the stink spirit reveals itself to be a polluted river that has been ignored the spirit world’s inhabitants for years.

Environmental messages are nothing new in Miyazaki’s oeuvre, but they haven’t always been well stated in past films.  Spirited Away’s generalized message about protecting the earth and overcoming greed threatens to become a bit too blunt for the film’s dream logic plotting (Chihiro’s parents literally becoming pigs after eating too much is hardly subtle), but Miyazaki gets away with his criticism of careless materialism by depicting the characters in the film as misguided rather than villainous, and by sticking to a coherent point of view (thereby avoiding the muddled moralizing of Nausicaa and Castle in the Sky).  As usual, Miyazaki does not shy away from presenting the natural world as an ominous and dangerous place even as he revels in its beauty and wonder.  The other spirits’ fears of the stink spirit are entirely understandable.

While some of the morals that Miyazaki is imparting may seem simple, he consistently states them in the least obvious and most mesmerizing ways possible.  A long sequence involving a masked spirit known as “No Face,” who is allowed to consume and destroy as much as he wants in the bath house as long as he keeps throwing gold at the employees, simultaneously provides the film’s most obvious moralizing (“don’t be greedy”) and some of its most stunningly bizarre nightmare imagery (No Face’s body rapidly growing as food dribbles out of his mouth and plates smash all around him).  The combination of a clear moral and vividly animated dream-logic plotting makes Spirited Away a wonderful modern fair tale.  It is Miyazaki’s most powerful and beautiful film to date, and one of the greatest triumphs in the history of animated film.

UP NEXT  Howl’s Moving Castle

Understanding Auteurs: Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke)

Hayao Miyazaki seems to be treating his ‘90s films as a chance to do better and more ambitious variations on the kinds of films that he made in the earlier part of his career.  Porco Rosso (1992) is in some respects a return to the wild and messy action of Castle of Cagliostro (1979), but the newer film is far more odd and perverse than Miyazaki’s feature debut.  The great animator followed Cagliostro with Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Castle in the Sky (1986), which expanded the scope of Miyazaki’s visual aesthetic and the complexity of his animation considerably, while putting a noticeable strain on his storytelling abilities.  Princess Mononoke (1997) feels like an attempt to remake those widescreen eco-themed epics, but with a considerably darker tone and less reliance on fantasy genre clichés. 

The improvements over Nausicaa and Castle in the Sky are apparent from the first scenes of Princess Mononoke.  Studio Ghibli’s animation has been improving steadily with each new project, and as gorgeous as Porco Rosso is, the new film feels like a quantum leap over it.  Every frame is dynamically composed and filled with rich, colorful detail.  The epic scale of the film, which often has as much action going on in the background as the foreground, recalls masterpieces of live-action cinema such as Seven Samurai (1954) and Andrei Rublev (1966).  But unlike Kurosawa or Tarkovsky, Miyazaki has the advantage of working in an animated medium where literally anything can happen.  And although Mononoke is considerably more serious and grounded than Porco, it still features an embarrassment of fantastical riches, with eccentric settings and character designs populating the edges of the screen at practically every moment.  Miyazaki’s early films featured breathtaking backgrounds, but the characters tended to be a bit nondescript (as seems to be customary in anime).  But since Porco Rosso, Miyazaki has been lavishing as much care on the look of his heroes and villains as on the design of their dwellings.  The titular character of the new film has some particularly striking early appearances in her battle garb, which includes a maroon tribal mask and a caveperson’s loincloth. 

Princess Mononoke is Miyazaki’s most visually lavish and impressive film to date, but it doesn’t find him making many advances as a storyteller.  The movie’s eco-friendly message is largely indistinguishable from those in Nausicaa and Castle in the Sky, and it is simultaneously unsubtle and muddled, frequently buried under an unnecessarily convoluted plot surrounding a battle over control of the forest.  Here is the story, as far as I understand it:  a hunter, Ashitaka, is forced to kill a demon-infected giant boar that is rampaging through his village.  The demon curse is transferred to Ashitaka, whose left arm is now imbued with a super strength that will eventually overwhelm and possibly kill him or lead him to kill others.  Banished from his village, Ashitaka is advised to travel to a mountain range that is the home to a forest spirit that may be able to remove the demon curse.  When Ashitaka reaches the area, he is thrust into a complicated conflict involving the giant beasts who populate the forest, a town of weapon-makers, a group of prize-hunting monks, an army of samurai, and Princess Mononoke, a wolf-raised girl who has turned against her own species.

There are at least one or two too many factions involved in this conflict.  While none of the characters feel as thoroughly pointless as some of the supporting figures in Miyazaki’s early films, the conflict really could’ve been stripped down to the weapon-makers and Mononoke and her animal friends, with Ashitaka caught in-between.  Not even all of the animals really needed to appear in the film; as cool as the menacingly shadowy red-eyed gang of apes are, they seem to show up just to add extra color to a movie that doesn’t need any extra eccentricity, and they have no real bearing on the outcome of the final battle.  The purpose of the samurai army is never entirely clear; they threaten to take the weapon-makers wares, which makes the potentially villainous craftsmen more sympathetic than they otherwise would be, but the samurai are never fleshed out enough for the viewer to care about their role in the fight. 

But although Miyazaki clutters his script with too many unnecessary subplots, he does deserve credit for creating a number of vividly realized and fleshed-out characters.  The weapon-makers from the industrial Iron Town feel particularly human and interesting.  It would’ve been easy to turn these battle-ready people into mustache-twirling enemies of peace (as the equivalent characters in Nausicaa and Castle in the Sky were), but Miyazaki makes their need for self-defense understandable by depicting the gigantic wolves and boars that populate the nearby forest as genuine threats; these are not the cuddly, anthropomorphic singing and dancing creatures of Disney films, but hungry, sharp-toothed beasts whose tempers can turn dramatically at the first sign of a threat.  The denizens of Iron Town are not merely defined by their need for self-defense, either.  Lady Eboshi, the leader of the town, has turned her home into a haven for some of Japan’s less fortunate citizens, with lepers and prostitutes earning a second chance in life by becoming weapons manufacturers.  Although Eboshi may be misguided in some ways – and it was her hunting that unleashed the boar demon that caused Ashitaka’s dilemma – she is scarcely less sympathetic than Princess Mononoke, whose desire for vengeance against the humans who killed members of her wolf family seems simultaneously noble and insane.  Mononoke is unsurprisingly revealed to have a kind heart, but she is memorably introduced as a near-feral threat with blood-smeared lips.  There are no real villains in Princess Mononoke, and while this has more or less been the case in all of Miyazaki’s films since My Neighbor Totoro (1988), it is especially impressive to see that kind of moral rigor in a violent adventure film.

Princess Mononoke is perhaps the most action-packed of Miyazaki’s films to this point, and it features quite a few stunningly directed setpieces.  The opening sequence involving Ashitaka’s battle with the demon-enhanced boar is as thrilling a chase sequence as exists in cinema, and the surreal details in the animation – the demon curse is depicted as a mass of worm-like figures slithering over the boar’s body as it runs at top speed – only make the action more riveting.  Mononoke’s attack on Iron Town is an equally dynamic scene, with Ashitaka struggling to keep the peace between the psychotically revenge-obsessed wolf girl and the gun-happy citizens of the town.  Even the incidental details of the action scenes are powerfully realized.  After Ashitaka gains his demon strength, his arrow shots become strong enough to remove limbs from his attackers; the fact that Miyazaki doesn’t linger on the resulting gore only makes the action seem more visceral and brutal.  The raw physicality of these scenes provides a wonderful contrast to the elegant, confidently surreal moments of tranquility, with the final appearance of the forest spirit being a particularly transcendent moment.  Though Miyazaki could have edited his script down a bit, it’s hard to begrudge him a few excesses in a film where he’s finally achieved the epic fusion of relentless action and otherworldly beauty that he has been aiming for throughout his storied career.

UP NEXT  Spirited Away

Understanding Auteurs: Hayao Miyazaki (Kiki's Delivery Service and Porco Rosso)

Originally this post was going to focus exclusively on Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Hayao Miyazaki’s fifth feature and the spiritual sister of My Neighbor Totoro (1988).  But while Kiki is a pleasant enough follow-up to Miyazaki’s artistic breakthrough, and boasts gorgeous animation from the reliably excellent Studio Ghibli team, it strikes me as a relatively minor work and I’m not sure how much I really have to say about it.  And since I didn’t get around to writing anything about Miyazaki last month, this post will also include a look at the great Japanese animator’s sixth feature, Porco Rosso (1992), an entertaining film that finds Studio Ghibli making a confident return to the action genre.

Despite their kid-friendly cartoon surfaces, Miyazaki’s films have tended to be a little too eccentric and surreal to fit comfortably in the children’s section at video stores.  The situation changes somewhat with Kiki’s Delivery Service, a lighthearted tale about a young witch who gradually learns to overcome her insecurities and become a self-sufficient, mature individual.  Kiki is our first (and possibly only) chance to see how Miyazaki would handle a relatively straightforward family film – the streamlining most likely due to the fact that he took over for a different director part way through the film’s pre-production – and he handles it very well.  It would be disappointing to see Miyazaki make too many films with simple morals and few dark edges, but Kiki’s pro-independence message is treated with appropriate sincerity, and the Totoro-style lack of villains and contrived conflict prevents Kiki from becoming just another children’s film.  With its utter lack of urgency, Kiki may qualify as “Miyazaki light,” but it is genuinely sweet and charming in a way that far too few family films are.

While Kiki finds Miyazaki reigning himself in a bit for a mass audience, the wild action-adventure film Porco Rosso is probably the strangest thing to come out of Studio Ghibli up to this point.  In fact, Porco may be the most eccentric film set during the World War II era this side of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009).  The plot revolves around the titular character, an ace Italian pilot who inexplicably turned into a pig after emerging as the sole survivor of a skirmish in the first World War.  Porco simply wants to fly his plane for fun and adventure (and the occasional quick injection of cash to pay off some of his many debts), but he is constantly interrupted by various gangs of sky pirates and by a cocky U.S. pilot who wants to compare skills.  The story borders on being incoherent and a little shapeless – which is perhaps due to the project’s origins as a short film meant to be shown during commercial flights, though it’s also true that plotting has never really been Miyazaki’s strong suit – and while setting the film in Italy during the initial stages of WWII is an interesting choice (and it is amusing to see the hero of the film tell a soldier that “it’s better to be a pig than a fascist”), Miyazaki doesn’t seem terribly interested in making any sort of grand statement about the war. 

Still, this is Miyazaki’s most energetic and purely exciting film since his feature debut, The Castle of Cagliostro (1979).  Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Castle in the Sky (1986) seemed to be adventure films mostly because Miyazaki couldn’t come up with any other structure to hang his fantastical animation on, but Porco finds the director really digging into his action scenes, and coming up with dynamic and visceral ways to film Porco’s many dangerous and daring flights.  The climactic action scene that finds Porco and the U.S. pilot engaging in a dog fight before landing in the sea and having a surprisingly gory (albeit cartoonish) fist fight in the water is particularly impressive.

Better still are the bizarre details that fill every scene and contribute greatly to the movie’s rowdy atmosphere.  An early highpoint has sky pirates kidnapping a group of children who wind up annoying the villains by reacting to the situations as an audience excited to be rescued by Porco rather than as terrified hostages.  Later scenes feature the apparently foul-smelling pirates ganging up on Porco only to become bashful and giggly when confronted by the hero’s female repairs specialist, who encourages them to take a bath.  This kind of enjoyable broad humor is matched to a dry, surrealist wit that provides continuously amusing tropes like Porco’s inexplicable appeal as a ladies man despite being an obese pig, and a straight-faced flashback to the moment that Porco transformed into a pig that hilariously winds up making the situation more baffling rather than explaining anything.  While My Neighbor Totoro found Miyazaki fully developing his own distinct style, and Kiki’s Delivery Service put that unique aesthetic into a somewhat more crowd-pleasing context, it is the seemingly throwaway Porco Rosso that finds Miyazaki finally pulling all of the divergent strands of his filmmaking into one messy yet potently unmistakable aesthetic. 

UP NEXT  Princess Mononoke

Understanding Auteurs: Hayao Miyazaki (My Neighbor Totoro)

My Neighbor Totoro (1988), the fourth feature film by Hayao Miyazaki, drops the rote fantasy structure of the director’s previous two movies while foregrounding his distinctive brand of gentle surrealism.  Interestingly, the film’s plot doesn’t revolve around conflict, and there are no attempts to turn any of the characters into heroes or villains.  Though Miyazaki’s first feature length work was the excellent, action-packed Castle of Cagliostro (1979), it seemed that he had mostly lost interest in the adventure genre by the time he made Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Castle in the Sky (1986), where the adventure movie plots seemed to exist mostly because the director needed some sort of recognizable frame to support his gorgeous animation.   Totoro eschews the conventional plotting of Miyazaki’s early work in favor of an immersive, relaxed pacing that evokes the wonder and confusion of childhood in a way that very few family films even attempt.

Totoro’s plot is very simple.  A father and his two daughters move into a new countryside home in order to be closer to the hospital where the girls’ mother is recovering from an (unspecified) illness.  While playing outside one day, the younger girl, Mei, wanders into the forest and winds up on top of a large, bear-like creature.  When Mei asks the creature what its name is, it lets out a series of roars that she interprets as “Totoro.”  Eventually Totoro makes himself known to Mei’s older sister, Satsuki, and he winds up helping the girls through some potentially scary moments in their lives.

And that’s about it.  There are none of the expected scenes of adults telling the girls to stop making up stories, and no scenes where angry townspeople misunderstand Totoro and try to harm him.  There are no moments that seem designed to amp up the melodrama or manipulate the viewer into having a heightened emotional response.  Though Totoro is aimed more directly at children than any of Miyazaki’s previous work, it seems to trust the intelligence of the audience more than those earlier films did.  Aside from an annoyingly saccharine ballad that plays over the opening and closing credits, there is nothing in Totoro that feels like a generic example of filmmaking for kids.

By keeping overt plot mostly out of the way, Miyazaki ensures that there is plenty of room for his finely honed sense of charm to dominate the proceedings.  Satsuki and Mei are spirited and likeable in the way that real-life children often are, and their sisterly bond seems genuine precisely because it is so understated and well-observed.  Totoro’s appearances are fairly sparse, but Miyazaki makes them count; his most memorable scene occurs at a bus stop during a rainstorm, where he is delighted to share the girls’ umbrella.  The furry creature’s friends, such as a many-legged half-cat/half-bus, are imaginatively conceived and impressively realized.  But the oddball, fantastical touches share equal screentime with enjoyably quirky characters like the neighbor boy who is so shy around girls that he becomes speechless when he is in their company.

Perhaps My Neighbor Totoro is a bit too slight to be considered a truly great film.  At times the film’s aimless plotting and lighthearted tone make it feel almost too gentle to be really special.  Miyazaki could perhaps be accused of soft-pedaling the mother’s illness; nothing has been done in the animation of the character to even make her look sick, and it basically just turns out in the end that she isn’t doing so badly.  Then again, the point of Totoro is not to show a family in a dramatic, life-and-death situation, but to show how an imaginary friend/teddy bear/Totoro can help kids deal with everyday stresses.  Miyazaki’s fourth film may be a relatively minor work in the grand scheme of things, but by turning away from traditional good-and-evil action and focusing on small charming details, the great animator has made a major breakthrough in his own aesthetic and has finally fully honored his unique voice.

UP NEXT  Kiki's Delivery Service

Understanding Auteurs: Hayao Miyazaki (Castle in the Sky)

Tech-savvy warlords battle each other in the air while humble farmers toil on the ground.  Workers tell tales about huge buildings in the clouds, though most are too afraid to travel outside their village.  The villagers rely on a rare crystal whose power can be easily misused for violent purposes.  A young, adventure loving princess is one of the few who can harness the power of the crystal, but that doesn’t stop a number of warring factions from attempting to use the mineral for their own selfish needs.  One such villain plans to use the crystal to activate a series of long-dormant, hulking robot beasts that are rumored to live in a castle in the sky.

If the plot of Castle in the Sky (1986) sounds a little familiar, it’s because the film is only a slight variation on Hayao Miyazaki’s previous movie, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984).  Once again there is a collision between a peaceful, old-fashioned village and a series of warring, high-tech societies.  Once again there is an environmental theme, which is once again expressed through a heroic princess who is the only one can utilize nature’s power to a righteous end.  Once again there are arrogant, power-hungry warlords who want to use a natural power to devious ends.  And once again those villains want to seize their power by activating ancient, destructive beasts.

Miyazaki’s third feature is largely a remake of his second, albeit with some noticeable cosmetic changes.  But Castle in the Sky does mark a genuine improvement over Nausicaa (and Miyazaki’s first film, 1979’s Castle of Cagliostro) in the sense that there are no completely extraneous characters.  Every major figure in the film has something to do, and even if the heroine and her male sidekick/chaste romantic interest have scarcely more personality than Princess Nausicaa, at least they each have a complete character arc.  And some of the supporting characters are genuinely eccentric.  A family of shy, bumbling sky pirates, led into combat by their domineering, clown-haired matriarch, keep the film lively even as the plot goes through the “fantasy 101” motions.  Even the most ill-defined of the film’s major characters, a villainous army general, has a clear function in the plot, so it doesn’t seem like a waste of the film’s generous running time to feature him in scenes the way that it did with, say,  the master swordsman in Nausicaa.

Castle in the Sky does have a few of the impressively large action set pieces that we’ve come to expect from Miyazaki.  The master animator boldly opens the film deep in the middle of the action, with the princess being chased through a giant air ship by the sky pirates, as if this was a late chapter in an ongoing serial and not the beginning of a children’s film.  A massacre that occurs when one of the aforementioned robots is unleashed is genuinely intense and brutal, with Miyazaki grippingly building the intensity by continuously increasing the scope and scale of the destruction until the screen is virtually filled with blood-red fire.  But overall Castle in the Sky, like Nausicaa, is too convoluted, lumbering, and lengthy to be consistently thrilling.  The ambitious, wide-canvas style that Miyazaki is quickly turning into his signature style does give Nausicaa and Castle in the Sky a truly epic feel, but its easy to miss the fleet-footedness and insouciant wit of Castle of Cagliostro, which remains Miyazaki’s most enjoyable film to this point.

UP NEXT  My Neighbor Totoro

Understanding Auteurs: Hayao Miyazaki (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind)

Hayao Miyazaki followed the critical and commercial success of his debut feature, The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), by creating a manga series known as Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.  The origins of the series, which began its twelve-year serialized run in 1982, are somewhat controversial.  Some say that Miyazaki originally intended for Nausicaa to be an anime, but couldn’t find funding for a feature film, while others claim that the director started the manga on the condition that it would never be adapted to film, and that he was only later convinced by financers to turn his story into a theatrical release.  Regardless, Miyazaki wound up releasing a filmic version of Nausicaa in 1984, adapting only the portions of the story which he’d already completed in the manga (roughly a quarter of the story that was ultimately completed in 1994).

Like Cagliostro, Nausicaa freely blends medieval fantasy adventure with space age sci-fi, though it replaces the earlier film’s spy elements with a post-apocalyptic wasteland motif.  The story is set a thousand years after a world war known as “The Seven Days of Fire,” which destroyed the earth’s ecosystem and turned human civilization into a scattered series of settlements.  The various villages face the constant threat of being engulfed by the toxic jungle that now takes up most of the earth.  While humans can’t survive long in the toxic environment, insects have thrived and become enormous, threatening beasts.  Princess Nausicaa, a skilled wind glider who often enters the toxic forest in order to gather supplies for her settlement, is one of the few who seem willing or able to communicate with the insects rather than enraging them.  But when several other warring kingdoms crash land in the Valley of the Wind, Nausicaa and her peaceful settlement are thrust into a complicated conflict involving a long-dormant “Giant Warrior” who may be able to eliminate the insect threat, but who may also pose a lethal threat to the humans.

The plot is about as convoluted as it sounds, and probably more well-suited to a lengthy comic book series than a two-hour film.  Sadly, the film quickly gets bogged down with long expository scenes, and Miyazaki never finds a way to effectively incorporate all of the plot points and characters into one distinct, compelling vision.  Cagliostro had several peripheral characters that seemed to have been included simply because fans of the Lupin the III series would expect them to be there, but every character besides Nausicaa gets short thrift in Miyazaki’s second film.  While the characters in Cagliostro were largely archetypal in conception (and in their physical design), many of them were given enough personality to at least partially transcend their generic origins.  Not so in Nausicaa, which features such hackneyed figures as the noble swordsman, the blind but wise old lady, and the arrogant and power- hungry soldier, and then doesn’t give any of them enough screen time to become anything more than walking action figures.  Miyazaki is wise to temper his earnest environmental and anti-war themes by acknowledging that nature is often harsh and inhospitable to humans, and the animators admirably make no attempt to make the slimy, multi-eyed giant bugs cute in any way.  But otherwise the low level of ambiguity and nuance in the film seems wildly out of proportion to the complexity of its plot.

Fortunately, Nausicaa’s stunning hand-drawn animation ensures that the film is at least as compelling as it is frustrating.  The world of the film may be made up of a thousand different fantasy and sci-fi clichés, but its indigo hue and wide-open vistas are as unique as they are breathtaking.  There are a lot of nice little touches, such as the way that the wind rustles through the characters’ hair, that earn the animators points simply for degree of difficulty.  Nausicaa’s action sequences aren’t as crisp as those in Cagliostro, but they do feel impressively huge and they are edited with a clarity that is sadly lacking in most modern action films.  Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is bloated with plot and underdeveloped characters, but it is proof that even a heavily flawed Hayao Miyazaki film is well worth staring at for a couple of hours.

UP NEXT  Castle in the Sky

Understanding Auteurs: Hayao Miyazaki (The Castle of Cagliostro)

Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki has a reputation as one of the finest filmmakers working today.  Miyazaki’s creative leadership of Studio Ghibli, the animation studio that he co-founded with director Isao Takahata and producer Toshio Suzuki, has led many to dub Miyazaki as the “Japanese Walt Disney.”  But whatever whimsy and sentimentality crop up in Miyazaki’s work is offset by a deeply weird, surrealist sensibility that doesn’t lend itself easily to toy deals or happy meal promotional tie-ins.  Miyazaki doesn’t shy away from using populist humor or cute, family friendly creatures in his movies, but his is clearly a deeply personal, singular sensibility, and he isn’t afraid to challenge, frighten or even confound his audience.

I was certainly baffled both times I saw Spirited Away (2001) on DVD and the one time I caught Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) in a now-defunct West Bend movie theatre.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – great works of art are always inherently difficult to process on some level, and the avant-garde at its best is able to tap into some fundamental yet hard-to-describe truths on a level that traditional, straightforward works can’t approach.  And although I would have a hard time giving a plot synopsis or even giving any sort of coherent thematic analysis of Spirited Away (and not just because I haven’t seen it in a few years), I still found it so ravishingly beautiful that I wouldn’t hesitate to call it one of the finest animated films I’ve ever seen, and perhaps one of the best films of the past decade.  But I’m of two minds about Howl’s Moving Castle, which I found stunning visually but couldn’t connect with on any other level. 

My experience with Howl’s Moving Castle discouraged me from exploring the rest of Miyazaki’s oeuvre.  Whatever curiosity I’ve had about his work has always been offset by a fear that I would be completely perplexed by his oddball vision.  It’s not that I have an aversion to oddity in art – I would actually go as far as to say that strangeness is a prerequisite for greatness, and most of my favorite filmmakers (Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, Orson Welles, Werner Herzog, etc.) made highly idiosyncratic works that are difficult to categorize and that can’t be fully unpacked even after many viewings.  I could blame my failure to connect with Howl’s Moving Castle on a bias against children’s films, since it’s true that I’m rarely the first in line to see anything that appears to be aimed at anyone under the age of ten, but I would have to ignore the fact some recent computer animated work by Pixar and some hand-drawn films by Sylvain Chomet and Michel Ocelot are among the most enchanting things I’ve seen in the past decade.  (Besides, even a novice like me can see that Miyazaki’s films are not necessarily aimed at children - or at least not just at children).  And while it’s true that I don’t have a very firm grasp of the history of anime, or its stylistic conventions – aside from genre landmarks like Akira (1988) and Grave of the Fireflies (1988), I really haven’t seen much – that can’t be the reason that I’ve been so thrown off by Miyazaki’s style, since he is clearly following his own muse rather than adhering to an inscrutable foreign tradition. 

I have to admit that the reason that I’ve remained ignorant of the work of Miyazaki for so long is probably simply that I’m afraid that I won’t “get it,” and I hate to be that guy who is so thrown off by a work of art that I can’t properly appreciate or evaluate it.  Miyazaki’s work is very difficult to compartmentalize, both because he shifts so quickly between different tones and because it’s hard (for me) to identify when he’s playing off of certain Japanese cultural tropes and when he’s simply making stuff up.  The English voiceovers added to the Disney-distributed editions Miyazaki’s films are also an obstacle to my enjoyment; while they nicely free up my eyes to pay closer attention to the astonishing visuals rather than subtitles, they also tend to feature distracting (and frankly pointless) appearances by celebrity actors rather than trained voice performers.  Miyazaki’s deal with Disney prevents them from drastically altering his films (part of the reason that Studio Ghibli was founded in the mid-80s was so that Miyazaki could retain creative control over the international versions of his films), but I do wonder if, for example, Billy Crystal’s goofy vaudeville-style voiceover as one of the comic relief characters in Howl’s Moving Castle may have given his scenes a tone that Miyazaki did not intend.  The DVDs helpfully include the option to view the film’s with either subtitles or the English dubs, but it’s hard to decide which version is preferable, especially as I imagine it may vary from film to film.

Thankfully, few of these concerns apply to Miyazaki’s first feature length film (he’d previously worked on several anime television series), The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), which is about as easy an introduction to the work of a filmmaker that I can imagine.  A narratively streamlined adventure film with a breathless pace, a goofy sense of humor, and iconic, easy-to-grasp characters, Cagliostro is presumably the furthest from the avant-garde that Miyazaki will be in his career as a filmmaker.  But even when making a crowd-pleasing blockbuster in what appears to be a sort of “house style,” Miyazaki brings enough personality to the proceedings to set his film apart from the pack.  Cagliostro isn’t an original Miyazaki creation – he and co-screenwriter Haruya Yamazaki were tasked with making the second film in the Lupin the III series, spun-off from a popular television series that was based on a manga series created by Monkey Punch (who based his creation on a series of French adventure novels by Maurice Leblanc) – but the film doesn’t bend under the weight of his complicated creative lineage, and it’s an easy-to-follow and engaging story that doesn’t require any prior knowledge of its source material.

Lupin the III is a master thief with a carefree attitude and a playful spirit.  He works alongside a sarcastic, laidback marksman named Daisuke Jigen and a focused master samurai named Goemon.  In the midst of apparently randomly cruising around Europe looking for adventure, Lupin and Jigen get in the middle of a wild car chase involving a mysterious woman and a band of thugs tailing her.  Despite knowing nothing about the situation, Lupin decides to rescue the woman, who promptly disappears but leaves him a distinctive and mysterious ring.  Lupin eventually comes to learn that the woman, Clarisse, is the princess of Cagliostro and is soon to be married to a villainous Count, who needs Clarisse’s ring to perform a ritual that will allow him to uncover the fabled Cagliostro treasure, which will add to the fortune that he’s made from his counterfeit bill empire.  In order to enter the Count’s heavily guarded castle, Lupin tips off his longtime rival, easily-agitated Interpol agent Zenigata, to his whereabouts, using the subsequent distraction to sneak his way past the Count’s guards and remote-controlled lasers.  Gradually Lupin and Zenigata are forced to join forces to rescue the princess and bring down the Count’s illegal operation, though complications arise when Lupin’s rival thief (and sometime lover) Fujiko turns out to already be attempting to swipe the counterfeit cash.

The characters are all fairly basic archetypes; even if the viewer isn’t familiar with the long-running Lupin series (as I wasn’t), they will be able to quickly identify each character’s basic function within the series’ universe, and there aren’t any unexpected twists in their personalities along the way.  There is no hint of moral ambiguity in the Count, and Clarisse is about as complicated as Princess Peach from the Super Mario Bros. video games.  Also, a few of the supporting characters have practically nothing to do in Cagliostro, and seem to only have been included in the script because fans of the series would expect them to show up at some point (samurai Goemon, who appears maybe five times in the whole film and does nothing of note, feels particularly shoehorned in).

These very simple characterizations may prevent Cagliostro from being a particularly sophisticated or original film, but the basic plotting allows the film to focus its full attention on its wonderful visuals and its many dazzling action scenes.  The film opens in the chaotic aftermath of a bank heist, and quickly establishes its tone when Lupin and Jigen decide to throw the cash out the window (it engulfs a bunch of passing cars, but magically doesn’t seem to cause any accidents), apparently more concerned with the excitement of the heist itself than any potential profits.  Miyazaki moves at the same jazzy pace as his heroes, flitting quickly between thrilling sequences like the aforementioned car chase, Lupin’s underwater stealth entrance into the castle, an out-of-control helicopter versus turret skirmish, and an awesome one-on-one battle in and out of a huge clock tower.  The animation team brings a real sense of dynamic momentum to these action scenes, and Miyazaki oversees a lot of vividly eccentric details, such as when a flash grenade tossed by Lupin causes one scene to play out on an entirely yellow background, with the characters appearing as black silhouettes.  There may not be a real sense of stakes in the by-the-numbers story – when one of the heroes is shot down in a helicopter, there’s no question of whether he’s going to get back up again – but Miyazaki’s incredibly visceral action scenes make Cagliostro even more exciting than the best James Bond or Indiana Jones adventures, and he gives the Count a surprisingly brutal death scene.  Even the scenes of comic relief or exposition have a sense of fun to them that is largely missing from contemporary action blockbusters.  The Castle of Cagliostro may not be complex or unique enough to mark reveal Hayao Miyazaki as a genius, but it is too damned entertaining for anyone to deny him his place as one of the world’s premier action directors.

UP NEXT  Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind