Three days into April it is time for me to draw up a little résumé with regards to Miyazaki March and what we have learned while passing through it. You can find all related posts HERE in the directory, to revisit the reviews I did on the Studio Ghibli animation features (mostly) directed by Hayao Miyazaki.
via raywoman.wordpress.com
For my ambitious project to review my way through all Miyazaki directed movies for Studio Ghibli (plus Arietty) with some general musings on top I actually re-watched all of them, except for Tales from Earthsea by Gorō Miyazaki, Hayao’s son, and except for Arietty, which I saw for the first time and only once.
It’s not exactly a surprise, but a pleasant realization, that all of these movies are really good movies and not one of them lets me down. Compared to other animation movies and movies in general they are all well made, well written and most of the time even refreshing in their outlook and presentation of things, characters and relationships. For family-friendly entertainment for mass-audiences I normally wouldn’t expect the level of complexity encountered in these movies, but they fail to disappoint.
via negativ-film.de
Two movies in particular surprised me:
I remember liking Porco Rosso more than I had thought I would the first time watching it, but I was really surprised as to how much the movie resonates with me and how incredibly well it holds up against all the other Miyazaki movies. I thus consider it to be part of my Top 3 favorite movies by Miyazaki – which really is made up of four movies.
That brings us to the other surprise: Howl’s Moving Castle. I have been conflicted about this one ever since I saw it, because on the one hand I think it has the potential to be the best of them all, yet, the ending and unfolding events there ruin it for me. If there were an ending more to my liking I am pretty sure that Spirited Away would have trouble remaining in the no. 1 spot of my list. But that is also the surprise, that the rest of Howl’s Moving Castle engages me that much, that despite the grave flaws, I consider it to be such an amazing movie. For me, in many ways, it feels like the quintessential Miyazaki movie (with some deliberate hinting at that within the movie itself) with all elements coming together perfectly, just like in Spirited Away, …xept for the ending, mind you.
via lovehkfilm.com
Reviewing all these movies was tough, because they were quite a lot and I wanted to write something meaningful (although I am fully aware of my regular drooling and ranting). It was time consuming, so my work with Miyazaki March actually started in early February, and it still felt like too little time. Well, it was actually, because I wanted to take a closer look at all other non-Miyazaki Studio Ghibli features which got replaced by reposting an adjusted version of my Tales from Earthsea review and I totally missed out on discussing the role of cats in Miyazaki movies. That would have been fun, but I had to cut it to get to my review of Spirited Away. Sorriez (and meow) for that.
Still, doing Miyazaki March felt really good and I got a lot of positive response and feedback. Viewers for my little corner of the internet increased significantly and I want to thank everyone who read the posts and all of you guys who liked and commented, I appreciate it very much!
I hope to do another theme-month later this year, September or October-ish, but let us wait and see. If all goes well, there will be two regular series for the blog coming your way, a comic re-read of Elfquest and a series re-watch of the X-files.
But let us not get ahead of ourselves!
Today in Miyazaki March (all posts HERE in the directory) I wanted to give you a little overview over other Studio Ghibli movies that have not been directed by Hayao Miyazaki and talk a little about what I think of them. Due to time constraints I unfortunately have to abandon that plan and give you a modified re-post of my “Whitewashing in the movie adaptations of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea” (full post HERE), in which I talk about the Studio Ghibli adaptation that fits right in with Miyazaki March, because it was directed by none other than his son, Gorō Miyazaki. I hope you’ll enjoy it!
via pejamovie1.blogspot.com
The Japanese film adaptation of Earthseawas produced by Studio Ghibli, famous throughout the World for Oscar-winning movies such as Spirited Away and nominees like Howl’s Moving Castle, and Princess Mononoke. All of these were directed by Miyazaki Hayao, one of the Co-founders of Studio Ghibli and it was him who expressed an interest in producing and directing an animated version of the first three Earthsea novels in the early 1980s. But it was not until July 29 2006 that a movie adaptation called Gedo Senki (Ged’s War Chronicles) saw a theatrical release, later released outside Japan with the English title Tales from Earthsea. This movie however was not directed by Miyazaki Hayao due to his time restraints, being involved in the production of Howl’s Moving Castle, a fact that Ursula K. Le Guin bemoans on her official homepage, since she initially agreed to the production based on her admiration for his earlier work. Instead of Miyazaki Hayao his son Miyazaki Gorō directed the film. Gedo Senki reached the Nr. 1 position of the Japanese Box Office in its opening week and held this spot for five non-consecutive weeks. It wasn’t a big commercial success abroad and still has not been released in the U.S. due to Sci-Fi Channel still holding the rights for the Earthsea novels there.
The Earthsea-series, written by the very popular Ursula K. Le Guin, consists of seven short stories, two of them published before any Earthsea novel was written, the other five all being part of the 2001 publication Tales fromEarthsea, and five novels. The first three novels are called A Wizard of Earthsea(1969), The Tombs of Atuan(1971) and The Farthest Shore(1972). Le Guin was approached by her publisher to write one or more novels targeted at an audience of young adults in the genre of fantasy. She drew upon her two short stories The Word of Unbinding(published first 1964 in the January issue of Fantastic) and The Rule of Names(published first 1964 in the April issue of Fantastic) to further explore Earthsea, the world she created for these two.
While the first three Earthsea novels soon came to be considered en par with fantasy classics such as the Lord of theRings and the Narnia novels, they have also been criticized by feminist critics, for they feature mainly male protagonists and delegate the power to the men, while rendering mainly isolated male wizard characters as wise. This changed when Le Guin opened the second trilogy of Earthsea with the 1990 publication of Tehanu. The feminist tone of Tehanu, expressed in the focus on women’s lives in Earthsea’s society. Tales from Earthseawas published in 2001 and features the stories The Finder, Darkrose and Diamond, The Bones of the Earth, On the High Marsh and the article A Description of Earthsea. Le Guin herself intended the last story, Dragonfly, to be the link between Tehanu and TheOther Wind, the last novel of Earthsea, also published in 2001.
“My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white” – Le Guin 2004
Although admittedly writing in a fantasy tradition that draws upon Nordic myths that usually accepts being white as the norm, Le Guin refused to adhere to this norm and decided for her Earthsea-series (but also for most of her other works) to establish protagonists of color.
Le Guin herself admits to didactic intentions, claiming that she expected her reading audience to be mainly white American adolescents who might have had some trouble identifying with Earthsea’s main protagonist Ged, which is why she chose to present his skin-color only after readers would already have eased themselves “into Ged’s skin” before realizing that “it wasn’t a white one” (- Le Guin 2004).
Even though we can also find somewhat problematic depictions of ethnicity (in itself a problematic term) in Earthsea that are not explicitly addressed by Ursula K. Le Guin, she acknowledges the fact that her presentation of non-white characters could be perceived as being problematic. She states that she is “intensely conscious of the risk of cultural or ethnic imperialism—a white writer speaking for nonwhite people, co-opting their voice,” and that she knows that this can be considered to constitute “an act of extreme arrogance” (- Le Guin 2004).
“what animation can do to the human body is one of the most interesting and provocative aspects of the medium. Anime representations of the human figure range across an extraordinary variety of types (and archetypes), implicitly promising a vast range of fictional identities for the viewer to revel in.”
It is therefore interesting to look at how the human body is represented in anime in terms of skin-color, and there is a startling observation to be made. Anime characters do not look specifically Japanese, but in fact very white-western. Most characters are white, meaning they exhibit fair skin, often with blond or light brunette hair. Susan Napier argues that these body types are neither Japanese nor Western but rather “anime-style”-bodies that display the notion of mukokuseki, being stateless, and refers to statements, that Japanese try to de-Japanize the anime characters in order to create an alternative world that serves escapist tendencies or underlines the incongruence with Japanese reality. By referring to these character-types as “postethnic” (especially with regard to dystopian fantasies of future worlds) she also points at their hybrid nature, the result of merging ethnic and racial identities within the course of time. Nevertheless many Japanese anime, even in futuristic settings, still stress Japanese cultural practices and traditions. She claims that it is this Otherness, that is neither Japanese nor Western, in relation to familiar cultural settings, that allows Japanese audiences (but to some extent also other, especially Western, audiences) to explore their identities without the constraining boundaries of realistic depiction. The anime style is considered to produce characters that work as a projection surface with features that render them human,
If we examine the characters in Gedo Senki bearing all this in mind, it is striking to see how conventional the protagonists are depicted in this cultural context of anime production. Apart from the villain Cob, who turns out to be a wizard of uncanny power, who was transformed by the evil that possesses him in his search for eternal life, all the other main characters exhibit neither surprising hair-colors nor exaggerated eyes. Their hair colors range from brown to blonde and their skin exhibits different shades of what could be called white. Even with regards to “extras”, characters that appear for only a few moments in scenes that take place in cities or villages, there are no characters who deviate from this color-scheme.
The extraordinary potential of anime in the production of human bodies that transgress at least national stereotypes and at most the human form itself is only used in Gedo Senki to render the antagonist as non-human, or beyond human. But it does in no way disrupt the patterns of perception of its viewers by introducing characters of a different racial background. Although the characters might not be Japanese, as their target audience, they nevertheless exhibit common anime-style conventions of depiction that make them easily identifiable and easily consumable – even if the movie is watched in so-called Western nations.
via outnow.ch
It seems that in the process of adaptation, the dealing with the issue of skin-color was dismissed in favor of presenting characters that were easy to identify with and believable in a setting of a somewhat medieval high-culture. And obviously the decision had been made that characters of color would not be able to be believable in this setting or achieve identification. To pick up on Ursula K. Le Guin’s critique, not only has the evil potential within human beings been externalized in the movie, but also the problematic issue of skin-color, to the extent, that it only becomes an issue external of the movie for those who are interested in it, but not within the context of the film where this issue was obviously considered to be too unsettling for an (Japanese and/or white-western) audience.
Even if the filmmakers would have kept their choice of not problematizing the issue of race and color in their movie, they still could have depicted all of the characters to be black, but they obviously chose not too. If they had, they would have been able to place characters, who are usually not considered for heroic deeds in the Japanese context, at the centre of an heroic tale and call into question not only stereotyping processes in the individual viewer, but also the foundations of power assumed and wielded in human societies.
via xfinitytv.comcast.net
The unconventional rendering of Le Guins protagonists as being people of color has not been translated into the Japanese anime version. Although the adaptation claims to have given thought to the issue and to have come to the conclusion that the allegedly multicolored casts in the films represented the best solution to the issue, my impression is that the production team has dealt with the issue only to the extent that they arrived at the decision to dismiss it by eradicating most traces of being non-white in principal characters with only a few token exceptions. They abandoned the concept of presenting heroes of color, a step that would have been challenging to production and casting norms in the depiction of human bodies in Japanese anime, in favor of a seemingly safer way, that transforms racially subversive characters into white (here standing for both western-white in U.S. tradition and Japanese appearance, that nurtures an ideal appearance modeled after “western looks”) characters in order to cater to a white mass audience that is thought to be constituting the targeted markets. The sad outcome of this white-centered market logic is that it cannot give any insight into how successful a version with protagonists of color would have been – we obviously have to wait for future adaptations that decide to take more courageous steps.
“Not to choose, these days, is a choice made. All fiction has ethical, political, and social weight, and sometimes the works that weigh the heaviest are those apparently fluffy or escapist fictions whose authors declare themselves ‘above politics,’ ‘just entertainers,’ and so on.” (Le Guin, quoted after Elisabeth Anne Leonard(1997): “Into Darkness Peering” – Race and Color in the Fantastic)
If you haven’t read Earthsea yet, I highly recommend you to do so!
Today in Miyazaki March we are not going to review a film, we are going to review a relationship. Studio Ghibli is not the Disney Company and Hayao Miyazaki is not Walt Disney, but there are things they have in common and there are areas where there is major difference. Let us explore alla that! But obligatory stuff first: All other Miyazaki March posts can be found HERE in THIS directory post.
via wired.com
With Studio Ghibli and Disney there are obvious parallels: One famous man giving face and reputation to the whole company that slowly turns into some sort of family business. The massive dominance that each company has within the respective animation markets where they dominate perception and conception of what animation in these respective markets is. And of course, both companies provide family friendly animation features for mass audiences.
Besides all those parallels, there are factual connections, the major one being their cooperation concerning the distribution of Ghibli films outside of Japan/Asia, which is the privilege/responsibility of Disney since their agreement on it in 1996 (the so called Disney-Tokuma Deal). Disney is in charge of the English dubs of Ghibli movies, but they are not allowed to make any cuts to the movies or change the content of the dialogue – ever since Miyazaki was frustrated with what happened to the US-release of Nausicaä, which is something I will touch upon in the post on it coming somewhen next week.
via dvdtalk.com
But what I really want to focus on in this post is the thematic differences and the differences in approach that distinguish the two companies from each other. And being upfront about it, I think that Ghibli, especially Miyazaki directed features of Ghibli, get a lot of stuff right because of approach and theme, while a lot of the Disney movies get a lot of stuff wrong, or at least just less right because of their favorite themes and their approaches to these.
While I want to focus mainly on differences in this post it should not go unmentioned that there are a lot of thematic overlaps and similarities in approaching stories. With Disney and Ghibli we usually encounter protagonists that are outsiders, but for a variety of reasons. While Disney outsiders tend to be dismissed by other characters as quirky and weird with undercurrents of bullying (and righteousness on the part of said protagonist) Ghibli outsiders are usually outsiders because of particular medical conditions or change of location. There is little to practically no bullying going on, the characters tend to be outsiders due to them really coming from outside or from living with a condition that the other characters know little about and struggle to relate to.
Both companies also often use female characters as their main protagonists in feature films – but with very different results. While Disney heroines tend to be slim, pretty and in search of love, Ghibli heroines come in all shapes and ages, pretty or not, rarely on the lookout for a boyfriend.
via fr-online.de
Which really just illustrates the first major difference between the approaches the two companies take on story-telling. While Disney seems to assume that it has to cater to a male gaze, Miyazaki movies are unafraid to take in a feminist perspective and actually question the male gaze and male dominance. Disney movies rarely do that. And rarely really just means that there might be one or two which do (Lilo&Stitch, y’all, Lilo&Stitch). At the same time there is no Miyazaki directed Ghibli feature that does not promote female agency and seldom one that does not explicitly question assumptions that men (or boys, or really just overall society) make about women (or girls). Which is one of the reasons why Miyazaki March happens on this blog: I love and admire Miyazaki features because they represent something fresh (sadly enough) in that they adhere to feminist conceptions and present strong female characters. I am just going to go there and claim that this is rare enough for the Japanese context (and if you think of Sailor Moon right now I press you HARD to question its feminist merits (which exist, admittedly)) and even less often for US-American or European contexts. There seems to be this golden rule that states that pro-feminist or rather just non-misogynist messages in movies just don’t sell and that there are just no audiences for it. Which is bullshit of course, but which does not prevent major (and minor) studios from coming up with the same male-centred, female-objectifying crap over and over again.
via moviepilot.de
And objectifying female characters is easy in Disney movies because they are either pretty and thus of good character, or ugly and thus of bad character. In Ghibli movies that pattern is not duplicated. Characters can be “ugly” (yeah, whatever that means) on the outside, without it necessarily having to reflect how they really are on the inside. A woman can be old and wrinkly with a gigantic nose and a wart and still be a wonderful human being. Which fits into a larger pattern in Ghibli movies in that they usually do not have a villain, or that characters that we encounter as villains turn out not to be. In a Disney movie there is a villain, make no mistake. You can tell by his or her looks usually and if you are looking for complexity in this character or really just motivation, you are more often than not disappointed. It does not hold true for every Disney villain (at least the complexity and motivation thing), but as a general rule it is practically enshrined into their approach to constructing an animation narrative.
via io9.com
While Disney features have clear-cut villains, they generally shun violence. Death is rare and often only awaits the villains themselves in the end. Miyazaki’s features are ultimately also family-friendly features, but they are unafraid to present some degree of violence. What we often get is stark scenes of explosion and destruction, which fits into Miyazaki movies so well, because they provide stories that often center on larger societal problems and themes – war, destruction of nature, fascist regimes… In some cases the violence is explicitly graphic, think of Ashitaka beheading people with his arrows in Princess Mononoke, but also more integrated into the narrative in that it is not an end in itself, but an illustration of why what happens to Ashitaka by being consumed by the demon is such a horrible thing. Granted, one does not have to be a fan of violence in animation directed towards kids, given especially the tendency of so many animation series out there blowing stuff up every episode for no reason at all. However, in the case of Miyazaki movies, I’d argue, the presentation of violence is a good thing, since it serves a purpose, it illustrates the narrative’s points. Violence does not occur because it’s cool and loud and grabs your attention, but because there is an in-story reason for it and its negative aspects are actually addressed.
via howlscastle.wikia.com
What we encounter in both Disney and Miyzaki features are protagonists coming from defunct or at least non-traditional families. The major difference usually lies in the depiction of the relationship between parents and children. In Disney movies we as an audience are often pressed to side with the kids who defy their parents and struggle against them. Which is weird enough, because usually these films also end with these kids coming to terms with their parents (most often fathers, because yeah, Disney is not big on mothers and their significance). Ghibli movies rarely throw us into this dilemma. Their kid heroes and heroines generally have healthy relationships with their parents. There might be disagreement and even an argument every now and then, but we practically never have to sit through some tale of “ah, I can’t stand them …. they are the best parents ever, I just didn’t know”. And realism in depiction of relationships in my movies, I appreciate.
via japanator.com
Both studios rely heavily on adaptations, with Disney tackling especially all the well and widely known fairy tales. But both companies not just take their source material and bring it to screen, there are always adjustments. And adjustments with Disney regularly mean the insertion of a love story or exaggerating the love story to the disadvantage of other potential topics and themes inherent to the source material. Is Arielle the little Mermaid about growing up and wanting to be something else than what society thinks you should be? Yes, absolutely, but we hardly get too see that because so much of it just focuses on getting with the boy. In Howl’s Moving Castle we have young woman wanting to be with a charming magician. But the magician is vain and the young woman loses her youth. There are feelings of despair, there is coming to terms with age and different circumstances and there are new families being built through friendships and forgiveness. Point being: In Ghibli features there are larger themes at the center of the narratives, not just love stories and blowing stuff up (because in Disney if it is not a story with a female protagonist it is an action adventure where some stuff has to blow up). There are stories about the difficulties (and complexities) of growing up, stories about how perceptions of gender might be misleading, stories about the conservation of nature which is not something we’d expect from a fairly conservative company such as Disney (whose expansionist tendencies do not go well together with sustainability), dealing with loss, death and grief by actually facing it and asking oneself hard questions about it. We could say that these are more adult themes, but they are really themes that kids have to face in their lives as well – it’s just not a given that adults know how or are willing to deal with said theme and the kids at the same time. So, yay for complexity!
So far for my little excursion as to why Miyazaki features are usually so much more gratifying experiences than Disney features. Agree? Disagree? Feel free to comment below (and prove me wrong)!
Let us kick off Miyazaki March with the eponymous animation feature that made the names Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli known to international audiences outside of Japan: Princess Mononoke. There’ll be flying heads, dying beasts and shooting women, but most of all: a tale about nature and unlikely friendships.
via coco.raceme.org
Mononoke Hime was released to theaters in Japan in 1997 and became the top-grossing film in Japan of all time…until it was taken over by Titanic later the same year. Which was in turn taken over by another Miyazaki feature, Spirited Away. It was released to international theaters in 1999 and put Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli into the international spotlight for the first time. Not that people hadn’t noticed mainly Totoro before, but Princess Mononoke marked a transition. All of a sudden Japanese Anime became a market force to be reckoned with at box-offices and Studio Ghibli became practically equivalent with high quality animation feature films. After the massive smash that was Mononoke, Miyazaki announced his retirement from making animation features, which, as we all know, didn’t last very long.
Princess Mononoke has grossed around 160 Million US-Dollars worldwide and remains one of the studios best known and most beloved features. And now let me elaborate on why that is, ‘cause that’s what y’all been waiting for, right?
More so than any of the other movies Miyazaki directed, Princess Mononoke is clearly set and clearly rooted in Japan and its culture. On the one hand we have references to the Muromachi era, with feudal lords fighting each other and Lady Eboshi denying the authority of the emperor. It seems to be her who has imported the first guns to Japan, changing the way battles are fought, both against samurai and against the beasts of the forest. Ashitaka and his village are of the people named Emishi, a people thought to be the native population of northern Honshū, but also a people that slowly merged with the conquering Yamato people.
On the other hand Princess Mononoke is clearly rooted in Japanese culture due to its conception of deities. There are manifold gods, which are powerful, but not infallible, they are not even immortal. Drawing on the animistic concepts of Shinto, these Gods are spirits in the form of extraordinary beasts, bound to some extent to the locale they inhabit and not necessarily friendly amongst each other or towards humans.
via extracine.com
I think one of the biggest draws of Mononoke lies in the fact that nature and its struggle for survival against the seemingly unstoppable technical progress of humanity is embodied by gods in the form of beasts. These beasts give the struggle and the anger a face. The boars, the wolves, the apes, they all are afraid and they all have their way of reacting to the encroaching human habitations that fell their trees and hunt them down. Saying that this is a draw does not equal saying that it is in any way novel or surprising. These kinds of stories have been told this way before. What is truly novel about Mononoke (which is a general Japanese term for a vengeful spirit or monsters and NOT the name of the girl in the movie, though it is of course implied that she is the princess of spirits) is that the humans in the story make a conscious decision to battle nature. To kill and corrupt its leading forces in order to control and rule it.
via oddsocks.wordpress.com
Which is a very interesting move in telling this particular story. It is precisely here that the historical setting becomes important. A setting where technology is something new and rudimentary, where industrialization has not kicked in and not made clear how terrible this whole development is going to be for large parts of nature and the animals that inhabit it. For the Iron Town, technology is something exciting and thanks to the driving force behind the settlement, Lady Eboshi, also a tool for empowerment and independence. And these concepts are not just selfish indulgence in this case, Lady Eboshi makes sure that misogyny does not have any place in the town, the women are not only headstrong, but active agents for their own well-being and survival. Eboshi makes sure they are independent, and by what we’re told, she is giving the chance to those who were worst off before, prostitutes who had to sell themselves in order to make do. Those who produce her guns are lepers. She takes them in, looks after them and gives them a purpose beyond their illness. She is not a monster and she is not evil. But nonetheless she has decided to kill a god.
via janken.de
And so she does. With the gods in Mononoke being actual mortal beings, they can be killed. Not only do we witness the death of one god in the first few minutes of the film, we also get to witness three other gods dying. Another boar, a wolf and a sort of superior deity, the god of the forest. It is a god over death and life, yet it can be killed. And with her shotgun in hand, Eboshi manages to do so, unaware of the disaster she is about to bring on herself. Reading her shooting the head off the god of the forest as a metaphor for humanity losing the respect for nature and its regenerative cycles, the subsequent disaster caused by the headless monstrosity destroying all life in the forest, fields and close to town can be read as what awaits humanity if it does not set limits for the submission and perversion of nature itself. And by the end of the movie, Eboshi has come to realize that as well. Technological progress needs boundaries, otherwise the negative effects will in turn not know any boundaries upon the lives of men and women.
via acornstree.blogspot.com
The struggle between nature and industrialization is not the only thing visualised in Princess Mononoke. The hatred against one or the other appears in very concrete terms as well, as a demon consuming those who give in to the hatred and despair. The hatred is contagious, obviously, since Ashitaka gets infected when fighting the boar. But it is also Ashitake to defeat the infection, to withstand – for the most part – the temptation to kill those who destroy nature. Or to kill the one who limits the progress of human technology. Cause not only does his infected arm react to other people (most noticeably when his arrows easily behead his attackers), but it also reacts to the god of the forest.
Why? would be a legitimate question to ask. For the demons we see are primarily the two boar-gods who are consumed by their hatred for humanity. But I would argue that this is exactly why the demon-infection reacts so strongly to the presence of the god of the forest: it stands for equilibrium, for making peace with what is and what exists. It is a forgiving, gentle god. A god of life and death, bringing literally with every step new and luscious life, but also witnessing it wither away within seconds. The demon cannot accept its presence, because the demon cannot exist in a peaceful equilibrium. It needs the hatred, needs either side as a foe to go after and kill. The demon’s very existence is called into question by the presence of the god of the forest.
via heracliteanfire.net
Princess Mononoke is not only remarkable for the complexity with which it approaches its subject matter and how its message and conclusion is not an easy and definitive one. It is also remarkable in that it delivers sub-plots that are both interesting, entertaining and ultimately just as complex. Where 99.9 percent of western animation movies would have ended with San and Ashitaka being a couple riding off into the sunset, Mononoke ends with them parting ways, remaining friends. Despite all the attraction, despite all curiosity, despite everything endured. And make no mistake, they are both melancholic about it, but they both obviously feel it’s right.
And even the potential love-affair subplot feeds into yet another larger theme of the movie that other subplots illustrate so well: female agency. Lady Eboshi is not only a complex and sympathetic character, an active female in control of her own life without having to rely on a man (and I am fully aware that this is where you can all potentially cry out and say: But in the end she needed Ashitaka to come around! Which would be a very good point to make for a discussion in the comments). San is obviously pretty much the same, only on the other side of the struggle. Her feelings, her relationships and her descent are just as complex and conflicted as those of Lady Eboshi. And in the village we have the women who are active agents of their own destiny and might I add – hilarious. I love how Mononoke confidently brings the lewd humour with all the Iron Town ladies lusting after hot young newcomer Ashitaka. Which is just another point to illustrate how I as a member of a western audience am used to experiencing the total opposite in animation, namely pretty girls being the object of desire by the male characters, which seldom happens in a Miyazaki movie. What practically never happens in western animation is what happens here: female characters asserting their positive sexuality and being in the position to find a male character hot. And it’s actually kinda shocking how very refreshing that is, even still in 2012.
via mashadutoit.wordpress.com
Some things go without saying, I’ll say it nonetheless:
The animation is of course beautiful. Detailed, nuanced, awesome color-palettes, breathtaking sceneries, and modest but effective use of CGI (e.g. the black worms representing the demon). Some images are just painfully pretty, like the sunset behind the passing deer and god of forest, the god’s appearance by night as it wanders through the forest, the pool in the middle of the luscious green forest.
And the tree spirits, they are ridiculously cute. How can anyone not instantly fall in love with how they look, how they behave, the sounds they make and the hope they give in the very final scene of the movie? Their role and airtime is miniscule, but the impact of their appearance lingers for long.
I am also a fan of the move for not shying away from the violence – and the violence in Mononoke is pretty graphic, from beheading people to massive amounts of blood erupting from the wounded boar-god. I also love, as I professed above, how the film does not avoid sexuality. The characters are all the more believable for being aroused and for blushing when feeling that their bodies are a little too exposed in front of strangers.
And finally, major shout-outs for Yakul. Yakul is awesome. Yakul looks awesome. Yakul acts awesome. Yakul is awesome loyal. Yakul deserves his awesome own feature that will blow Bambi awesomely out of the water.
Princess Mononoke is rightfully ranked among Miyazaki’s finest. It is a masterpiece in connecting flawless animation with complex characters and a layered story that doesn’t give in to the temptation to provide an easy and gratifying ending for the sake of it.
You should totally watch it. Or you should totally rewatch it. And then watch it again.
March is upon us! And Miyazaki March it is!
This whole month I will be reviewing feature films by Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli, starting with Princess Mononoke tomorrow and ending on Spirited Away on the 30th of March, if all goes well and according to plan.
via wikipedia.org
For animation lovers worldwide Japanese Anime is probably mostly connected to one name: Hayao Miyazaki. The 71 year-old director’s feature animation movies have made him famous internationally and won him prestigious awards, e.g. an Oscar for Spirited Away. To honor his oeuvre I will take a look at many of his feature films and review them, throwing in one or the other post that deals with recurring issues and underlying tropes. The features selected for review are the ones he directed (except for Arietty, for which he was the writer) for Studio Ghibli, even though I will also have a glimpse on some of the other Ghibli features that are worth mentioning.
via ghibliworld.de
Hayao Miyazaki directed his first feature in 1979, Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, after having worked as an artist and in different other roles in the animation industry. After the success of his next feature Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds he founded the now widely famous Studio Ghibli (though Nausicaä ist often counted as the first Ghibli feature). Miyazaki has two sons, one of which also directed Anime features for Studio Ghibli, which is a point we will return to later this month. Hayao Miyazaki was president of Studio Ghibli until 2008, but stepped down in order to focus his work on producing movies.
via dukeinla.blogspot.com
This post will serve as a directory of sorts, I will link back all Miyazaki related posts to this one, so you have a master index to get to all the posts in case you’re interested.
Stay tuned for all the goodness to come!
Welcome to Me, all over the place, which is really just me being all over the place. Enjoy my rants and ramblings on stuff I like and stuff I don't and please feel free to comment! Cheers!
