Favourite Miyazaki film

Where's the Never Seen a Miyazaki Film option?

Totoro is the best animated feature made by anyone anywhere.

Totoro v Spirited Away? Tough choice man.

No 'Panda Kopanda', no credibility.

Not safe. I don't mean not safe for work. I mean not safe, full stop.

i saw spirited away away in an empty movie theater

A W E S O M E

Yes of course it's a foregone conclusion, I've only seen Spirited Away from this list and it's one of my very favourite films, as I'm sure it is for many people here, now accept it!

You should see some of the others! Not that I'm saying they're better necessarily (I didn't vote for SA but if I thought it was going to be close I might have) but they're mostly very rewarding.

totoro by a whisker, but yeah, there's a lot of full length and studio ghibli side projects missing from this poll!
Besides which, where's Lupin?

above all else, miyazaki films are fun to look at

'my neighbor totoro' is quite the head trip in particular

totoro by a whisker, but yeah, there's a lot of full length and studio ghibli side projects missing from this poll!
Besides which, where's Lupin?

All the feature lengths actually directed by Miyazaki are on the list. Castle of Cagliostro is his Lupin film.

Louis - if SA is one of your favourite films you MUST check out his other ones. In fact, why the hell haven't you. There're a couple which are as good if not better.

totoro is the best

Besides which, where's Lupin?

what the fuck dude

I know totoro or spirited away are going to win but that's because you all hate fun and are girls

OK, OK!

http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/images/animesoc/2006/02/24/lupin_groups087.jpg

http://www.intercom.publinet.it/manga/lupin.jpg

http://www.hkcuk.co.uk/reviews/images/CastleofCagliostro.jpg

Mononoke by several thousand miles of ace!

Yeah 'cause the whole ghibli OH NO THE CURSE OF ANGRY GAIA-EQUIVALENT WILL DESTROY US GUILTY, GREEDY HUMANS shit needed a fifteenth do-over

Fujiko is the only female character in any of these movies that he couldn't figure out how to totally emasculate by the end of the film, freakin' misogynist

OK I'm done

I voted for Mononoke too, cue semi-comprehensible Tombot rant.

(I think miyazaki has made some really beautiful and charming movies that are marvellously put together but that's the absolute best I can say for them, the stories are vaguely nauseating Capra-via-cutesy-animism)

Nothing beats the nekobasu. Totoro, definitely.

sidenote: when I was hiking in the rainforest over the weekend, a Japanese family passed - two little girls and the mom, singing the opening Totoro song. A pretty perfect moment.

Also, Grave of the Fireflies, though beautifully animated, is horrific in so so many ways.

Come on, PORCO ROSSO!

Close race between SA, Torotro and Kiki's Delivery service for second place though.

good lord porco rosso

Not safe. I don't mean not safe for work. I mean not safe, full stop.

I am not clicking on this, but lemme guess. Totoro pr0n?

actually it's just bible quotes, I was suprised

Porco Rosso is a quirky marvel - although I find the overlong and brutal climactic punch-up rather hard to stomach.

Porco Rosso was my tick too.

bump

kiki is the best, then totoro, then nausicaa

Well, once upon a time it was totoroporn, at least. Probably all for the best it is gone now.

I've seen all of those but Kiki and Porco (both of which are high on my Netflix queue). I think Castle in the Sky might be my favorite, though. Just great high adventure, and a really imaginative world. Am I the only one that likes The Cat Returns the most out of all the ghibli projects?

Kiki by a mile, of all his childrens' fairy tales it's the one that seems to have the closest handle on the actual experience of childhood. Wonderful little film about adolescence and the irksome relationship between how others treat you and how you relate to your own passions/gifts/art. Also, the most convincing witch-broom-flying ever put on film.

I saw Totoro again last night, wish I hadn't voted for Spirited Away now.

Finally picked Totoro, but dang, that's hard. To be honest, I've liked every bit of Miyazaki I've seen.

Grave of the Fireflies was Miyazaki? I don't think so. Hmmm. That movie wrecked me over. But in a good way.

I don't think I ever want to see Grave Of The Fireflies again. Great film though.

Favourite non-Miyazaki Ghibli film = Pom Poko.

Hmmm, looks like it might be a surprisingly strong turn-out for Kiki (which is great, but relatively low-key and overlooked).

Laputa was always my fave

Grave of the Fireflies is Takahata, not Miyazaki. Which is why you don't see any of his usual stuff in it - flying, young woman who grows up strong and fearless, wind through tall grass, environmentalism, etc.

Totoro is objectively a better movie, no weak points, but Spirited Away is my favorite for including some epic/dark/whatever parts. (The beginning, the train ride...) Mononoke is overrated and Porco is underrated.

Yeah, Mononoke was a relatively disappointing note for him to have originally retired on. I was volunteered with some japanese exchange students during the summer of 98, and even they agreed. Spirited Away was much stronger, and i need to see a subbed-copy of Howl's Moving Castle to fully get it.

Grave of the Fireflies opened as a double-bill with My Neighbor Totoro. Which, I don't know, I just can't imagine watching them sequentially.

I've only seen the last four on the list, but Porco Rosso. The flashback to the war is one of my favorite scenes ever in anything.

I rented Totoro for my daughter based on the board. It's a lot more linear, kiddie, and therefore not as interesting to me as Spirited Away, although unfortunately I am a Lynch type. But she liked it.

Spirited Away is on the tube right now. It's awful good.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

The top three are as I predicted, Kiki in fourth is a surprise.

I am surprised Howl's Moving Castle got so few votes, it was awesome and beautiful and suspenseful made me cry.

Got so few...vote?

howl's is my least favorite - the castle itself was neat but story and protagonists were pretty dull.

I liked it a lot better than Porco Rosso, which I admit I didn't really get the appeal of.

Kiki deserves better, but I guess at this point it's really hard to compete with the ones that got English box-office releases, and Totoro has had a pretty long home video circulation (I remember ads for it airing during like, David The Gnome reruns and so on). It's really, really good though, you guys.

Still need to see Howl's and Porco, myself.

Spirited Away is on the tube right now. It's awful good.

Yeah, we watched this last night on TCM as well. It's strange and scary, just like being a kid.

Missed the vote, but I would have picked Totoro. I can't think of another movie aimed at children that is quite so poignant and trippy at the same time.

Spirited Away and Howl's would be close second and third for me. Kiki and the Cat Returns were also pretty good. The rest I didn't really care for so much.

I don't understand all the love for Mononoke, it is probably my least favorite of his. It was very slow and not too interesting.

Things I love about Totoro:

How they totally embrace and take pleasure in the fact that they live in a haunted house.

How the grown-ups are all completely supportive of the girls' interactions with Totoro and other fantastic creatures. The fantasy element is taken as a normal part of nature. An American or European film would have stressed the conflict between real and fantasy worlds.

How the film doesn't sugarcoat the trauma caused by their mother's illness and the general absence of parents.

Catbus!

http://www.pyzamstuff.com/funpix/animals/MonorailCat.jpg

FANTASY IS REAL, YOU GUYS

Howl's Moving Castle gets better with each re-run. I've even started to allow the incredibly abrupt ending which I now see as a very neat way of pulling together all the threads. Although I still think it's a bit of a cop out, the scarecrow suddenly transforming and saying "Hi! I'm that one guy who was being talked about very briefly by two bit-roles right near the beginning of the film. I'm going to go and end this war and make everything go back to normal". I do love the film though.

Still need to see Totoro. Had no idea it was so highly rated.

No way is Kiki better than Laputa. :-(

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20011223/REVIEWS08/112230301/1023

mononoke is pretty boring.

I am totally appalled that cagliostro only got one vote but I suppose Lupin fans aren't really the same as Miyazaki fans, much

e.g. Me

There's a chapter in Peter Carey's Wrong about Japan where he watches Totoro with a Japanese friend who clues him into the hundreds of details of cultural and personal reference embedded in the story. My favorite bit is still the wonderful night dance of the three totoros with Mei and Satsuki, getting the plants to sprout.

haha wtf I totally missed this.

I am in the midst of a Neil Gaiman fanboy freakout and discovered that (apparently?) he did the American translation of P. Mononononononoke(?).

Castle In The Sky/Laputa has the best dub of all the dubbed ones. I probably would've voted for Totoro, the most infinitely rewatchable of his movies, or Nausicaa, which (for me at least) was the most jaw-dropping with the wow gosh bang craaaaazy anime stuff.

Oddly the only Miyazaki movie to make my mom visibly squirm in her seat is Cagliostro (Lupin's crazy rooftop escapade).

Nausicaa is beautiful. Wasn't that his first film?

> Castle In The Sky/Laputa has the best dub of all the dubbed ones.

but which Laputa dub, the newish one with dawson o'leary's voice? i found that worse than the previous version i had, more fake, trying too hard.

gaiman did mononoke script, yes. just a pity they got claire danes to do the voice. gag me with a spoon.

I love Claire Danes! And yeah it was the new one with Dawson & Rogue from X-Men when they were cute little youngsters. Also Cloris Leachman as the pirate mom. I guess it's a matter of taste really.

I think Cagliostro was technically first but Nausicaa was his first writing/directing/production venture, and maybe the first Studio Ghibli film?

I watched some documentary on his career once upon a time, probably high.

I watched Kiki's Delivery Service last night and found it really touching. It's not epic like Spirited Away or even Laputa, but there's so much attention to detail; plotwise, character-wise and animation-wise. Really beautiful and melancholy.

Did you guys hear about his next film, Ponyo On a Cliff, yet?

http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/ponyo/faq.html

It's being done in watercolor with completely analog equipment as kind of a last hurrah for Ghibli's traditional animation style. To me the plot sounds like a remake of Totoro (kid in rural setting pals around with magical friend) w/ more emphasis on the parent-child relationship and a potentially sadder ending. Which means it's basically a shoe-in to become one of my favorite movies of all time.

The movie was half finished as of a weeks ago, it's due out next summer. Here's some concept art:

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a175/spir7u/gake20no20ue20no20ponyo_1b.jpg
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a175/spir7u/ponyo3b.jpg
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a175/spir7u/ponyo2b.jpg

The creepy Howl-looking guy is the boy's dad, btw.

WOW, holy crap. That looks great.

Looks very aquatic, awesome - check out the kid swimming with the jar over her head. Also all the stuff with what is either some kind of underwater dome or a jellyfish.

the scene in Kiki at the beginning when she is lying on the hillside and all the animated grass is blowing in the wind around her is the single most incredible moment of animation I have ever seen.

When are we going to get Tales of Earthsea over here? It was released almost a year ago in Japan.

Oh here we go:

Licensing problems are in the way of a North American release of Gedo Senki, with the Sci-Fi Channel, which released the miniseries Legend of Earthsea in 2004, currently holding the rights to the property. Under the current situation, the film cannot be released earlier than 2009, when Sci-Fi's rights expire.

GODDAMIT! That adaptation ws really, truly balls, and now it's holding up my Ghibli fix.

Gedo Senki is better than the Sci-Fi version, but not by much, which makes sense considering it was storyboarded and directed by a former landscaper with virtually no animation or writing experience who just happens to be Hayao Miyazaki's son. It's disappointing because if you read his production blog he seems to know what he's talking about (and he also reveals some really depressing childhood memories; Hayao was so absent from his son's life that Goro studied his dad's movies as a desperate substitute for face-to-face interaction) but he just wasn't cut out for directing. As an adaptation it's severely jumbled and as a Ghibli movie it's uncharacteristically violent, mean-spirited, and cliche.

That said, the R2 DVD will have subs and even a Disney dub done in anticipation of the eventual R1 release and I'm sure there will be rips of it a day or two after it comes out.

I saw Miyazaki once. Standing outside a downtown hotel, by himself, smoking. It was surreal. I decided it couldn't really be him, this not being Japan or even a major city. Later, I found out he'd been in town to talk to Ursula K. Le Guin about the earthsea rights. I wouldn't have bothered him but it still makes me mad, I owed him a smile at least, not a confused gawk.

Don't fret it, I don't think he speaks a word of english anyway!

Oh, and if I'd been here for the poll, it would've been a toss-up between Totoro and Spirited Away.

fucking hate this shit

I'm surprised Totoro got such a high rating. Saw it the other night and wasn't really that moved. For a gentle narrative-lite Miyazaki movie I much preferred Kiki's Delivery Service.

You have no soul.

no? well i do enjoy a lot of the miyazaki films, but this one i felt was a bit thin on the ground. Good points - loved the architecture of the house and a lot of the animation is as breathtaking as any other Ghibli film. The catbus was cool... The two little girls were pretty sweet and well acted (I watched the dub - I hate reading subtitles, I'd rather be watching the film).

Downsides? Well really there's naff all plot to speak of. They find the Totoros but they're really a bit rubbish, just lying around and sleeping and waiting for buses and doing silly dances. Call me soulless, but if you're going to have mystical creatures, at least make them do SOMETHING interesting or tied in with the plot.

I preferred Kiki's because it felt like there was a bit more going on, despite a lack of conflict (which is why I'm comparing the two films). There are some excellent lessons going on in Kiki, about growing up and stuff, whereas Totoro felt like it just meandered around not really revealing itself too much.

Is it because it's one of the last few Miyazaki's I've yet to see that I'm not that impressed? Maybe I've grown used to the style, whereas when I first saw Spirited Away, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Is it because I watched the dub? I don't know. I might watch it again, but am I totally mistaken? What should I watch out for when I rewatch?

heresy

We had polls back in May ?

Mind you, there is something very fucked up about Howl's Moving Castle getting one vote and Mononoke getting 11. Seriously, I demand a recount.

I think I voted for Mononoke. Howl's is probably my third least favourite of his films, after Cagliostro and Nausicca. I've only seen it once, but I remember the plot being a bit of a muddle.

Saw Porco Rosso for the second time recently, and it's FANTASTIC. It might get my vote now.

Totoro has the greatest theme music ever.

Read Peter Carey's Not Wrong About Japan before you watch Totoro again, grozart.

howl's sucked, sorry

What should I watch out for when I rewatch?

A desire to have a huge fat Totoro of your own that you can lie down and go to sleep on on the middle of the day.

Fuck that almost makes me sound like a furry.

Seriously just the idea of standing waiting for a bus in the rain with a huge fat furry forest spirit next to you is pretty magical. Especially if you're a kid I'm sure.

Yeah it mostly does just meander but really that's one of the great things about it. It's subtle. Doesn't require too much brainpower, just something to curl up on the sofa with.

i have a feeling that my enjoyment was skewed by circumstance and the people i watched it with, who quite openly didn't enjoy it, and i think that might have ruined it for me. While I realise Totoro came out earlier, creatures like the radish spirit in SA are very similar.

howl's sucked, sorry

-- bell_labs, Friday, 11 January 2008 16:07 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

Some days it's my favourite. Definitely the one I have had to come back to the most - seen it umpteen times now and I still need my Howl's fix now and again. The only problem with it is that some very important details (like the missing prince) are skimmed over with such speed, you'd be forgiven for getting a bit lost plotwise. It's also got quite a misleading title since not a lot actually happens inside the castle. It's just a couple of rooms as far as the viewer knows, but I first expected it to be set in an enormous haunted castle. I love it though.

I just watched Kiki's Delivery Service, and it is pretty much the most adorable movie ever. It's charming, and sweet, and makes you actually feel optimistic about humanity. Plus every moment with Jiji was hilarious.

I'm still mad pissed at you lunatics that I was the ONLY person who voted for cagliostro

I still don't think i've seen the ending for Cagliostro yet, having had to leave the campus screening early 10-12 years ago.

I love Cagliostro. Not my favourite by any stretch, but those rooftop scenes alone are enough to give me vertigo.

I love Porco Rosso but Cagliostro is the one I'd enjoy seeing again most so it gets the win.

Also Lupin is a great argument for casual suit wearing.

So I watched Totoro again on my own with the Japanese language on. I must say I enjoyed it a lot more this time round. I think the first time I was getting too anticipatory - "Ok they've found these creatures - what you're just going to fall asleep?!!". I was expecting a lot more to actually HAPPEN and I spent most of the film waiting for this. The second time though, I knew what was going to happen and ended up enjoying it a lot more. The attention to detail, the smallest references. It's like going for a lovely stroll in the park, as opposed to running full pelt around a funfair.

Just finished watching Earthsea now it's available in the UK on DVD. Wonderfully animated, breathtaking in parts - probably the best drawn of all the Ghibli films, no doubt due to Goro Miyazaki's previous role as a head animator (or something similar - not sure).

However the plot felt a bit aimless in points and I felt, particularly for the first half, that I was watching Tom Bombadil the movie. There's an awful lot of the main characters just pottering around doing chores or eating food and you do end up when they're going to get on with it.

I guess it suffers from being a book adaptation, and like the Golden Compass film, it feels a bit potted and lacking flesh.

Once the plot does pick up again, it gets very good. The Cob character is especially well done.

So his latest Ponyo On the Cliff By the Sea has been out for a month in Japan and is raking in the cash once again, etc. Anyone know anything about it?

Here's the official site at least:

http://www.ghibli.jp/ponyo/

it looks kinda childish from all the previews I've seen. like totoro or kiki's delivery service childish.

by the way
Porco Rosso 5
Laputa: Castle in the Sky 4
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind 2

are better than
Spirited Away 20
My Neighbour Totoro 15
Princess Mononoke 11
Kiki's Delivery Service 6

especially Nausicaa

challops!

sad that howl's moving castle only got one vote. it's my second favourite.

I always nod off during Nausicaa. Not a bad thing, but the film is far too long.

I nod off during everyone so its hard to use that as an excuse ;)

I would def have voted Nausicaa

Rereading this thread I'm definitely part of the Porco Rosso fanbase here. Not necessarily my all-time favorite but I'd rank it top three.

Totoro and Nausicaa are the two I like most i think, haven't seen Porco Rosso or Cagliostro

That Tales of Earthsea movie was better than I expected.

I saw Spirited Away in the theater, and it was my first Miyazaki, so it's hard not to love it - especially since it felt like one of the first truly immersive animated films I'd seen yet. I didn't want it to end, and it felt like I had spent days inside it.

Then I went to Mononoke and was promptly disappointed. How in the world was that the one which broke him into the US market?

But the 80's material is pretty solid. Nausicaa dragged a bit, and while I liked Totoro and Kiki, they're both a bit extra twee compared to the rest. I suppose my other faves would be Lupin, Laputa, and Porco.

I remember Nausicaa being good, but I have no real desire to ever see it again after becoming so immersed in the manga, which is one of my favorite comic books of all time. The movie, by comparison, feels like a cheap adaptation of that comic (although obviously the history is more complicated than that!).

Still stand by my vote for Kiki. Still need to see Howl's.

I just saw Ponyo! It's pretty cutesy, even compared to Spirited Away and Totoro, but it's good. There's this uber-catchy song that goes with it, though, that they've been playing non-stop over here and I hope for everyone's sanity back home they don't translate it into English.

Ponyo to be released in America in August.

Ponyo Ponyo Ponyo sakana no ko etc

v.v. catchy aargh

Thunder and lightening

v v frightening

> That Tales of Earthsea movie was better than I expected.

on uk tv sometime soon (saw it in tivo listings but there's no easy way of searching upcoming stuff unless you know which channel it's on (film4 i think))

http://www.animeuknews.net/news/1796/tales-from-earthsea-to-get-film4-showing
"The film will be shown twice - the first time on Sunday the 12th of April at 2:45pm, and a repeat show on Thursday the 16th of April at 6:45pm."

Loved: Spirited Away
Liked: Howl's Moving Castle, Kiki's Delivery Service
Indifferent: Princess Mononoke
Disliked: My Neighbor Totoro

of these that i've seen, which is only 2 or 3, i always come away thinking that they look great and but they're kinda boring.

I saw Laputa in the cinema a week ago (hadn't seen it before), and it was great! I'd almost be willing to say it's the second best Miyazaki film after Totoro. I loved the way it never quite revealed all of the mysteries implied in the backstory (trying to avoid spoilers here) but gave just enough hints to make some guesses. I guess I've always been fond of stories where people explore the mysteries of long ago vanished cultures. Also, I thought it was nice how there clearly was a strong ecological theme (common with many other Miyazaki films) yet it was never spelled out. And there where some incredibly beautiful designs, especially the robot. Oh boy what a cool robot!

One thing I found kinda weird thougb, why does every Miyazaki film (besides Princess Mononoke) have a similar-looking teen girl as a protagonist? I'm familiar with the Japanese fetishism for school girls, but the way the sky pirates leered after Sheeta was still a bit disturbing here. At least it was done more tastefully in Porco Rosso.

Oh yeah, they showed a trailer for Ponyo before Laputa, I can confirm that the Poyno song is indeed silly and ridiculously catchy!

i totally agree with these poll results. Spirited Away is the only one that was truely magical. Totoro is sweet. Mononoke ok. Howl's Moving Castle a tragic mess.

shut up. YOUR FACE will be a tragic mess after its done getting punched. by me.

howl's moving castle 4EVA

I agree with Ludo, Howl's Moving Castle had some nice scenes, but it was very incoherent. Definitely the worst Miyazaki I've seen.

g2h

I don't think I voted in this, but it's a shame - I'm betting Nausicaa and Laputa didn't get votes just due to not being as widely seen, but there's definitely top 3 with Spirited Away for me (followed closely by Totoro).

Miyazaki's doing a brief American tour to tie in with the release of Ponyo.

I've come to find that I like Howl's as much if not a little bit more than Spirited... incoherent mess my arse.

It is too hard to pick only one.

ch4rlie fr4m3 otm - Howl's is a wonderful film.

Yeah Howl's gets better every time I see it.

The only problem with Howl is that it just misses out on being as wonderful as the original book.

Will rep for Mononoke til the end!

LA Times interview with Miyazaki. Hoping like hell *somewhere* in the LA basin Ponyo will be screened with subtitles...

wow he turned into The Architect from the second Matrix movie

it is an interesting interview, thanks for the link

there was an advanced screening of ponyo here on friday w subtitles not dub!...i watched it about a month ago, i love it, his most innocent and childlike film since totoro. my son saw previews on cartoon network and said he has no intention of watching it, i saw the same preview yesterday and can't say i blame him, the dub sounds terrible and they chose the most disney ass bullshit scenes to show in the trailer.

miyazaki may be the only director who hasn't made one film i didn't love

Am I the only one who's intensely annoyed by the music of Spirited Away?

i saw Ponyo with subs the other week. its definitely aimed at a younger audience like Totoro, some odd but beautiful imagery at times. and no flying sequences that i can remember! worth seeing if you can handle the twee.

there was an advanced screening of ponyo here on friday w subtitles not dub!.

Man, lucky.

I am still really excited to see this.

Did Miyazaki say something like this is his last film? I forget.. I remember him not caring much for his son's work.

Tuarangalila, you may have been my neighbor on Last.fm but I can't share your annoyance. Rather the opposite.

I want to go and see this, but if there's going to be fucking subtitles scrawled all over the animation I'm outta there.

It's either that or hearing young Cyruses and Jonases speak.

B'wana Beast,

Hee! :) What's your screen name?

I'd rank "Ponyo" below everything I've seen from Miyazaki, beautiful pastel backgrounds or no. I understand the "think like a child" concept, but that's no excuse for lazy plotting and so many loose ends. It felt like there was 20 minutes missing, yet at the same time the movie felt too long (it barely held the attention of my 4 1/2 year old, who loves "Totoro" and "Kiki's"). And "Ponyo" ends as abruptly and lamely as a generic freeze-frame high-five.

Perhaps if I were better versed in Japanese mythology I'd have liked the movie better. Certainly it starts out fine, or at least fine enough. But by the 2/3rds mark the pronounced lack of plot/drama started to really irk me. Big disappointment from a director I love.

For what it's worth, I saw the "dubbed" version, but John Lasseter from Pixar typically oversees all the "dubbing" of Miyazaki's films, and the voice work was OK. And besides, as Ebert wrote in his overly enthusiastic if well-intentioned review of "Ponyo:"

“Is it only dubbed?” I was asked. You dummy! All animated films are dubbed! Little Nemo can’t really speak!

Anyway, I'd rather have more misses from this guy than hits from the usual assembly line players. But I'd still prefer hits from him all the same.

Does anyone know if there is a subtitled release in theaters in NY? I couldn't find a listing for a subbed version on moviefone...

"pronounced lack of plot" is usually a good point, with miyazaki, though

just ONE vote for cagliostro? wow ilx u siccen me yet again

lil nublets

I would say Nausicaa by a pretty heaven margin now, also,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OkT5HyumQ4

nausicaa suffers from comparison with the manga, which was some next level shit, but it has moments in it unlike anything else in miyazaki's career - it's more like a trad post-apocalyptic anime in that sense i guess

i think laputa is the weakest

porco rosso is great, especially the french dub featuring jean reno

future boy conan deserves some luv here too imo

read a think with miyazaki recently where he says he hates porco rosso, he kinda dislikes a lot of his films and didn't enjoy making any of them and is a lot crankier than I expected

Was supposed to see Nausicaa in the theater recently but it didn't happen. ;_;

i've only seen spirited away, howl's moving castle, and totoro. <3 totoro so much

i guess i should watch nausicaa next?

animators are generally miserable people

no fuck that you should watch castle of cogliostro next!!!!! nausicaa is really pretty weak

turns out cogliostro is the only one available to watch instantly on netflix so i guess that's the one for me ^_____^

kismet

ps - I know what I'm doing tonight now!

its the most fun of his movies

x-post "Pronounced lack of plot" as in setting the film up for stuff that is alluded to but which never happens. Like, the set-up is all there, but the delivery is off. It'd be a bit like "Spirited Away" if the girl finds the spirit world, wanders around for a little, then goes home. The end. It'd be nice to look at, but it'd be lacking. Even Alice needs something to do in Wonderland. In "Ponyo," there is just no obstacle to surmount, no challenge, despite hints of global environmental imbalance and impending catastrophe. At one point one character says another is to be tested, very dramatically, then we flash to that character about to enter a dark tunnel. What's in the tunnel? What will he face? Um, nothing. He walks through the tunnel. At another point, a character notes of a magical well that it would be a disaster were any living creature to come in contact with it. Then a living creature comes in contact with it, and ... nothing? I'm still not sure. Hence this weird "what's missing here?" vibe to the movie.

I absolutely adore Totoro, but Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke were really boring for me. Not sure why.

gbx, did you watch it?

Hence this weird "what's missing here?" vibe to the movie.

I certainly felt this, but honestly it didn't bother me that much. I mean, the scene where Ponyo is running on top of the giant fish is one of the best scenes in the history of animation. I felt that I got my money's worth + a weird taste in my mouth at the end (especially because of the song).

turns out cogliostro is the only one available to watch instantly on netflix so i guess that's the one for me ^_____^

Cagliostro is brilliant though. One of his best, alongside Porco, Spirited and Totoro.

I loved Ponyo running with joy across the giant fish! Sort of wish the movie ended right after that, when she reunited with Sosuke. Everything following that was totally pointless, if not completely nonsensical (and not in the fun way). The extended sequence of her feeding that baby? The whole notion of her getting sleepy and reverting to fish form? The entire "Cocoon"-esque ending in the jellyfish/bubble by the old folks home? The fact that no one noticed/cared the moon was hovering a few feet away? No follow-up on the hundreds (?) of ships trapped in that wall of ocean, let alone the massive near-destruction of the world? It was as if the whole village was just enjoying a day spent punting along the rising water, which is fine, but which totally lacked portent, given the wizard's build-up of the dangerous imbalance with nature.

I can go with it up to a point, but don't really understand the hyperbolic praise being lavished on it, especially compared to Miyazaki's more obvious peaks. If he wanted to craft a crazy dream-like world, he should have done so. This one lacked resonance.

no fuck that you should watch castle of cogliostro next!!!!! nausicaa is really pretty weak

― a narwhal done gored my sister nell (cankles), Tuesday, August 18, 2009 12:09 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark

you're really pretty weak

Is Ponyo custom-made for ichthyologists or what?

Her dad's reaction to her turning into a human (or at least the weird chicken-fish-girl) for the first time reminded me of a dad encountering his first daughter hit puberty. "Revert! REVERT!" And the mom's just bemused.

lol at Capt Lorax. wtf?

http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd120/hipsterrunoff/photographs/hro/1aeda2dc.jpg

nuh uh

Do kids like Totoro? A friend was asking me if I could lend him any films to entertain his kids (to stop the usual 3 on repeat melting his brain). But it seems a bit...unfocussed...for children.

i LOVED totoro as a kid but what i did was make up a big stupid action thriller plot going on "behind" the actual plot, because i was an american. so if your friend's kids are philistines like me, don't worry, it can still work.

saw totoro when i was ~10 years old and loved it

i loved spirited away when it came out, but at this point i can't think of a movie i'd be less interested in revisiting. totoro is much more pimp

spirited away is worth revisiting. so's totoro.

yes, kids love Totoro. (based on kids I have shown it to between 3 and 12)

Didn't really get into Totoro, but then I did see it after Spirited and Howl's. The film I'm most likely to revisit is Howl's these days - it gets a bad rap because the ending's one of the worst examples of deus ex machina I can think of, but there's a lot of great stuff in there.

i honestly don't think any child should get to the age of twelve WITHOUT seeing totoro

The film I'm most likely to revisit is Howl's these days - it gets a bad rap because the ending's one of the worst examples of deus ex machina I can think of, but there's a lot of great stuff in there.

Visually, yes. The plot's all over the place though.

One of my kids pulled Totoro off the shelf at the library -- he liked the image on the cover of the DVD -- so I rented it even though I wasn't sure it would hold their attention. They're 3 and 6 and used to faster-paced entertainment. But they actually both really liked it, the 3-year-old in particular kept watching it over and over. So, yes, recommended.

was babysitting little cousins ages upon ages ago (this might have even been back in the 90s) and little kids will apparently watch any ghibli movie totally rapt.

(keep in mind spirited away hadnt even come out yet at that point and i've got no idea if this still applies to newfangled kids with their newfangled cgi.)

(and i didnt show them grave of the fireflies or anything.)

i thought howl's was rad but im a big fan of the source book & i kinda liked how unfocused and goofy it was idk

how was the first one where i went "oh god what if he isn't infallible" but dude has been substitute jesus and granpa for me ever since i saw "warriors of the wind" (ugh) on hbo at like age 8 so i'm probably not to be trusted

christ that new dub of cagliostro pisses me off. not like the '80s streamline dub was perfect by any means but ugh. also fuck u netflix for giving me this and no sub option for streaming.

this reads/watches like it was translated by babelfish, but it's still pretty great. we're talking like three hours of interviews/behind the scenes footage, though. it still kind of amazes me how much actual DRAWING he does on these movies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi3LRn7EKx8

ghibli/miyazaki for me from canon to spectacular to good:

totoro/kiki/porco rosso/laputa/yamadas/grave of fireflies > mononoke/spirited away/nausicaa/only yesterday/pom poko/panda go >howl/ponyo/cagliostro/whisper of the heart

and then there's earthsea.

kiki is sooooo underrated

"fly"

Kiki's probably my third favourite ghibli, so charming and some great life lessons too

Did you all see the trailer for Ghibli's adaptation of The Borrowers, 'Arrietty' http://t.co/q9nTu5V ? They're doing separate dubs for the US and UK. This one's the British one.

this looks...a little too precious. the non miyazaki/takahata ghiblis have been kinda all over the map, quality-wise.

also, yay: Porco Rosso 2: The Last Sortie[8] Unknown (2012) Hayao Miyazaki

i keep forgetting about that.

i kinda feel bad for goro. he's turning into the jakob dylan of the miyazaki family.

mononoke is my favorite. inexplicably misinterpreted by 99% of everyone (pro or con) as "nature good humans bad".

99%, eh?

yeah i considered mononoke a minor work for a long time, but it's probably top 3 for me now. spirited away at the bottom obv

billy bob thornton as jigo was one of the few inspired celeb v/o casting moves ever

xxp well i hear it get praised or dismissed as an "environmentalist fable" a lot when really it's a movie about the ancient-to-modern shift (common to lots of cultures' autobiographies), when the spirits and the people inevitably fall out of touch. the only person in it who's evil (as opposed to partisan or confused or despairing) person in it is billy bob thornton, who is an opportunist perplexed at the end by his defeat by the more compassionate ("can't win against fools").

for me it's first amongst equals, i guess; lots of the others are great too. i liked ponyo but thought most of the magic stuff was vestigial: i just wanted a movie about the kid and his mom and the dad at sea and the old ladies in the home and the boats tethered to the houses floating up like balloons in the flooded town. and howl's had gorgeous stuff in it but the setting was totally incoherent, which was a huge disappointment to me after the first five minutes (shopgirl in a wartime city is harassed by soldiers in street, not in overt EVIL RAPEY SOLDIERS way but in "young men experiencing simultaneous terror/boredom of being stationed in temporarily peaceful city fuck around with a pretty civilian because they can, which is not Okay but is certainly Understandable" way) made the movie look like it was gonna have mononoke's sense of time & place & historical stress.

obv should be "the only person in it who's evil (parenthetical) is billy bob thornton"

no, i agree. i was just being dick-y. i was re-reading that interview (from after the nausicaa manga finished in '94) someone mentioned above (i think?) where he says he "didn't like" the way porco rosso turned out, but i think they were misreading him. what he says is that he started out wanting to make something lighthearted and slapstick about a flying pig but then his adult concerns kept creeping in and it poluted his original conception. of course that's the stuff that gives porco rosso its (for lack of a better word) edge.

i think when it comes to the environmental stuff he's essentially a very pessimistic, conflicted man (in the interview he keeps saying stuff on the order of "anything other than direct action isn't going to achieve anything, and even then you're just picking up litter"), who believes we're killing the planet but doesn't feel like giving up his car and moving into the woods, who has somehow found his way into a self-enforced career making entertainments suitable for the whole family, where he makes himself (by his own admission) iron out the ambiguities in his thinking, but then the complexity starts creeping back in, which pisses him off. mononoke is probably just the movie where he allowed himself the most free reign with keeping things morally ambiguous. (later in the same interview he says that he thinks all anime should be for children, but then the next movie he'd make would be mononoke, so maybe he was just getting a morally ambiguous movie aimed more at adults out of his system?)

obviously it's an old interview, from a time when studio ghibli's financial success was only starting to feel secure, so it can't be taken for how he thinks now that he's japan's biggest money-maker and can basically get away with anything he wants. but i just think it's funny that all the nuance and moral grey areas and whatnot are what he's praised for in comparison to american animation and what he feels are "flawed" about his own movies (at least up until mononoke). like he actually seems to think he'd be happy if he could make one totoro after another because HE'S so confused about things and he doesn't think that confusion belongs in his movies. i find that struggle to squeeze an individual filmmaker's adult concerns into the template of a kids movie one of the most interesting things about him, but apparently he didn't always agree. of course he's also gotta be the only guy who'd finish off his longest and most personal work by basically claiming "everything's fucked and the planet would be better off without humanity" and then open a preschool in japan.

oh wow did not know that stuff, have never read/seen an interview w/ him. thanks!

he's so careful w/ antagonists, at least in his more recent period. either they have good reasons or they're honest within fairy-tale-style rules or they don't exist at all. i love how spirited away is mostly a movie about a girl who gets a job: dealing with weird customers, bitching with co-workers after hours, hating the boss but eventually understanding she has a business to run.

interview is here if yr interested. it's a bit disjointed but i dont know if that's a translation problem or if it was just kind of a rambling conversation.

http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/interviews/afternausicaa.html

there's actually a ton of interviews there.

i love that nausicaa.net hasnt changed a thing in like a decade+

btw you nailed it strongo - that tension between inspiration & cynicism has basically defined miyazaki's career. i think the cynic in him is winning these days though. i mean, re:

the non miyazaki/takahata ghiblis have been kinda all over the map, quality-wise.

― death to ilx, long live the frogbs (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Sunday, July 3, 2011 1:04 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark

ghibli's approaching a crossroads, sort of like where disney was in the 70s when the nine old men were drifting away or dying. they relied on those guys for decades without really doing anything to nurture fresh talent, and the disney golden age ended up shuddering to a halt instead of smoothly transitioning into the next era.

miyazaki has little regard for the work of anyone besides himself and his mentor takahata, and i think miyazaki hates the idea of anyone spoiling his legacy with subpar work after they pass. ghibli's resources are formidable, and if they wanted to they could easily develop ghibli into a creative powerhouse where young talent is nurtured. but the lack of interest in that future is why anything by the junior ghibli crew ends up being a crapshoot.

Did you all see the trailer for Ghibli's adaptation of The Borrowers, 'Arrietty' http://t.co/q9nTu5V ? They're doing separate dubs for the US and UK. This one's the British one.

― Alba, Sunday, July 3, 2011 4:51 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

oh wow, i loved the borrowers as a kid. that actually looks pretty faithful... but i hope the rhyming voiceover is only on the trailer since it made me want to kill everyone involved with knives.

secret world of arrietty...due in Feb...

http://kottke.org/11/10/the-secret-world-of-arrietty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_World_of_Arrietty

I guess Miyazaki is playing an advisory role these days.

for anyone in toronto tiff lightbox is doing a studio ghibli series during march and april w/almost all of miyazaki's films but also takahata and others

IFC just did something similar in NYC. caught only yesterday. it was good!

I wasn't a fan of "Ponyo" at all, but I thought "“The Secret World of Arrietty” was absolutely lovely and satisfyingly melancholy. Mayazki didn't direct (he wrote and produced), but he may as well have. It bears some similarities to "Totoro" and the attention to detail is gorgeous. In fact, its languid, even slow pace was such a nice change from the usual. Loved it.

Loved: Spirited Away
Liked: Howl's Moving Castle, Kiki's Delivery Service
Indifferent: Princess Mononoke
Disliked: My Neighbor Totoro
― Nurse Detrius (Eric H.), Monday, April 6, 2009 12:16 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Put Ponyo into the "liked" category as well. Maybe someday I'll see what everyone loves in Totoro so much.

going to see arrietty today if I can convince my son to do it.

Took my kids, 7 and almost-4, to Arietty yesterday. They both dug it, and so did I. 2nd everything Josh said about it above, it's gorgeous and gentle, but enough action to keep things moving.

is it MIYAZAKI good or is it just good?

Loved: Spirited Away
Liked: Howl's Moving Castle, Kiki's Delivery Service
Indifferent: Princess Mononoke
Disliked: My Neighbor Totoro
― Nurse Detrius (Eric H.), Monday, April 6, 2009 12:16 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Put Ponyo into the "liked" category as well. Maybe someday I'll see what everyone loves in Totoro so much.

― dead-trius (Eric H.), Monday, 20 February 2012 15:55 (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Pretty much the same as me, although I warmed to Totoro after maybe 3 watches. Seems people appreciate it as a very gentle film for very young children with some poignant moments added on, but for me there's just not enough going on. Mononoke is okay in that it lays down the artistic groundwork for Spirited/Howl's, but the plot starts to wear about 3/4 of the way through and it lacked light relief.

xp Just good, but that's enough. It's no Ponyo, though.

Totoro is not for very young children or any age group in particular.

I'd count the baby / flappy bird / sootlings as light relief - the bit where the plot shifts about 3/4 of the way through is lovely I think, and genuinely dreamlike - "enough about that, we need to go do this!"

Arietty is Miyazaki-good. Totally feels like his movie.

Maybe someday I'll see what everyone loves in Totoro so much.

catbus

http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/27600000/Cat-Bus-my-neighbor-totoro-27648508-476-352.jpg

Haha guess who has completely mistaken Princess Mononoke for Sprited Away!

catbus otm

skip the first two-thirds and just watch the bit with Totoro and the Catbus in imo

(I am sort of kidding, or am I? I can't tell any more)

So how is the Earthsea film? I liked the books as a kid but I read that Le Guin was not pleased with it so I didn't bother with it at the time. But the talk on this thread is not overwhelmingly negative. Not positive either, mind...

my thoughts on it, as i recall, were that it was so ghibli-by-numbers that there wasn't very much space for earthsea-- but tbh the experience of watching the film is such a rage blackout i can't remember many details

catbus otm

agree

Loved: Spirited Away, Castle In the Sky, Princess Mononoke
Liked a Lot: My Neighbor Totoro, Castle of Cagliostro, Porco Rosso, Ponyo
Liked Okay: Howl's Moving Castle, Kiki's Delivery Service, Nausicaä
Disliked: uh...

wish someone would put out a comp of miyazaki/ghibli shorts

I really liked Arrietty, I saw it on Saturday and 2 days later it's still gently floating into my consciousness, which imo means it's fabulous.

the disney-created trailers for arrietty made it look kind of insipid, so i was really happy with how beautiful + engaging it ended up being. also, there were three little 5-year-old girls seated directly behind me in theater, and at first i was like "oh man they are going to get bored and noisy halfway through." but they ended up being equally enthralled! and when they did talk it was pretty funny. they couldn't figure out if the housekeeper character was good or bad for a while, and the ambiguity REALLY troubled them.

ha yes a girl behind me said, "I think she's bad" when the housekeeper had uprooted the boards.

The voice casting for Arietty (English dub) was so weird, though – Will Arnett as the strong but gentle, levelheaded, pragmatic Borrower dad. He sounded pretty sedate most of the time but every once in a while it was jarringly Gob Bluthy.

I got the UK edition, which has Mark Strong as Arrietty's dad with a gruff but caring approach. It seems odd that the UK dub (in this instance) might have more starpower than the US one; Saoirse Ronan plays Arrietty, vs Bridgit Mendler - is she a star over there? I've genuinely never heard of her.

Howls is on UK TV now. Definitely my favourite Ghibli now, and for ages Spirited Away was my alltime favourite film.

Caught the 2nd half; I've got the dvd, but there is something about a favourite film being on telly that makes me want to watch it even more. It is just superb, enormous rewatching value and there's something new every time I see it. Showing it on Saturday afternoon tv is excellent scheduling, I bet loads of children saw it for the first time - I envy those kids :)

Arietty was good except for the stupid stupid voice of the stupid boy with his breathless DYING RASP, and the terrible terrible coda at the end because I AM STRONG SINCE YOU ARE IN MY HEART. What the hell? Arietty could probably just climb inside his actual malfunctioning heart with a long-ass snorkle and keep it beating by kicking at the inside of left ventricle. I think I will love a dubbed vers, but everything done to translate/Disnify the film made it ∞ times worse.

What, you think the boy should have died at the end?

xpost You think? In my experience, Disney has done a great job (often with Lasseter) doing Ghibli dubbing and voice casting. I'm sure the boy was no better in the inevitably breathless Japanese language version.

Also, want to say from memory that Miyazaki (et all) have trouble with endings, a la Hitchcock and Spielberg.

Only ones that have stuck out as being bad choices to me were Arnett in Arietty and Billy Crystal in Howl's ––– both of whom were really subdued but I just had too strong of previous associations w/them. I can grouch with the best of them about celebrity voicecasting but Josh in Chicago is basically OTM.

Also I loved that dying boy so much, more kids movies should have a character who is just a walking, talking memento mori.

I also liked that he was kind of an ass and put his foot in his mouth constantly.

Ehh, I didn't mean to imply that the kid should have died, just that the line 'strong because you are in my heart' was morbidly sentimental and undermined any potential poignancy of the parting.

i will never forgive disney's dub team for making the cat in kiki talk at the end. kills the entire metaphor.

Billy Bob Thornton's voice casting in Princess Mononoke was particularly jarring for me

billy bob in mononoke was inspired!

I don't like Miyazaki still.

huh?

Also, want to say from memory that Miyazaki (et all) have trouble with endings, a la Hitchcock and Spielberg.

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, February 25, 2012 8:58 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah, maybe, but howl is the only miyazaki flick that i think is seriously undermined by its ending. the rest i'm good with. haven't seen arrietty (wtf is up w that name).

english voice acting has never bothered me, cuz i mostly watch these in japanese. did like bbt in mononoke.

Arietty is the actual name of Mary Norton's main character –– a corruption of Harriet, if I remember rightly.

lol, never read the borrowers. okay then.

except i think i actually did, but have forgotten most of it

i watched ponyo with a friend the other week and a few minutes in we had a little cynical lol about how obvious the impending environmental theme was, and then... it kind of disappeared? i guess that showed us, but as much as i enjoyed it at the end i kinda felt i didn't know what it was about.

it's about ponyo, who is a girl fish with magical adventures, duh

i get you though. it's p nonsensical. i like that about it, tbh.

who are you awful awful people that you watch the dubbed versions

just finished watch arrietty - everybody otm, felt like a miyazaki film. things I loved:

-the fluid dynamics. when they pour tea, it comes out a drop at a time.
-the tall big person boy is so weak and going to die and can't do any physical exercise but the borrowers are on some ninja warrior shit 24/7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oco3lPfokaU

I hated "Ponyo."

Also, dubbing is a non-issue when it comes to most cartoons. I mean, they're all dubbed!

not that it's miyazaki, but i watched pom poko the other night (studio ghibli flick abt raccoon balls). was weird.

Nausicää is my favorite, followed by Castle in the Sky, then Kiki's Delivery Service. Still need to see the Lupin movie, Totoro and Princess Mononoke, though.

Also: really disliked Ponyo when I saw it in theatres, but that could've been due in part to the English dub.

ponyo didn't really grab me

it isn't directed by miyazaki, but the secret world of arrietty is fucking a plus. amazing movie. much more conventional narratively than ponyo (whose plot really irritated me despite all the beautiful animation of water and such) but no worse for that. just amazing.

for the voice of the dad will arnett seemed to be channeling christian bale's batman.

Ponyo's ending is even worse than Howl's. Miyazaki's never been too good at endings - the few I can think of off the top of my head tend to involve some hurried deus ex machina thing, but it doesn't usually matter because it's the ride that counts.

Just realised Josh In Chicago said the same thing.

for the voice of the dad will arnett seemed to be channeling christian bale's batman.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Wednesday, March 7, 2012 12:40 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

I watched the japanese audio version and the dad was voiced by a gruff dude

so so so glad that I didn't have to think about gob at all during my viewing

pom poko is great

greatness tempered constant raccoon balls

*tempered by

i would say "muddled with" rather than "tempered by"

*tempted by

infused

thought pom poko was really up and down. story, impact, themes & more naturalistic animation = GREAT. otoh, at least half the comedy & anthro tanuki action was really lame & grating.

Nausicää is my favorite, followed by Castle in the Sky, then Kiki's Delivery Service. Still need to see the Lupin movie, Totoro and Princess Mononoke, though.

― tanuki, Wednesday, March 7, 2012 3:24 AM (16 hours ago)

^^^ correct first and second choice :D
I'd throw Porco Rosso in at #3

Nausicaä is pretty good, but sadly I read the comic first, and even though the movie is a fine adaptation, it just doesn't manage to convey the richness of the comic's themes. (Partially because the comic wasn't finished when the movie came out.)

Here's how I'd rate Miyazaki's films, to to bottom:

Totoro
Castle in the Sky
Porco Rosso
Nausicaä
Ponyo
Lupin III
Mononoke
Moving Castle

I still haven't seen Kiki, need to correct that soon.

Oh sorry, add Spirited Away there, between Nausicaä and Ponyo.

Miyazaki's never been too good at endings

This is nuts! Kiki - awesome ending! Mononoke - awesome ending! Totoro - awesome ending! Laputa - awesome ending!

Totoro | Spirited Away | Kiki's Delivery Service
Mononoke | Castle in the Sky | Ponyo | Howl's Moving Castle
Porco Rosso | Nausicaa | The Castle of Cagliostro | Cat Returns

Cat Returns is not Miyazaki.

oh. it wasn't very good, anyway.

Eh, i consider ghibli close enough

i LOVE cat returns, one of my favorite ghibli films (a long list, admittedly)

The ending of Mononoke might look halfway cool but it's absolute garbage. The forest spirit is a stupid way to wrap up a movie.

otm

notm

mononoke ending is v satisfying

I was being sarcastic

If Miyazaki is so bad at endings, why am I always moved to tears at the end of his movies??? That doesn't happen at movies with good endings (except for Cold Mountain, I was v mad at myself for crying at that).

subtlety is lost on me

xp

The endings aren't usually stupid. There might be three dissenters here but they only make up a minority

loved this! saw it today. so well written - understated and elegiac. and the animation was gorgeous - so carefully drawn and so lush. really one of the best - up there with totoro, spirited away and kiki in my eyes. maybe the best of the bunch actually (tho i haven't seen spirited away in awhile and i do remember how much i loved it)

also will arnett did not bother me at all! i thought he did a great job as the dad.

i have never seen any of these but my kids watched Nausicaa the other week and seemed pretty into it

cosco has most of these in their movie section now

2 new Ghibli films announced for summer 2013 in Japan!

http://i.imgur.com/5YuiX.png
Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Is Rising) written & directed by Miyazaki, story is about Jiro Horikoshi who was the designer of many WWII Japanese fighter planes.

http://i.imgur.com/95rlW.png
Kaguya-hime no Monogatari (The Tale of Princess Kaguya) directed by Isao Takahata, based on a Japanese folktale about a princess discovered as a baby inside the stalk of a glowing bamboo plant.

those are some beautiful promo posters. especially Kaze Tachinu - looks so breezy and sunny.

Although I'm starting to wonder whether Ghibli will make another truly great movie again.

Great news and yeah, *gorgeous* posters. Almost more excited about a new one from Isao Takahata than Miyazaki tbh, it's been so long since he directed anything and Only Yesterday is up there with anything else that Ghibli has made.

The premise of The Wind is Rising sounds fascinating though, hopefully an excuse for plenty of aerial sequences too. Man, I'm totally psyched for these :)

Sounds like the Wind is Rising could potentially be the first Miyazaki with no fantasy elements, interesting.

Watched Ponyo for the first time the other day, some absolutely stunning sequences, particularly the flooded town. Though the plot felt like it was invented by an eight year-old on the fly (maybe that's the point?).

Oh and the use of colour was phenomenal, maybe his best yet in that respect.

For real, there's some spectacular stuff in Ponyo] - the sequence where they they're racing the storm back to the clifftop home always sticks with me: the roiling sea, and the tiny figure of Ponyo pelting along beside the car on the cresting fish-like waves. And then they get back and have a ham/eggs/noodles meal - from a hurricane to domestic bliss in 10 minutes. And yr right, glorious work with colour throughout. Def. gonna have to watch it again soon.

my niece and nephew are your exemplary cultural-ADD children of today, nothing holds the attention, everything's accompanied by simultaneous DS-playing or similar, but the other day I put Ponyo on and within fifteen minutes they had dropped what they were doing and were silent and rapt till the end of it. Considering that they watch even their favourite films in a really passive way it was amazing to see.

Lovely!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7D-1RG-VRk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BPTNdmdJSc

i love that video.

was it on the ponyo dvd?

Spirited Away

Since this thread's revived, I may as well use it to note how much that last episode of Game of Thrones (w/ Danaerys) stole from the end of Nausicaa.

trailer for new film
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOsHgNaMTKw

Also, want to say from memory that Miyazaki (et all) have trouble with endings, a la Hitchcock and Spielberg.

so so so so wrong

i mean, it's not even true of hitchcock imo!

I'd say plotting simply isn't Miyazaki's strongest point, he's better at developing general themes and portraying individual moments. For example, the plots of Princess Mononoke, Moving Castle and Ponyo are all kind of a mess; with Ponyo it doesn't matter so much, since it's not a plot-centric movie, but with the former two it certainly hindered my enjoyment of the movie. His plotting deficiencies are even more evident if you read the Nausicaä manga, which arguably is Miyazaki at his purest, since he did it all by himself... The major themes of the comic and some individual bits certainly linger in mind, but I challenge anyone who's read it to try to summarize the plot in a coherent way.

His episodic plot structuring is a different style from what you're (we're) used to, the Shakespearean conflict-resolution style of storytelling. Seemingly unrelated plot events with abrupt changes of tone are the norm in Japanese plotting from The Tale of Genji through to Mishima and Kurozawa and Haruki Murakami. At least, that was my impression

I dunno, I've read plenty of manga and seen plenty of anime, and though it might be more prevalent than in the West, I wouldn't say this is the norm for either.

Also, the not-so-coherent/episodic structure is fine with me, if it fits the tone of the movie, like it does in Totoro or Pom Poko (not a Miyazaki movie, I know, but it's by Studio Ghibli). But when a movie is more plot-driven, and the plot gets incoherent, like it does in Moving Castle, that is a flaw to me.

I think Nausicaa (manga)'s plot is basically clear, it's just that it's a really long war epic with a large cast and there is a tendency towards episodic detours in the form. I mean, she's named after a bit character in a superfluous, plot-derailing segment of the Odyssey iirc... I'll concede that it maybe suffers a bit from write-as-you-go over many years, and a couple of big later plot developments aren't REALLY set up in the first half, but it's not Howl-level by any means.

Japanese sites reporting that Hayao Miyazaki has announced his retirement from making films
http://mainichi.jp/mantan/news/20130901dyo00m200036000c.html

Awww.

Howl's Moving Castle on Film4 again yesterday. If it weren't for No-Face in Spirited Away it might actually be my favourite.

he also recently said that Hideaki Anno (Nausicaa key animator & writer/director of Evangelion) can make the Nausicaa sequel that Anno has been badgering him about. hmmmm.

Woah, I never knew the Anno-Nausicaa connection!

anno's series nadia: the secret of blue water is also based on an original concept by miyazaki (hence its similarity to laputa: castle in the sky). nausicaa is still probably my favorite miyazaki film; as much as i like anno's work i'm not sure if i trust him at this point to do justice to the original.

Early reviews of the new one seem a little lukewarm.

IIRC Miyazaki said he was gonna retire after Princess Mononoke too... But then he went and made the most successful movie of his career.

Would the supposed Nausicaä sequel be based on the parts of the manga that came out after the movie? Because as good as the movie is, it still feels like it simplifies the complex, non black-and-white themes of life and ecology found in the manga a bit too much. Not sure if a sequel movie would rectify that, but it'd be cool to see them try.

i think you're right tuomas, he was supposed to bow out after ponyo

i had a hard time making complete sense of the nausicaa plot (even more than some of the other complex ghibli plots) but it impressed me the most visually. maybe b/c i first saw it in big theater unlike, sadly, a lot of the early-2000s/late-1990s stuff.

Japanese sites reporting that Hayao Miyazaki has announced his retirement from making films
http://mainichi.jp/mantan/news/20130901dyo00m200036000c.html

― ( X '____' )/ (zappi), Sunday, September 1, 2013 9:25 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark

i'll believe it when he's dead

yeah hasn't he announced his 'retirement' like three times already?

i think so, i def. recall him saying this in early 00s

https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-and-how

why would a 26 year old film generate so many tweets?

its become a cultural phenomenon, every time Laputa has aired on Japanese TV the number of people who've tweeted the "Balse" spell at the same time the characters do at the end of the film has grown.
supposed to be a press conference on Thursday about Miyazaki's retirement.

Cute phenomenon, I basically dig that. Rewatched Castle in the Sky recently to get through a bad hangover. Had my eyes closed most of the time so I went with the dub, which is bad, but not Kiki bad. Still basically a charming, harmless movie but the main appeal really is the animation of the collapsing train tracks in the chase at the beginning, and everything to do with the robot and the pastoral idyll of Laputa when they first arrive.

The robot on the rampage set piece is so good.

Oh god, yeah. The robot's eye-beam laser thing and the way it makes things swell up and explode is sort of the Platonic ideal of such things, like the broom-flying in Kiki. Also love how doomy it all is with the music and so on. Sells the dreadful potential of Laputa in the wrong hands much moreso than an "exciting" soundtrack or lots of jump cuts or whatever.

the press conference was earlier on today, Miyazaki quoted as saying “I think people are thinking, 'Oh, he's saying he's going to retire again,' but this time, I am serious.” There's a new Ghibli film scheduled for next summer but no details on what it is or who is directing it.

spending his retirement in the best possible way by making a samurai manga

http://24.media.tumblr.com/a6f942f71ddb0276ef40656b33f8543f/tumblr_mwi0xj090K1qbg80vo4_500.jpg
http://25.media.tumblr.com/c6b509762caefdfd96390a5993854c31/tumblr_mwi0xj090K1qbg80vo1_500.jpg
http://25.media.tumblr.com/54e234952a3639bbaa0b4dfcfb117d98/tumblr_mwi0xj090K1qbg80vo2_500.jpg

he should stick his hands in a lawnmower. that'd be the best thing he could do for the world

fp

i was gonna post how i always want to say "princess monkey monkey" and was that maybe wrong, so thanks for recalibrating my scale

Wtf, H4A?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWz2AyDD6Zc

https://vimeo.com/134668506

my daughter wanted to watch Princess Mononoke, that turned out to not be such a good idea

I can see how that could be a little traumatic. I'm not sure if my littlest one has watched Princess Mononoke yet. We watched Spirited Away not long ago. Not sure if my oldest remembers Mononoke. He wasn't really interested when I tried to show it to him at age 6.

Yeah Mononoke's not really for kids.

Of course, she's a little harder than me. Last night she accidentally ended up watching footage of some whale hunt, and I turned it off saying "I don't like people who hunt whales." And she was like "why don't you like people who hunt whales?" "I don't know, I just think they're too beautiful." "I don't think they're beautiful."

she's almost 8 and she wasn't traumatized by it (and I have never seen it/didn't get to watch it with her) so when I came home and asked her how it was she proceeded to relate the entire film to me in painstaking detail - when she got to the part about some guy getting his arms and head blown off I was like hmm maybe this movie was not for you. She has this penchant for asking to watch anime stuff and then when we do there's inevitably freaky demons and gore and just ugh why, I hate this shit

Totoro

i revisited totoro a few weeks ago and boy did i cry

totoro >>>>>>>>

totoro is just a bit plotless and kiddyish for me. it has moments, but i can't even really relate to it on a child-like level because there's not enough of a moving-along of the plot and a lot of drifty, waity parts.

that's why it's great! it's not a story it's an environment!

even so, i've never found it as absorbing as, say, Spirited Away which really is its own environment. Totoro is kind of pedestrian on the whole, with just these little cat things in the background who do, what, barely anything except sleep and fly around?

totoro is about being a child and transitioning through that magical ability to stay in a constant state of hallucination and wonder at the simple world

I acknowledge that's something that happens as a kid, but not really in the way it does in Totoro. So it feels more like an adult's take on childhood that rings a bit false to me.

for what it's worth, it resonated as accurate in my experience... though perhaps that's rose colored hindsight

even so, i've never found it as absorbing as, say, Spirited Away which really is its own environment. Totoro is kind of pedestrian on the whole, with just these little cat things in the background who do, what, barely anything except sleep and fly around?

your heart is cold

my little brother has grown up on miyazaki, princess mononoke was his favourite from a pretty young age. warmed my heart a bit how much he took to them.

these little cat things in the background who do, what, barely anything except sleep and fly around?

OK now you're describing me

forks otm, totoro is the only movies which perfectly captures my sense of being a young kid and endlessly fascinated by the mysteries of my neighbourhood and the local woods

maybe it has something to do with a rural youth upbringing?

i dunno, kids are pretty good at finding magic in mundane places no matter where they are

magical ability to stay in a constant state of hallucination and wonder at the simple world

I don't remember ever having this capacity!

one of my earliest memories is racing Mr. Rogers to my preschool alongside my mother's car. he was riding a bicycle. afterwards we shook hands and had interviews with the attending press. I also remember going to the zoo and seeing a tiger the size of a house walking around in an enclosure. Those are actual solid memories from childhood that come to mind that are surely hallucinations. I was probably about five.

yeah i have a lot of similarly crazy/impossible memories from childhood that i've assumed for years were dreams, but i find it hard to believe i'd remember dreams so vividly after decades. kids definitely live in a somewhat different world than the rest of us.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/07/childhood-hallucinations-common-research-psychotic-schizophrenia-why

i had a LOT of hallucinations as a kid; mostly just audio hallucinations these days

Oh don't get me wrong, I had a very active mind as a kid (and still do to some extent although logic tends to win me over) but Totoro somehow doesn't quite sum it up. Spirited Away is more in line with that strange dream/wake logic I think. I mean, I'd get freaked out by patterns in wood or be convinced there was a demon in the garage or whatever but Totoro feels forced and not enough at the same time. Sweet film, but sweet doesn't cur it quite enough. I'd it supposed to be more of a kids' film or an adult film?

https://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2015/08/371632.html

had a horrible feeling that was going to lead me to an obituary so *phew* i'm very glad that is not the case

Just watched "The Castle of Cagliostro" for the first time, it was terrific. It is Miyazaki's first full length film and is a sort of James Bond-style action comedy taking place in a fantastical moving castle, with several scenes directly referenced in the NES Castlevania. There is an amazing car chase, and secret trap doors, and a counterfeit money operation (which Speilberg probably ripped off for the Goonies), and a bunch of ninjas, and an epic battle on the face of the clock tower, and so much more. The whole time, of course, the artwork is utterly beautiful.

http://www.lasertimepodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Image-1.jpg

I always mean to revisit that one! I saw it early in my first wash of anime fandom, on a second- or third-generation tape; it might in fact be my first Miyazaki. I recall it being a fun romp and yet I've never gotten around to revisiting it beyond the first couple of minutes.

I remember seeing that as a kid back in the '80s when I had no idea what anime was, it was mind-blowing. For some reason I've never watched it as an adult, should correct that. I think TCoC and Starzinger were my first contacts with anime, but like I said, I was 8 or 9 and didn't know what they were or that they were even made in Japan (they were dubbed versions, of course), just that they were way different from the kids' cartoons we had on local television.

love lupin's style and esp green jacket

love cagliostro

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-40128846

Japanese animation giant Studio Ghibli has unveiled plans for a theme park to open in 2020.
The 200-hectare site will be built in Nagoya city, in Aichi prefecture, said Governor Hideaki Omura on Thursday at a press conference.
The park will be based on the popular film My Neighbor Totoro, embodying the movie's theme of "respecting and embracing nature".
The site of the park, previously the home of the 2005 World Expo, currently has a life-size replica of the house from the film.
Co-founder of Studio Ghibli and producer Toshio Suzuki who was also at the announcement, said the attraction will be "set in the world of Totoro". There will not be any amusement park rides.
"Construction will be planned around existing clearings to avoid felling trees," Governor Omura said.

Nora is a big fan of Kiki and Totoro. Totoro is magical; whoever said up-thread that it's not a story, it's an environment, is spot on. Nothing really happens, you just kind of hang out in that emotional, magical space for 80 minutes. I remember liking films where not much happens, plot-wise, as a kid. I often get frustrated myself by films that start of by establishing an environment that I'd like to remain in, and then move it on via plot to something I'm less interested in. But one of my favourite films if Koyanisqaatsi, so there you go.

i was delighted to find that there's a Totoro reference in Persona 5.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8oi9hlXYAAFGtf.jpg

Man, I love watching documentaries about Studio Ghibli, poor Miyazaki wandering around, all grumpy and in a perpetual existential crisis -

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3004569/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqD-pIoHGj0

took me about 20 years to realize kiki is about depression

kiki is so fucking incredible

That would be my vote for favourite Miyazaki film. It's perfect.

Kiki celebrates 30 years tomorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH32qCUowew

https://www.fathomevents.com/events/studio-ghibli-fest-2019-kikis-delivery-service

Kiki still the best in my book.

Such a sweet film. It's so cozy.

It's not the most ambitious but it's definitely the one that's given me the most feels. Really helped me out of a deep funk I was in when I first saw it

I think the only big-hitter Miyazaki I never gelled with was Princess Mononoke. It feels very jumbled and there's something missing from the storyline for me. You could say the same about Howl's Moving Castle, but I guess there are so many twists and turns to that film to keep it moving along, it doesn't really matter

that yumi arai video - incredible!

not sure any film means more to me than kiki; so beautiful, so practical

what a cool witch

there's so many wonderful things about it... the animation's consistently lovely and in the case of the broom-flying it's breathtaking. the town and the world are so warm and good, such that the moments when they still fall short and let kiki down, it's extra heartbreaking in the most believable, i've-been-there way. jiji (in japanese) is one of the all-time great movie cats. and yes, deep funks: what a smart, beautiful, unforced way to talk about what a funk like that feels like, and how they don't necessarily last forever, in a way that can speak to children (without talking down to them) and maybe even more deeply to adults. it's a movie i avoid rewatching too often for fear of spoiling its magic, but also one where every time i do watch it (usually to share it with a new person), i love it all over again.

otm

imo kiki is the most perfect work of art about depression

thought it was about puberty but tomato tomato

it's also rather elegantly about talent and careers/passions/purposes, and our emotional relationships to these things, how much our feelings about them intertwine with how fulfilling the rest of our lives are and vice versa. also man that bread looks delicious.

I coincidentally saw this for the first time over the weekend. Really lovely.

the animation's consistently lovely and in the case of the broom-flying it's breathtaking.

Yeah, the bustling city and countryside are so beautifully and naturally rendered. It really captures the imagination like nothing else.

https://media1.giphy.com/media/fgi8MEo6WCdtm/source.gif

The Studio Ghibli Easter Eggs of Kiki's Delivery Service... #1: a Ghibli bus, just missing Kiki as she flies around town. 👇 pic.twitter.com/xblznK4LqS

— Film4 (@Film4) July 31, 2018

My favorite easter egg is that if you zoom in on the map she holds up when she's delivering the cat in the cage, all the names of the towns/neighborhoods/features are real places in Hawai'i.

https://i.imgur.com/21qRvbg.jpg

(mostly north shore Maui)

Huh, I've only watched Kiki once, probably fifteen or so years ago, and it didn't particularly stick in my mind, certainly less so than a lot of his other films. Time to revisit I guess.

It's a very low key movie, but in think that's part of the appeal. Just a young witch out there, learning about the world.

kiki is a way more anxiety-inducing watch than it should be

hm that's interesting--I was just about to post:

Kiki probably has the lowest level of dramatic conflict of any more or less mainstream movie I've ever seen

though I could see how the absence of big dramatics might be more anxiety-inducing; the grandmother/granddaughter story is softly devastating, but you could almost miss it too

my kids love all the ghibli movies so i've seen most of these over the past couple of years. totoro and ponyo are my favorites, kiki is good and visually beautiful but it makes me sad

https://www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2017/03/13/towards-a-true-childrens-cinema-on-my-neighbor-totoro/

this essay captures a lot about what i love about totoro

My Neighbor Totoro is a genuine children’s film, attuned to child psychology. Satsuki and Mei move and speak like children: they run and romp, giggle and yell. The sibling dynamic is sensitively rendered: Satsuki is eager to impress her parents but sometimes succumbs to silliness, while Mei is Satsuki’s shadow and echo (with an independent streak). But perhaps most uniquely, My Neighbor Totoro follows children’s goals and concerns. Its protagonists aren’t given a mission or a call to adventure—in the absence of a larger drama, they create their own, as children in stable environments do. They play.

we watched princess mononoke not realizing it was one of the pg-13 ones and were a little startled by all the heads and arms being cleaved off by arrows

it's crazy that this poll happened before ponyo came out because it's slotted right in as a classic miyazaki in our household

Kiki says towards the end of the 2nd act something along the lines of "Flying is fun until you have to do it for work". If that's not a farewell to adolescence, I don't know what is!

Her conflict mostly details her transitioning into adult responsibilities: Choosing a career, independence, sustenance, overcoming lack of motivation and social awkwardness.

There's probably something to be said about her transition into womanhood as well but I will leave that to someone else.

yes it's more a 'learning to be in your twenties' film than a film about becoming a teenager

kiki is definitely a top 25 film for me

https://www.polygon.com/2019/10/17/20918448/watch-studio-ghibli-films-miyazaki-stream-hbo-max

"why not on disney," you ask?
https://www.polygon.com/2019/10/15/20828843/studio-ghibli-movies-miyazaki-streaming-netflix-disney-plus

(non-ghibli) The Castle of Cagliostro is still up on netflix, such a great Bond send-up (for you Bond-heads).

and great fun in its own right!

wow, the streaming thing is wild tho - "not on streaming" has been such a part of the brand for so long.

Watched Totoro (again) and Ponyo (first time) with our 3 yr old - the following opinions are all mine. Ponyo didn't really grab me, it lacked emotional weight. Totoro effortlessly shows us everything we need to know in the first few minutes - sisters, a new (old) house in the country, mother in hospital. It's not a great deal - well it is for the girls - but it's totally relatable and a solid foundation for everything that follows. And obviously Totoro himself is 100% adorable - the scene where Mei first meets him via his tail is amazing. In Ponyo we get a weird fish with a human face (wtf) and an overbearing father, and a boy. That's it. (The boy also has daddy issues but fairly minor ones & we don't find out till later.) It's not clear what drives Ponyo or why they become so attached to each other. I feel like Totoro is one for the ages, it overflows with humanity; Ponyo is just a bunch of weird stuff that happens.

watched Spirited Away in theaters last night and the couple next to us were laughing hysterically about the little bird carrying the mouse/baby; like more than seemed at all normal.
seeing Porco Rosso (eng dub) and The Wind Rises (original) over the next two days as part of this:
http://www.ifccenter.com/series/the-films-of-studio-ghibli/
could maybe sneak another one or two in if i'm lucky.... would kinda like to see kaguya again in theaters. Thinking now about what I have NOT seen in theaters and the big ones are Arietty (which i haven't seen anywhere!), Tales of Earthsea (which i only watched about half of a torrent when it was out back in japan before bailing) and Ponyo... and I don't much love Ponyo.

PONYO LOVES HAM tho

ledge otm on both films: totoro is hands-down one of the greatest movies ever made

but ponyo is so staggeringly beautiful to look at that i never get tired of it

And Ponyo's myriad sisters on the submarine are voiced by one-time YMO live keyboardist (and noted singer in her own right) Akiko Yano! Tales From Earthsea really is pretty bad though, I tried to like it on re-viewing but couldn't bring myself to care even a little.

Ponyo might dip a little too deep into the well of Northern European folklore (HC Anderson/R Wagner) for the typical Ghibli fan. I think it's amazing.

Yes, but what did the three-year-old think, ledge?

Well we don't often sit down for whole films with her but when we do she's not often into them; she was with these but drifted towards the end of Ponyo. She asked more questions about Ponyo (especially about the wizard, I kept on having to say "shush I need to hear what he's saying to answer your questions!"), I think she was as confused as I was. I think she laughed more at Totoro (the film) & liked Totoro (the character) more than the fish but she hasn't clamoured to rewatch either so don't know if they're keepers yet.

sorry if tmi!

No, it's good! I know Ponyo was specifically aimed at very young children so was wondering if they saw more in it than us.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jan/28/studio-ghibli-ranked-netflix-princess-mononoke-spirited-away

I'm afraid I cannot agree with Porco Rosso and Only Yesterday being two of the three worst Ghiblis.

only yesterday is a top 3 ghibli film

ranking it beneath the cat returns is some bullshit

is this what I want if I want a DVD collection?

https://www.playtech-asia.com/studio-ghibli-collector-edition-dvd-english-dubbed-hd-version.html

Most of the action unfolds as the credits roll.

wha?

Takahata is way underrated on this list.

Also, does Grave of the Fireflies not qualify for some reason?

sleeve - can't say for sure but there are a ton of bootleg, low-quality ghibli box sets online. one red flag: 24 movies on eight discs does not suggest great picture quality or special features.

thanks, that's why I asked! any recommendations would be appreciated, I want to start getting hard copies.

I think the GKids DVDs and Blu-Rays are still in print, and widely available in Best Buys and the like. Those do contain the Disney dubbed versions (and I think many of the same extras?) in addition to Japanese with subs, etc.

After absconding from the RAF, Porco Rosso transforms back into a human, literally and metaphorically.

Wait what? Did they even watch the movie? This is bonkers.

that list is pretty terribly written, and also clearly doesn't have any need to be a ranked list at all apart from clickbait logic.

Also I haven’t watched Tales From Earthsea but I’ve never seen anyone describe it as better than mediocre/disappointing, let alone top-tier Studio Ghibli.

Although its child protagonists are far too young to promise to love each other, this....is one of Studio Ghibli’s best.

Okay.

My ranked list!

Spirited Away
My Neighbour Totoro
Laputa
Kiki's Delivery Service
Only Yesterday
Princess Mononoke
Grave of the Fireflies
Porco Rosso
Nausicaa
Whisper of the Heart
Howl's Moving Castle
The Tale of Princess Kaguya
Pom Poko
The Wind Rises
Castle of Cagliostro (doesn't really count I know)
Ponyo
Arrietty
My Neighbours The Yamadas
When Marnie Was There
From Up On Poppy Hill
The Cat Returns
Ocean Waves
Tales From Earthsea

Everything down to Arrietty very good to amazing. Only the last two weren't especially enjoyable.

> Also, does Grave of the Fireflies not qualify for some reason?

it wasn't on the list of things available on Netflix, the one i saw anyway.

I liked Tales from Earthsea just fine! I like the novels, it did it’s job.

Tales From Earthsea is really not great. It's super slow moving and the characters spend ages just hanging out in a house doing not very much while doom is impending.

Good to see Kiki getting rated highly but Spirited Away is too low and Princess Mononoke I've always felt I can take or leave, so I'd swap those round

The documentaries on Miyazaki that I've seen are weirdly compelling, he's so relentlessly downbeat as a person, it makes me think that his achievements are somehow snatched from the jaws of failure in some act of artistic brinkmanship. I wonder if he was like that his whole life, the dynamic between him, Suzuki and Takahata (and indeed his own son) was interesting to witness.

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3004569/

thanks!

Watching Laputa on Netflix with English audio & subtitles and the subs are godawful. Totally basic compared to the audio, maybe because they assume a reading rate of about one word a second; but also often a much worse fit for what's on the screen.

everyone with a low opinion of ponyo is wrong and shd have themselves checked out

(currently watching totoro for the first time)

totoro quite stressful in its later reaches :(

have you read Ebert's review of Totoro?

no i only just finished watching it

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-my-neighbor-totoro-1993

ok now i have: he doesn't really explore the stressful section!

Totoro is a perfect movie. Also, it is at least two movies - one for very little children and one for adults. I’m never sure how to read the last ten minutes.

it’s one of the great movies about childhood feels and the panic of being very young and very lost is perfectly evoked

i never got picked up by catbus when i got separated from my parents as a kid tho :(

er I meant about HOW childhood feels but i guess it’s about childhood feels too

(Novelization implies that the mother has TB, just like Miyazaki’s mother. But I’m not sure it’s wise to read Miyazaki’s films autobiographically. Plus, there’s a poignancy to the theory that Totoro is a child’s companion through sorrow and the loss of a parent).

As I've gotten older I've realized it's about parenthood as much as childhood.

(also: in the end credit stills, it's implied that the girls gain a baby brother not too long after the film ends).

can’t be a parent without being a child first iirc!

re last ten mins: possibly adding to my stress was that i'd texted my sister to say i was watching it and ask her whose imaginary friend from our shared childhood was "teethus" (soft "th"), hers or mine, and said "mine! i used to wander by the river aged 4 'looking for teethus' "

-- and i remembered the river and the riverbank in question (in reverse order steep and slippy, deep and swift) and became alarmed on her small behalf for half a century ago :0

totoro is grebt but i like ponyo more

You should watch Kiki next.

it's also on netflix so i will

(i think cagliostro is then the only one on the OP list that i haven't seen)

There's a book that I read as a child called The Ship that Flew, by Hilda Lewis. At one point, the flying ship takes the children up to the window of their mother's hospital room so they can visit her. I've always figured Totoro was referring to that, but it didn't occur to me until just now to google it. Apparently The Ship That Flew is #42 on Miyazaki's list of 50 favorite children's books.

oh wow, definitely read that in 3rd grade, hadn't thought of it since but the name "hilda lewis" totally popped in my memory.

Am working my way through the Ghibli dump on netflix, Ocean Waves is so far the only one I would consign to the dustbin - haven't watched Earthsea yet though. Cagliostro is brilliant.

Massive Joe Hisaishi drop on Spotify today, tons of music.

the earthsea i found slow and odd, with a handful of terrific unnerving moments. i know the farthest shore pretty well so i found some of the departures or changes a bit confusing -- i know this type of criticism is rarely fair, let alone convincing if you haven't Read The Book™, but the grasping of the backstory of the setting (the various islets of the archipelago and their cultural-political ways) seems to rest on your porting in yr memory of the books as shorthand explainer, so

also sparrowhawk himself is very underrealised and not actually very absorbing as a character

iirc, earthsea is the only skip it in the ghibli canon

now revise yr opinion on ponyo

i watched totoro last weekend and apart from the amazing catbus, i thought it was all a bit cutesy-poo

spirited away is a masterpiece tho

the cat returns is slight but hella fun and underrated, (she wants to marry a cat!)
thats all the studio ghibli ive seen so far

i don't think totoro is cutesy-poo! the situations -- realist and quasi-magical -- are often borderline terrifying, and the way the children are is i think very well drawn (the little one just makes me laugh the whole time, her volume control is so random)

(i like the point ebert makes also, that there's no cliched conflict or drama inserted: the darkness is right there but quite understated = ill mother, threat of kids slipping from lovely freedom to play into actually tumbling down a well and drowning or whatever (this is what i found so stressful abr the final ten mins, it made me think how lucky i am to still have a living sister given her unsupervised rural adventures aged 4 and up) (i just read books on my bed, i was only ever in mental peril)

now revise yr opinion on ponyo

Totoro mother is not "ill" btw, she's pregnant! It's shown in the credit sequence. Next time you rewatch it, think about it with that in mind and it becomes a story about how families adjust to change.

Totoro mother is not "ill" btw, she's pregnant!

I've noticed the baby who appears in some, not all, of the credit stills, but this is some epic wtf revisionism!

The mother is def not pregnant while hospitalized, both dubs gloss over it but she's recuperating due to a weak heart but keeps catching "kaze" (could be either flu/cold) so the doctor's keep stalling her release.

Thanks guys I thought I was going mad for a minute

it's probably best avoiding the dubs then if important bits of plot are being missed.

think i was the cagliostro vote. perfect troll opinion but i am more into Lupin III than the filmography of miyazaki

yeah, i've had this conversation a few times with people who have written academic papers about miyazaki: given the unreliable narrator that is mei and satsuki, the weak heart/cold may well be the way they are interpreting the moment with the mother. I am personally positive that she's in the hospital (likely with additional ailments induce by but primarily stemming from the fact that she is) pregnant. Try watching Totoro with that in mind and it plays in a totally different way!

Now where's those paragraphs I wrote somewhere in this or another thread about how Kiki is really about the onset of puberty?

right, here's the reference I remember reading in book one of miyazaki's bio about his mother having spinal TB: it's likely both that and pregnancy as the film is not covering a timeline longer than nine months and mom comes home with a baby:
https://ghibli.fandom.com/wiki/Tuberculosis

willing to fight and die on this hill btw

I might watch it again tomorrow but the Internet is not full of people agreeing with you on this one

i prefer thinking of kiki as being about depression rather than puberty though both viewings work and puberty is more likely "correct"

The mom doesn't come home with a baby lol... In the end credit stills you can see that both Mei & Satsuki have grown a few years.

The heart condition is detailed in the telegram which you only get a brief glance at (prob why it's skipped in the dubs, it's only shown for a moment). The telegram also says that the flu/sickness is delaying her expected discharge from the ward. I guess someone could try to theorize that the telegram is some weird fantasy made up in the girls' minds... but then again I don't write academic papers about teh animes lol.

The mom tells the girls how she needs to get stronger to go home, and that the doctors keep preventing her from going home because she keeps catching either cold/flu/fever. The grandma alludes a couple times that her cooking/vegetables would help her mom recover her health from an illness.

It's a creative theory but even with your 25 years of graduate weeb studies, but I'm gonna say: hard nah.

The correct list:

My Neighbor Totoro
Spirited Away
Kiki
Ponyo
The Wind Rises
From Up on Poppy Hill
Princess Mononoke
Howl’s Moving Castle
My Neighbors the Yamadas
When Marnie was There
Laputa
The Cat Returns
Nausicaa
Whisper of the Heart
Secret World of Arietty
Tale of the Princess Kaguya

I don’t remember Only Yesterday, Grave of the Fireflies, Porco Rosso, or Pom Poko very well.

I’ve never seen Ocean Waves or Tales from Earthsea.

I don't feel like writing a million words on it, but I've noticed that Ponyo, Howl, and Arietty (in particular) are all movies that dispense with standard narrative structure, and are dramatically much "worse" than they should be, but are waaaay more entertaining because they're then not beholden to a bog-standard three-act style.

Pardon a moment's soppiness...

So I got a portable projector screen for my birthday and last night my wife and I gave it a test run on Ponyo.

My wife had a brain haemorrhage three years ago and along with it, a parallel condition called Terson which has messed with her eyesight badly, so watching a projected movie, it was kinda unknown territory for her, I was pretty nervous.

She loves the film. Ghibli movies, in general, are threaded into our relationship. And even though stuff on screen goes missing and colours are distorted for her, she had a good time especially after the first 15 mins which it took for her eyes to acclimate. She could even read the subtitles okay, which is great because it's not the same with the English dubs.

It was weirdly emotional but reasonably successful. We're gonna try her out on some Ozu soon, continuing the Japanese theme, and when I came home tonight her little Ponyo figure that she bought from the Ghibli Museum shop was down from the top of the wardrobe and on her bedside cabinet.

:)

Many thumbs up to hear that MN!

Well, two

the Internet is not full of people agreeing with you

i've never been to japan so i'm only guessing that its skies are as blue and its clouds as large and white and fluffy as anywhere of similar latitude but i still love the the ghibli skies look so exactly like the cover art skies and clouds of british children's books and jigsaws from the 1930s, a very particular blue and a very particular painted fluffiness

(tonight i'm watching KIKI'S DELIVERY SRVICE for the first time, already i feel i understand it better than Fuck the NRA (ulysses) has for decades)

i am also going to watch kiki for the first time tonight

please explain its nuances to me in great detail

i hope to christ you are watching a sub and not a dub

sub yes, kiki is pregnant apparently

pregnant with meaning, sure

late xp to albert but:

The mom doesn't come home with a baby lol...

if we've already established the mother (of three i might add!) had spinal tuberculosis and not "flu", I think it's a short and reasonable leap to imagine what else is not being carefully and clinically explained to both mei and satsuke and, consequently, to us as the audience.

i'd argue that searching miyazaki's films too closely looking for "proof" is like trying to fact check a fairy tale. on the other hand, finding deeper themes and complexities when you go into the woods is the point of reading good children's literature beyond puberty.

kiki is amazing, and yes subs only, the dub of that is really unfortunate

all the boys are tintin in this film lol

this scene is half serge clerc and half a 30s uk travel poster

https://i.stack.imgur.com/gT1Jb.jpg

(the colours aren't really right in that one but i couldn't find the one it reminds me of most on-line)

https://i.imgur.com/TxIPRsf.jpg

excellent stuff :)

(tho totoro doesn't actually remind me of those posters anything like as much as kiki, where they clearly unfurled a sheaf of them in the studio and said "like this please" except with crowd characters from the post-hergé school)

smdh at ragged edges, visible artefacts & missing foot. oh well i was under (bed)time constraints.

@ulysses w/r/t pregnancy in Japan (& please trust me on this):

When a couple is expecting a child (and this would be 100% specific to the culture of mid-century Saitama-ken, as is incredibly still common today in both cities/countryside), the mother goes to stay with her parents for most of the 3rd trimester prior to delivery and then again (with baby) for the first 30-100 days post-partum.

Look up 里帰り出産 or 産後の肥立ち in your favorite multilingual search engine.

But yeah, the doctor's telegram from the doctor clearly states her condition as "心臓弱" (so as not to confuse HM's bio with the story presented)...

...and I just remembered the very same heart condition shows up again with Sho/Shawn in Arietty. #ghiblitropes

and not "flu"

for the last time (I hope): the mom is hospitalized for a weak heart condition, her release is being delayed because she catches "風邪" (hard to translate but could mean either cold/flu/fever) & the doctors don't want to release her unless she's in 100% health.

You are free to re-imagine whatever backstory you like, I'm just telling you the information that the film provides.

the mom is not in the sanitarium because she is pregnant, let's stop this lunacy

just carefully rewatched the credit-still sequence -- may go back and break it down to some extent (= frame by frame) -- but while a baby (and at one point 2 x babies) do appear alongside the girls, mei in particular, they never appear (that i could see) (will recheck 2moro and take proper weeb-studies notes unless someone else does first) with the mother, and in the very last frame we see the 2 x girls in bed with the mother, who is reading to them. everyone looks happy but i would not say she looks 100% recovered…

my provisional pre-rerewatch conclusion is that *if* the arrival of a baby is being implied, it is nonetheless somewhat *ambiguously* (indeed deniably!) implied: in most of the credit stills with the baby (or babies) there are several other children too, the rest of whom must be from other families

if the totoros are spirits of growth and life, and come out of the forests help the girls at the moment when the parents aren't available, then the best proof of the totoros' efforts would probably be the girls growing into healthy, older, socially integrated beings... and the photos at the end of the movie (with happy M and S) might prove exactly that?

what are the best Miyazaki films to watch with younger kids (~ages 4-7)?

The mom is in the hospital bc that is where she is a viking

Ponyo, Totoro, Howl. Ponyo makes perfect sense to kids, IMHO, and less sense to adults. All Miyazaki (except maybe) Totoro can be scary/overwhelming. Most of the dubs are serviceable, but not great.

Maybe The Cat Returns too. Am I wrong or is it a sequel to Whisper of the Heart inasmuch as it's (SPOILER ALERT) the story Shizuku writes at the end of that film?

Now where's those paragraphs I wrote somewhere in this or another thread about how Kiki is really about the onset of puberty?

― Fuck the NRA

just watched it for maybe the fourth or fifth time and I came to the same conclusion

as much as i love every miyazaki film, my personal top 3 are princess mononoke, laputa, and nausicaa.

the only one i haven't seen yet is the wind rises. i've heard a lot of conflicting opinions... what did you guys think?

btw, this isn't a film, but miyazaki's 1978 tv show 'future boy conan' is absolutely incredible!

kiki was pretty good! will do either laputa or the wind rises next weekend i think

Now where's those paragraphs I wrote somewhere in this or another thread about how Kiki is really about the onset of puberty?

I just thought of Kiki as a really great portrayal of burnout. But I should really watch it again.

albert: thanks for the textural insight; it's interesting as I obviously don't read Japanese.

also, mom was totally pregnant:
http://i.imgur.com/nbESEbK.png
http://i.imgur.com/IMrwHBb.png
http://i.imgur.com/OzgGjhd.png

people can be sick and then later, also, be pregnant

Yes! This is also a reasonable reading of the film! In any case, the question of how to balance your own needs with that of your family and your community are really at the heart of what totoro is about in any case. Mei and Satsuke are adjusting to maturity and new responsibility and that process is not seamless. the imaginary friends that help them come to terms with those difficulties were tremendously familiar to me as a kid growing up in the sticks who also talked to mysterious invisible creatures.

and re: kiki from the netflix thread:

its subtext is a tale of a young woman going through puberty and losing power. Remember, Kiki gets sick and then can no longer communicate with Jiji / control the broom / access her power. Until then, she's had opportunity to see pathways to maturity in the independent young woman in the woods and the older woman who bakes and sees the foolishness of immaturity in the bratty grandkids. When she accesses her power to save Tombo (that "Fly" always gets me goosebumps), she is leaving behind her childhood and recognizing that her greatest days lie ahead.

So here's my beef: in the Japanese version, when Kiki is mobbed and Jiji (who has found his own leap forward in maturity by falling in love with the cat next door) jumps out at the film's end and loudly meows. Miyazaki is telling us that maturity means that you lose a little of the magic of childhood, that everything has a price and a tradeoff. It's an important moment that speaks of repercussions and growth. In the English dub, Disney has obviated that lesson by having Phil Hartman's Jiji jump out and say "I can talk again too Kiki!" It's a sign that they've completely missed the point of the film.

a quick glance at the wiki suggests they dialed this back somewhat for the rerelease on home video but GKids in-theaters version (to the best of my experience) retains the original dub. the quoted section below also brings up my loathing of what Disney does to the almost always excellent music: they fuck it up.

"There are a number of additions and embellishments to the film's musical score, and several lavish sound effects over sections that are silent in the Japanese original. The extra pieces of music, composed by Paul Chihara, range from soft piano music to a string-plucked rendition of Edvard Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King. The original Japanese opening theme is "Rouge no Dengon" (ルージュの伝言, Rūju no Dengon, "Message of Rouge"), and the ending theme is "Yasashisa ni Tsutsumareta nara" (やさしさに包まれたなら, "Wrapped in Kindness"), both performed by Yumi Matsutoya (credited as Yumi Arai). The original opening and ending theme songs were replaced by two new songs, "Soaring" and "I'm Gonna Fly", written and performed for the English dub by Sydney Forest.
The depiction of the cat, Jiji, is changed significantly in the Disney version. In the Japanese version Jiji is voiced by Rei Sakuma, while in the English version Jiji is voiced by comedian Phil Hartman. In Japanese culture, cats are usually depicted with feminine voices, whereas in American culture their voices are more gender-specific. A number of Hartman's lines exist where Jiji simply says nothing in the original. Jiji's personality is notably different between the two versions, showing a more cynical and sarcastic attitude in the Disney English version as opposed to cautious and conscientious in the original Japanese. In the original Japanese script, Kiki loses her ability to communicate with Jiji permanently, but the American version adds a line that implies that she is once again able to understand him at the end of the film. Miyazaki has said that Jiji is the immature side of Kiki, and this implies that Kiki, by the end of the original Japanese version, has matured beyond talking to her cat. More minor changes to appeal to the different teenage habits of the day include Kiki drinking hot chocolate instead of coffee and referring to "cute boys" instead of to "the disco".

However, when Disney re-released the film on DVD in 2010, several elements of the English dub were changed, reverting more towards the original Japanese version. Several of Hartman's ad-libbed lines as Jiji were removed, and Sydney Forest's opening and ending songs were replaced with the original Japanese opening and ending songs. Additionally, Jiji does not talk again at the end, implying that Kiki never regains the ability to talk to him, and many of the sound effects added to the original English version have been removed. The English subtitled script used for the original VHS subbed release and the later DVD release more closely adheres to the Japanese script, but still contains a few alterations. Tokuma mistakenly believed the Streamline dub was an accurate translation of the film and offered it to Disney to use as subtitles. As a result, several additions from the dub appear in the subtitles regardless of whether or not they are present in the film."

I just thought of Kiki as a really great portrayal of burnout. But I should really watch it again.

― Lily Dale, Saturday, February 22, 2020 10:05 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

same! it works that way too

I said this upthread:

Kiki says towards the end of the 2nd act something along the lines of "Flying is fun until you have to do it for work". If that's not a farewell to adolescence, I don't know what is!

Her conflict mostly details her transitioning into adult responsibilities: Choosing a career, independence, sustenance, overcoming lack of motivation and social awkwardness.

There's probably something to be said about her transition into womanhood as well but I will leave that to someone else.

― Jersey Al (Albert R. Broccoli), Tuesday, July 30, 2019 9:31 AM (six months ago)

yeah i agree with all that.

the dub of Kiki we want he'd last night was okay but felt oddly timed in places. especially noticeable were bits where people laughed out loud at no discernible joke

we want he'd? Think I need a translator

This thread made me have a look for any Ghibli related Podcasts to ease my commute, the one I did find was a bit dry, Ghibliotheque.

Was hoping for some insight but they can't even say Miyazaki's name correctly or many others, I mean if you're going to do a high profile podcast on a subject you should perhaps spend a day learning how Japanese vowels work.

What was interesting tho' is Whisper Of The Heart came out on top in their rankings, I might have to revisit.

I'd put Whisper Of The Heart in the second rank of Ghiblis, i.e. still better than most things but not an A-lister compared to Kiki, Laputa etc.

Did they pronounce his name my-yuh-zarki or something?

Blank Check have a full series on Miyazaki that they finished about 6 months ago maybe? I'd highly recommend it.

just snagged this; will have a go.
http://www.nausicaa.net/wiki/Ghibli_Artisan_-_Kazuo_Oga_Exhibition,_A_(Japan_BD)

seconding on the blank check miyazaki series, it's good

blank check series was overall good. ep-by-ep some were good, some (e.g. totoro) landed a little awkwardly. they have more knowledge than a total neophyte to ghibli, but not a lot of context for thinking about anime otherwise (cagliostro ep was best in this regard), and tend to focus on plot, character and auteur versus form and technique. but they brought out some recurring themes i hadn't thought about before, and made me give another think to some that i underrate (e.g. howl's). also was the nudge I needed to finally watch Porco last summer! which was lovely.

Last Ghibli we watched at home was Laputa, and at one point Nora (5) gasped and said "this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen".

She's kind of grown out of Totoro, which makes me sad - watched it several times very happily when she was 3-4. She still loves Ponyo, though, and Casper (2) is also transfixed by it.

She was a big fan of Kiki for a long time, and The Cat Returns, too. She loved Howl's, which I'd not really clicked with. I think the slightly unhined-from-narrative-expectations ones do work better with kids in that respect.

Question is, which dubs are on Netflix? I kind of assume the most recent ones?

Obviously these days with the kids we always watch the dubs - the differences are minor enough to not stop you getting the overall effect.

I'd have Totoro, Laputa, Kiki, and Spirited as my favourites. Bunch I've not see that I'll hopefully correct as they come onto Netflix.

God, Miyazaki loves airplanes.

podcasts maybe not the greatest medium for exploring the visual dimension, which to me is the most under-examined? (i mean i'm sure there's actually ppl busily examining it, i'm just not aware of them)

it's just such an incredibly rich terrain of hints and allusion and echoes, from classic kidlit inc.the endless micro-moomins popping up to the travel posters mentioned above, to herge and serge clerc, to who knows what else (inc.actual japanese and far eastern stuff i know nothing about).

i would read the fuck out of a giant expensive catalogue essay on same, someone shd hire me to sub-edit such a thing and pay me nicely to do a grand job

i am not a parent but, perhaps there is something in knowing that, even if they've grown out of the films for the moment, they will likely come back to them at later points in their life seeking (as 20 and 30somethings do) a comfort and safety you helped bring to their young lives. and then discovering to their surprise that things like Kiki and Totoro actually speak to them as adults about things that are emotionally meaningful and valuable to them right then. could make for some really good conversation-starters down the line, and either way it's a good thing you've given them. versus many of the movies i adored as a kid that it turns out are beautifully constructed for a 10 year old (and maybe even "a few jokes for the parents!") but have very little to offer, really, later in life.

xpost hmm fair points! i just remember being let down b/c griffin is a huge animation nerd, dropped out of animation school etc., and when they've talked about pixar or genndy tartakofsky, he's launched into explanations of animation principles, "squash and stretch" etc. whereas here he seemed to stay distant from that stuff, focusing instead on his own late-in-life journey of miyazaki discovery. which was fine enough but especially in the context of thinking about career arcs and "blank checks" i would have expected some notice to, like, how Laputa is a big-budget spectacular epic of relentless and laborious animation, and how Totoro is, comparatively, made on the cheap (but still achingly beautiful of course). i think he just doesn't know much about anime and didn't want to be a dumbass by getting out his depth but it's an area i thought could have been cool to get into, oh well.

https://66.media.tumblr.com/9ee6493e78495d35b98dd75743a793c5/tumblr_nqun7aAb4G1up42jgo7_500.gifv

I'm looking forward to this -

https://www.stonebridge.com/catalog/sharing-a-house-with-the-never-ending-man-15-years-at-studio-ghibli

I should really watch these subbed, but I'm always worried I'd be missing out on the beautiful animations

watch em twice!

i am not a parent but, perhaps there is something in knowing that, even if they've grown out of the films for the moment, they will likely come back to them at later points in their life seeking (as 20 and 30somethings do) a comfort and safety you helped bring to their young lives. and then discovering to their surprise that things like Kiki and Totoro actually speak to them as adults about things that are emotionally meaningful and valuable to them right then.

This is how I feel about the classic children's books I grew up with, and Miyazaki's films are one of the few things made for children in recent years that seem to have that same layered quality. (Although I never went through a phase of rejecting my favorite kids' books; I reread them periodically as I got older and found that the best of them continued to speak to me but in ways that kept changing.)

We watched Totoro at my daughter's request and aside from the doctor's written diagnosis you see briefly on the telegram, here are some other things I noted that are glossed over in the subs:

+ The father mentions that the country air near their new house will be better for the mother to get healthy when discharged.
+ The mother has been in the hospital for one year, and has been discharged once but had to be readmitted almost immediately. This is why Satsuki freaks out when she gets the telegram: she thinks that her mother will never be coming home from the hospital (or worse: that she will die there).

The Disney dub/subs from what I remember are pretty bad ("soot gremlins"... wtf) but they do a better job of pronouncing characters' names more accurately.

So Nora decreed it was my turn to pick the Friday ‘pizza and film’ film, and I put Totoro on - they were both rapt pretty much all the way through (5&2).

And no, she’s not pregnant. No way. Mei is the same age and the baby is standing in the credits, so at least 18 months would have had to pass for gestation, birth, and a year of development. The baby - like all the other kids in the credits - is just a friend.

They’re watching it again this morning. So she’s totally not grown out of it.

It’s cool that more people are watching Totoro.... and spending time with the pregnant mom

this is starting to feel like one of gregg turkington's theories

spirited away and princess mononoke now on netflix, i need never leave the sofa

a good thing abt tales of earthsea is it made me reread the first three books

only good thing to say about that movie probably (haven't/won't see that)

we watched Mononoke on Sunday. I will still say Spirited Away is my #1 Miyazaki, and possibly the best movie I've ever seen, but Mononoke is unfuckwithable, original in every frame, subtly plotted, making the case for it over Spirited Away would be easy to do.

i probably will now rewatch it at some point: as weak cover versions of strong books sometimes can it puts in yr mind things you hadn't really thought abt, like actually how spartan cultural life seems to be in the book version of the archipelago (spartan not being a mode ghibli handles well, le guin is fine with it)

any version of Earthsea where Ged isn't dark-skinned is p fucked up tbh

hard agree. haven't seen any adaptations - if Ged is light-skinned it really takes some of the punch out of the white blond people being the scary primitive Other.

I don't feel like I ever got the hang of Princess Mononoke I have to say.

Maybe having been introduced to Miyazaki via the one-two punch of Spirited/Howls left me with expectations of all his films being bonkers maximalist masterpieces, so coming to films like Mononoke and Totoro later on left me slightly underwhelmed as they're a lot more understated.

a good thing abt tales of earthsea is it made me reread the first three books

why not tehanu? a) it is used in the film; ii) it's the best one.

weird i would consider princess mononoke way more of a bonkers maximalist masterpiece than spirited away

spirited away takes place in a bonkers otherwordly place but has a very understated time in it imo

otm, whereas Mononoke has like six factions, heads getting lopped off all sorts of people, no definite villains except maybe the local lord besieging Irontown, and the dang forest spirit, the weirdest guy of all

spirited away's big spectacle sequences feel bigger & more overwhelming to me than mononoke's

maybe that's because the baseline is lower though!

why not tehanu? a) it is used in the film; ii) it's the best one

bcz no copy in the house

get one forthwith, and the next two, and join me in the earthsea thread to discuss the greatest hegelian thesis/antithesis/synthesis in literature.

my wife announced to us all that she'd never seen Spirited Away despite it being one of the kids' favourite films growing up!we're not sure how she could have been always out of the room when it was on, going to rectify it later

Watched Nausicaa & Mononoke in quick succession. I really wanted to like Nausicaa more, it looked fantastic and I was instantly drawn into its world, however although most of his films drop you into the middle of a unique and fully realised world it usually serves as setting to a more universal story - even when it's as integral as in Spirited Away things are rarely explained, you just have to take them as they come. By contrast this had too much exposition and the story, especially the climax, relied too much on the invented quasi-mystical ecology. Also it was too damn long and at some points it seemed like 'young girl yells at giant insects: the movie'. Some great moments though, especially the giant at the end.

Also within the first few minutes I thought 'wtf this looks like the work of Moebius'; turns out Miyazaki directed it "under Moebius' influence" (his (or translator's) words, apols to mark s). Great interview between the two of them here: http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/interviews/miyazaki_moebious.html

Mononoke was also too long, also featured a protagonist overly fond of yelling, this one way more annoying than Nausicaa. Even though she was eeeeeevil the Lady Eboshi was much more likeable, as was the mercenary monk, though of all the Engish dubs I've seen/heard so far Billy Bob Thornton's voice is the only one I've thought was really out of place. The eldritch Forest Spirit was great and the "I'm going to show you how to kill a god" scene was awesome. I couldn't really get behind the more conventional aspects, a lot of dashing around on horseback (or elkback) with no real sense of peril.

and re: kiki from upthread:

kiki is a way more anxiety-inducing watch than it should be

yes! i am perhaps unusually anxious about lateness/missed appointments but dropping the package in the forest/dithering around at the old lady's and missing the party gave me palpitations.

> Also it was too damn long

it's only about 40% of the book(s). i think it was made after volume 2 and it ended up as 5 volumes. this or laputa is probably my favourite.

> Mononoke

english text by neil gaiman. terrible violent thing.

> kiki is a way more anxiety-inducing

that propeller-bicycle at the end looks like a deathtrap

lady eboshi is not strictly evil, that's part of the point

it's always hard to convert an epic manga series into a watchable movie... nausicaa does a pretty good job imo, considering what a feat that is... on the other hand, akira, while a fun movie, feels like a trailer compared to the manga it's based on

lady eboshi is not strictly evil, that's part of the point

she's not an ahem cartoon villain, sure. i don't think caring for the people of irontown or even the lepers are huge points in her favour though.

this seems like a good thing to lower your blood pressure
https://ghibli.fandom.com/wiki/Iblard_Jikan
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xpn1g7

rewatching ARRIETTY (2011)

i love how much she adores her dad and is excited by his skills and him being deadpan stoic back at her

Have vented on this before, but find Arrietty almost impossible to watch, in large part because of the UK English dub. Also #1 daughter watched it a lot as a 4 year old and took to addressing me and her mum as "Mother?" and "Father?" in that piercingly insufferable middle class tone, often while we were wheeling her around Streatham Sainsbury's.

i'm watching it subbed so luckily this isn't an issue

as a uk english person who used to read the uk english books i thought it was fine except for the boy. was a bit of a shock at first but then a relief from all the american dubs. olivia colman was pretty good.

wild theory: Shou (the boy) is actually pregnant...

Don’t be silly

rewatching LAPUTA (1984) as i break down to make some room in my flat

tentative critical observation so far: tintin is one visual ancestor (see also KIKI) and YELLOW SUBMARINE another

tintin ancestry comes in by way of lupin iii surely

maybe yeah

The dub version of Kiki that's on Netflix is the one with the terrible corny music and the extraneous OTT Phil Hartman dialogue that was eventually pared down. Sucks for folks who will know this version best.

oh we watched it the other day and u remember thinking I didn't remember all that stuff

The dub version of Kiki that's on Netflix is the one with the terrible corny music and the extraneous OTT Phil Hartman dialogue that was eventually pared down.

I've never seen it before so don't know what to compare it with, but it doesn't have the "I can talk again!" line at the end that forks rails about.

https://www.quora.com/Did-Hayao-Miyazaki-really-say-that-anime-was-a-mistake?share=1
Some really funny stuff in here, sure some of you have heard it already but there's some stuff I didnt know. I think he's right about a lot of things but it's often a bit too sweeping. I've heard that he doesn't even like his work being called anime.

I used to think that all japanese animation was called anime but apparently that's not the case. I would like to know if anyone could clarify this.

ponyo (the only good film) is now on netflix

obviously i am watching it, i will always watch it

anime as the term is used in the west just means any animation produced in japan

I can't remember who it was that said differently. Might be something like the way people said gekiga is not manga?

when lisa and sosuke are fleeing the tsunami in the little pink car and ponyo is running on top of the storm fishwaves is the most exciting scene in cinema history sorry if this offends

also the high stylisation of the sea

ponyo is running on top of the storm fishwaves is the most exciting scene in cinema history

it is certainly the most exciting scene in the film. it is a very good scene! the whole thing, from the old folks home to the house. lisa's driving is terrifying. love how calmly accepting she is at the end, 'my son's favourite human-faced fish has turned into a little girl, ok'. tina fey is a+ voice talent in this.

watched howls, it is now in my top 4. sure the end with the scarecrow/prince is hugely out of the blue but till then it almost matches spirited away for a wild thrill ride. As usual with Miyazaki there is a wealth of detail and a dearth of explanation (this is good not bad), e.g. all the childhood ephemera in Howl's bedroom. The only thing I thought was unduly skipped over was a scene with the witch of the waste: after she's had her powers taken she becomes entirely simple, except briefly after Sophie's mum visits she perks up, deals with the black wriggly spy thing, smokes a cigar and says she wants a little chat with Howl - but then she goes right back to being simple and it's not mentioned again. I've started reading the book, will be interesting to see how much of this is fleshed out. Already some major changes - Sophie's sisters are dispensed with, Howl saves Sophie from sleazy pickup guys but in the book he is the sleazy pickup guy!

... also love how sophie occasionally wavers between an old woman/a not so old woman/her normal younger self.

The film takes a sharp left turn from the book round about the time Sophie meets the King, iirc. It's more 'inspired by' than 'based on' from that point on.

@mark s:

I mentioned upthread that Ponyo might dip a little too deep into the well of Northern European folklore (HC Anderson/R Wagner) for the typical Ghibli fan. Did you find it a more "classics"-informed tale than the other Ghibli films you've watched?

you said before yes but i'm not sure i get it? (well i get HCR i guess somewhat but wagner? do i just not know enough abt the submarines in wagner?)

on the whole ponyo seems *less* european to me than many of the others (if european means euro kidlit across the 20th century, which they are full of): its setting is the tsunami-threatened present-day japanese coastline, with warning loudhailers on poles and etc

i agree that it's a little different from the rest of studio ghibli tho

the Ponyo score pretty much co-ops Wagner's Walkürenritt for Ponyo's "tsunami" chase, from the part of the opera when Brunhilde and her valkyrie sisters are trying to return the One Ring to the Rhine.

ah ok!

might fuck around and rewatch PONYO (2008)

actually i already started, love how utterly fkn wired and exhausted her dad looks from the get-go

he's all jacked up on that elixir.

also how recklessly sosuke's mum drives, she reminds me of mine getting me to school in like 1969 lol

Rewatched Ponyo with daughters yesterday - it's #2 daughter's fave now - and was struck again by the sheer loveliness of their little boat put-putting over the flooded motorways as the Cambrian fishies ("IT'S DEVONICUS!") loom beneath them.

semi-convinced that there's a thread in ponyo -- part visual part story-content -- that goes back to a rupert the bear story i dragged my old rupert annuals off their high shelf and finally checked, and tbh (a) no, the two elements i thought were in one single story are in two quite unrelated stories (rupert at greyrocks cove in 1961, rupert and the whistlefish in 1969, if yr keeping count) so i think my grand theory fails BUT someone at ghibli nevetheless reads rupert the bear books imo

j forgot what b was, i think it's somewhere in what i wrote

Halfway through Pom Poko, <3 <3 <3 (those are hearts not racoon balls.) Wasn't expecting a rendition of the best non M.R. James ghost story Mujina, turns out Mujina is another word for raccoon (raccoon dog, techinally).

We watched Pom poko last week and it manages to balance the watership down sadness, with being absolutely hilarious.

I should read more tanuki mythology.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-tanuki-japan-s-trickster-god

There’s some great tanuki testicle tricks ukioe prints in that article.

yeah, either the sombre narration (though not untempered with dry humour) or the WBesque raccoons would be too much by themselves. was trying to place the narrator but i had to look it up in the end: "what are the raccoons going to do tonight? the same thing they do every night pinky: try to take over the world!"