Kaze tachinu (The Wind Rises)

Ghibli's had a productive couple of years, and now they're taking a little break, I read.  We're still catching up.  Kaze tachinu (The Wind Rises) came out just after we left Japan last summer, and I hadn't seen it in the States.  I've been looking forward to seeing it with a mixture of anticipation and dread.

The dread came as soon as I learned what it's about:  the early life of Horikoshi Jirō, the guy who designed the Zero fighter plane for Mitsubishi, the one that became so notorious during WWII.  I'll note here that I'm not at all familiar with Horikoshi's life story;  but the theme alone made me worry that in his old age (he's announced that this is his last film, but didn't he say that about Ponyo? I'm not actually too sure he's totally retiring) Miyazaki was going to turn to nationalism.  Under the Abe administration Japan has been swerving to the right to a worrisome degree, and a rightward, nostalgic turn in old age is a known issue with Japanese artists, so I half expected this;  but Miyazaki has always had such a multicultural, all-embracing aesthetic that I particularly didn't want to see him go in that direction.

On that score, the film isn't nearly as bad as I'd expected.  It makes Horikoshi into practically a saint in his personal life:  impossibly virtuous, in a Traditional Values sort of way, which is a typical strategy for rehabilitating right wing nasties ("but he loved dogs and cherry blossoms, so how could he be evil?").  But the movie resolutely avoids the political issues surrounding the war.  It's not an apology for Japan's actions.  It doesn't condemn them either, and that's a problem if you're looking for one. 

But it seems that what Miyazaki's aiming for is a portrait of a guy who's essentially apolitical, who just wants to make airplanes, and not think about what they'll be used for.  Jiro in the film is actually disturbed by the knowledge that his planes will be used for war (which is a certainty, given that his company is working on military contracts).  This comes up a couple of times.  I wish it had come up more.  That's the theme this film could have centered on:  the conscience of an artist or inventor who can't control the uses to which his work will be put.  Or who can control them, but only at the expense of the work itself.  There's a deep ethical issue there, but Miyazaki raises it only to essentially shrug it off.  So while the film isn't the nationalist thing I was afraid it would be, it does mostly dodge the moral issues raised by its subject matter.

On the other hand, it's not as good as I'd expected either.  It's a film about airplanes, about flying, intended (ostensibly) as a final statement by an animator who has made fantastic films about flying in the past.  Think of how integral the imagination of flight is to Nausicaa, Laputa, Spirited Away.  Think of Porco Rosso (my favorite Miyazaki film of all), which isn't just about flight but, like The Wind Rises, about airplanes as machines.  Think of all that flying and you're bound to expect this film to be, if nothing else, a triumph of glorious visuals.  But it's not.  It's pretty enough, and there are certainly some wonderful moments.  But really nothing we haven't seen Miyazaki do before, and often better. 

Ponyo (2008)

We saw this in the theater in Japan first-run, summer of 2008, and I had a blog post all composed in my head then, but never wrote it down, because we moved a few days later. 

It was going to point out that it's a deeply flawed movie, with the Captain Nemo elements not jibing well at all with the Little Mermaid elements.  But it was going to concentrate on the fact that, despite those flaws, the movie taps into some really deep sense of awe about the sea.  The whole tsunami sequence, starting with the raging storm with little Ponyo running along on the crest of the waves and going up through the morning-after wonder of boating around on the glasslike surface of a submerged world, I found very moving and beautiful.  Miyazaki gets at something really primal there, some kind of atavistic worship of the sea and its power and its grace.  It lends Ponyo herself a kind of divine wildness that a post-adolescent mermaid might have lacked, and it powers the film way past the weaknesses in the story and, in particular, the ending.

That was more or less what I would have said.  Watching the film again now, though...  That's not what I felt.  It was hard to watch the tsunami.  For obvious reasons.  I wasn't even directly affected - all my relatives, and all their friends, were well out of harm's way.  But even so, tsunami are real to me now in a way that they weren't in 2008.  And I found myself thinking that Miyazaki probably wouldn't make this film now.  It's going to be quite a while before we feel quite that way about the sea again. 

But then that makes me think that, while Japan hadn't experienced a devastating tsunami in many years before Sendai - so that Miyazaki might have felt the phenomenon remote enough to romanticize - the world had.  The Indonesian tsunami of 2004 was still fresh in people's minds when Miyazaki started this film.  Maybe he wasn't romanticizing tsunami from a position of remoteness, but trying to create for Japanese kids a kind of fairy-tale language with which to talk about tsunami, in preparation for a day when they'd have to. 

Regardless, this film was difficult for me to enjoy this time.  The shots of Sosuke and his mom in the car, this close to being washed away, were too similar to things we saw in news from Sendai. 

Yeah.  On an intellectual level, I think I understand how fairy-tales and folk-tales once fit into people's lives, speaking their unspeakable fears for them.  But I've never before felt it.

Kokurikozaka kara (manga version)

This summer's Ghibli release, Kokurikozaka kara コクリコ坂から, was based on a manga by the same name.  It was drawn by Takahashi Chizuru 高橋千鶴 with a story by Sayama Tetsurō 佐山哲郎, and it was serialized in the girls' comix mag Nakayoshi なかよし in 1980.  It's currently available complete in one volume, in stacks next to all the movie paraphernalia in the bookstores.

Taken on its own terms, it's an utterly typical shōjo manga.  Average.  I guess I mean that as both a pejorative and a mere descriptor.  That is, I don't find the manga really remarkable in any way;  but there's a certain value in reading unremarkable works, too, because they help you appreciate the excellent ones. 

The art:  it's undistinguished.  Very few compositions struck me as being memorable or arresting.  At the same time it's obviously using the visual vocabulary of girls' comix circa 1980 in typical way:  the flowers, the floating-in-space emotional moments, the dizzy-angle closeups of eyes, mouths, etc.  It's kind of a primer on the genre.

The story:  same.  Puppy love presented with an accent on beautiful boys just out of reach, and the endless internal sufferings of a girl in love.  Just enough complications to keep the plot going, and a resolution just in time to bring tears to your eyes.  (Theoretically.)

Read in terms of the movie, however, it's fascinating, precisely because Ghibli was able to make such a deeply resonant movie out of such average source material.  They kept the basic outlines of the story (Mer and Kazama's relationship, the boarding house, the school), but changed the setting from "contemporary" (in 1980 the manga was set in 1980) to "past," and thus the tone from up-to-the-minute (in the manga the boys all have Shaun Cassidy long hair) to nostalgic.  Furthermore they drew out the emotional, almost mythic power of the dad-lost-at-sea motif.

Here's an example of what they did.  High-school-student protest is a theme in both.  In the manga, it's a gag:  Kazama manufactures a student uprising against school uniforms, as a way of selling more papers (he's on the school newspaper).  It's mildly funny, but mostly a shockingly cynical parody of the student protests that had swept the country just ten years before.  Takahashi and Sayama's youngest readers may or may not have had any memory of them, but older readers would have, and it's some kind of sign of the new decade that student unrest in 1980 could only be thought of in terms of this kind of ridiculous parody.

In the movie they keep the theme, but transform it into a crusade to save the Latin Quarter dorm.  Notably, this too neutralizes the student-protest theme - what in the late '60s would have potent political significance is recast in the film as pure-hearted young people trying to save their community.  But at least it's taken seriously by the filmmakers - commitment to something other than puppy-love and hairbrushes is held up as a real thing.

Ghibli: Kokurikozaka kara (From Up On Poppy Hill) (2011)

I can imagine Arrietty finding an audience overseas, but I wonder about this one:  Kokurikozaka kara コクリコ坂から (which seems like it's going to be released as From Up On Poppy Hill).  It's about kids - well, high school kids - and no doubt young anime fans will find a lot to enjoy in it.  But the tone is pretty grown-up.  It's very much an adult's nostalgic view of adolescence - and really an older adult's, with the longing for the Showa 30s that has gripped Japanese boomers for years now.  Maybe younger viewers in Japan can sort of approximate that point of view - but will it register with overseas audiences?

Maybe not;  maybe it doesn't matter.  The story is moving, and the animation is some of the most beautiful Ghibli has ever produced.  What's not to love?

It's about a girl named Umi, nicknamed Mer (a bilingual pun) who lives in a big house on a hill overlooking Yokohama Harbor in 1963.  Her father died at sea during the Korean War, and her mother is in America studying medicine;  Mer lives with her grandmother, her younger sister, and three single women boarders.  Every morning Mer runs a nautical signal flag up the flagpole in front of the boarding house, hoping in vain that her father will see it and return.

So, with the longing for the dead father and the absent mother, the story is awash in sentimentality, right?  Yes, it is.  If that's not your cup of tea, then this isn't your movie.  But if you appreciate a good flushing of the tear ducts occasionally, a deft pull on the heartstrings once in a while, this anime delivers.

At school she develops a crush on a guy named Kazama who lives in an old Meiji-era foreign-style mansion that's been turned into a high-school dorm.  It's called the Quartier Latin, and it's a fabulous creation, combining the kind of colonial-style Western-yearning grand architecture that can still be seen today on the Bluff in Yokohama with decades of accreted boy student embellishments, everything from theatricals posters to dismembered bicycles to ledgers that probably contain missing parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  This dorm provides one of the major subplots, as the owner, an absentee landlord living in Tokyo, has decided to sell it, and the kids decide to band together to save it.

The lightness of the Quartier Latin parts of the film nicely balances the sadness of Mer's story, and of course the two threads intertwine in effective, affecting ways.  You'll laugh, you'll cry.

And if you're like me (and just pray you're not) you'll be enthralled at how carefully the filmmakers work in period details.  The story starts out in what feels like fairy-tale territory, the kind of fantasized-Europe-in-Japan that the Borrower house in Arrietty embodies.  But gradually the story eases us into the realization that this is a very particular time and place being depicted - Yokohama on the eve of the Tokyo Olympics - and that the West-East fusions, the nostalgia-vs.-renovation themes, are all carefully accounted for by the specificity of the setting.  Right about the time you realize exactly where and when this has to be taking place, the story brings you to Sakuragi-chō Station, sits you down in a Tokyo publisher's office surrounded by Olympics posters and magazine covers (all quite recognizable), lets you walk by the Hikawa-maru at night.  An idealized glow permeates everything, but it only enhances the sense of locatedness that this movie provides.

I like Ghibli's kid movies.  I really do.  But I get most excited when I see the company pushing the limits of what animation has traditionally been considered capable of doing.  Omoide poroporo おもひでぽろぽろ (Only Yesterday) might be their greatest achievement in this regard:  while kids appear in the story, it's all about an adult woman thinking through events in her childhood in order to make sense of her present-day situation.  That all this is accomplished, with perfect subtlety, through animation is a remarkable achievement, and what's more remarkable is that some parts of the story are told much more naturally than they could have been with live action.  It's an argument in favor of animation as an art form unlimited by age, subject, or theme.

Kokurikozaka kara is almost like that.  The story is all about adolescents, and nostalgic perspective aside there's no adult consciousness in the story reminiscing.  But still, thematically it's working on a more mature level than anything Ghibli's done in years and years.  It's a major work.

Ghibli: Karigurashi no Arrietty (Arietty the Borrower) (2010)

Catching up on a few Japanese films we'd missed.  I hadn't heard anything about this - it came out just after our Japan trip last summer, and somehow none of our family or friends in Japan had been talking about it.

Which is odd, because we normally keep up on Ghibli.  Sometime I mean to write a series of posts about all their films - I've seen them all, and loved most of them.  Our opinions were kind of mixed about Ponyo, I guess, and worse than mixed about the couple before that, which may be why our breaths weren't particularly bated for this one.

The Japanese title is Karigurashi no Arrietty 借りぐらしのアリエッティ, which literally translated to "Arrietty the Borrower," although it looks like it's going to be released overseas as simply Arrietty.  Anyway, we were a good ten minutes into before I realized:  dude, this is The Borrowers.  Which I haven't read since I was, like, ten, and haven't thought about in just about as long.

So anything I say about it as it relates to the original (and to English-language film adaptations - I remember seeing one as a kid, evidently this one) is based on ancient memories, right?  But here goes nothing.  I remember the original as being pretty jokey about the Borrowers - like, aren't these quaint little folk?  This film doesn't do that.  It doesn't look down on them. 

So when the dad goes out borrowing he's not some odd little cod-Victorian pilferer - he's a stern paterfamilias braving ever-present dangers to go hunting for his family (the concept works even better in Japanese than in English, since the verbs for "to hunt" and "to borrow" are homophones).  He's kind of heroic, and so you can easily see why Arrietty looks up to him so much.  The father-daughter relationship is really at the heart of this film (and, come to think of it, at the heart of a lot of Ghibli films).

The human boy, meanwhile, comes off as a kind of Keatsian figure - we don't know if he actually writes poems, but his illness is handled with a kind of wan picturesqueness that makes his crush on Arrietty quite believable. It meshes perfectly with the lush romanticism of the setting, which makes a rainswept backyard feel like Eden and a cobwebby crawlspace feel like a Roman ruin. 

The depiction of nature in this film is one of its chief delights.  It makes for some nice gags, as we hear them referring to the lawn as a forest, but mostly what we get are views of the fairylike Borrowers in close communion with flowers, leaves of grass, raindrops:  I hadn't looked at grass with this much wonder since I was, well, since I was almost young enough to read The Borrowers.  Pay particular attention to the way the film treats water:  the jewellike texture of raindrops or dewdrops when seen close up, and the way the animators decide not to scale down the effects of surface tension, so that when Arrietty's mom pours a cup of tea it comes out as one big droplet.  Very striking.

Arrietty herself, of course, is another in a long line of strong Ghibli heroines;  I'm not sure, on one viewing, if I could say what if anything differentiates her from Nausicaa or San or Fio.  Which doesn't meant she's an ineffective center for the film:  she's just as winsome as the others.

It's on the kiddy side of Ghibli's output, to be sure, but it's one of their better ones.  And it's probably the best of their attempts so far at adapting a foreign story (if you don't count Spirited Away as an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland).