Favourite Miyazaki film

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