Favourite Miyazaki film

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.