Favourite Miyazaki film

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.

It's in Chinese cinemas now, watched it twice this week. The otherworld section sure is dense and the ending is predictably full of things collapsing (a problem... or, maybe fairer just to say, trope since Nausicaa, or was it Cagliostro?). But on second watch I caught a lot more things that helped a lot of things make sense; and the ending was still full of things collapsing but also, this second time around, made me cry.

Lily, that "understated reveal" is incredible! -- I did not pick up on that.

This guy

https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2024/5/28/hayao-miyazakis-next-film-is-an-action-adventure

Damn... I hope he and George Miller keep it up! They seem to have boundless enthusiasm and creative energy for people their age, and seem to be getting better to boot.

Gosh, "The Boy And the Heron" is wonderful. I can't wait to watch it again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tjhy3jsnYWE

NHK Doc about the making of The Boy & The Heron that came out last year but with subs.

Oh nice!

Got a tentative plan to rewatch all Miyazaki full-lengths this spring (still haven't seen Conan or his Lupin episodes from the TV show -- yet not a hurry, feels great to know there are things I haven't seen). Cagliostro was as wonderful as always. That ending always makes me cry.

Nausicaa has that emotionally messy climax and falls apart at the end (there's a solid 45-minute ending in there, tucked into the 3-minute end credits) which I think I could still make a halfway solid thematic defense of, except Miyazaki is like Ursula Le Guin -- I don't think either of them ever figured out how to finish a story. Which is a bummer, but understandable, seeing as what both writers *did* become experts at is making worlds so lush that nobody could want to (or know how to) leave them, including the writers themselves...

Nausicaa has lots of things I love in the first ~90 minutes. This was a bittersweet watch in a more technical sense because almost every time a Hisaishi theme started playing, I would remember that originally Haruomi Hosono was supposed to make the soundtrack (but he and Miyazaki had some sort of falling-out; which didn't stop Hosono from being a huge fan of the film when it came out) -- so then I'd start thinking about the music in Night on the Galactic Railway and The Tale of Genji and get all "dammit! why couldn't those two just get along?!"

This is a good cue for one of my perennial "you gotta read the Nausicaa manga" posts. I feel like it's almost Miyazaki's least known work, but there's so much great stuff in there! It went on for years after the point when the movie was made, and I definitely find the ending a lot more satisfying.

Btw for US ilxors, Mononoke is getting a short, IMAX-only theatrical run starting this Wednesday, both dub and sub options available.

I don't even remember how Nausicaa ends, which I guess is a good thing? I mostly remember the character and the setting, especially the poisoned jungle. Which I guess goes to your point — in general I enjoy being immersed in his worlds enough that plot is somewhat secondary.

Yeah, the jungle and the petrified caverns beneath the jungle are my favorite things in that movie. Well, and the flying of course.

can't believe the le guin shade in this revive.

i found the boy and the heron disappointing tbh. maybe i need to watch it again - ponyo took two or three goes to fully appreciate.

can't believe the le guin shade in this revive.

In a good or bad way...? She's my favorite author! -- on the basis of the post-1978 work. She was only finding her footing in most of the work she remains known for.

Great point / reminder about the Nausicaa manga, thank you Doc. I read it when I was too young to follow either the complex story or the dense storyboarding. And even so, there are segments of it that I can call to mind right now. Definitely something to revisit now that I'm 35 and not 12.

She's one of mine too - writing off her endings, and her work pre 1978 is a pretty bold take! I'm sure we can agree the ghibli adaptation is trash though.

Oh, does "shade" mean something like "diss" ? If so, I make it with disappointed love, and it applies far more to her novels than her short stories, which latter (at least from the '80s on) are generally perfect, endings and all.

I'm sure we can agree the ghibli adaptation is trash though

Ha ha! Agreed!

Well, what I would call the "finding her footing" Le Guin is still pretty wonderful. The Left Hand of Darkness has one hell of a touching ending. And it's been too long since I read the first three Earthseas -- The Other Wind ends gorgeously, not to mention the series as a whole with Firelight. But several of my favorite of her novels drop off hard right at the end -- Malafrena, Tehanu, Paradises Lost, Powers, Lavinia a little bit too. I read so much of her, I picked up on the pattern -- it's often like she can't tear herself away from the beautiful world or characters she's made, so she just -- stops.

Come to think of it, that makes *two* of my all-time favorite artists that Miyazaki broke the heart of: Hosono *and* Le Guin (for not directing Ghibli's Earthsea adaptation himself).

taking it to the le guin thread :)

This morning I finished up the project -- fourteen films at the pace of about one a week, skipping only Ponyo because I'd watched it with my daughter a couple months previous. I love all of them. And loved getting to discuss each with a few friends who were watching most of them for the first time. Feeling purified, and lifted up. Been feeling this way pretty much since the project started. Miyazaki and his crew RULE.

Top five might be:

1. The Wind Rises
2. Whisper of the Heart
3. Arrietty
4. From Up on Poppy Hill
5. Porco Rosso

The inevitable directing / animating imperfections aside, Arrietty & Poppy Hill are so wonderful -- Hayao Miyazaki & Keiko Niwa's screenplays are too good. I wish they'd written ten more.

Cried my way through the endings of Totoro and Arrietty. Tearing up almost nonstop for 20 minutes.

Has anyone figured out what (Boy & Heron spoilers) that huge stone hovering in the Grand-Uncle's garden is all about? This was my fourth viewing (first outside the cinema) and a lot of things became clearer, but that remains a mystery. I figure it's connected to inspiration/creation -- there's that scene of the old creator bowed down under the combined weight of the stone's presence and his own age. It's also linked to the two tombs somehow, the one that Kiriko saves Mahito from, and the one that stands behind Natsuko's bed, and which Himi tries to save her from. The Mahito/Kiriko one has the "those who seek my knowledge shall die" inscription. Mahito talks about how the stones the Grand-Uncle offers him in their first/dream meeting are not wooden, but tainted with malice, and suited only for tombs. Is it connected to the theme that retreating from suffering into an alternate and only seemingly more idealistic world is no way to go?

Peeved about the title change, by the way. "The Boy and the Heron" is evocative but also only accurate for the first half of the film. Whereas "How Will You Live?" is perfect.