Tag: Anime

Rapid Response: Kiki's Delivery Service

For all the praise given to Hayao Miyazaki for his fantastical imagination, the man is also a master at portraying the beauty of the real world. He shows us the simple themes that teach our children to grow and the thrill of an adventure. “Kiki’s Delivery Service” is Miyazaki’s most modest production, free of most fantasy and anime trappings, and yet it is no less magical.

“Kiki’s Delivery Service” was the follow-up to Miyazaki’s masterpiece “My Neighbor Totoro,” a simple but delightful film about a child who discovers a hidden realm of the forest and a magical creature with loveable qualities. What it shares with “Kiki’s,” as well as several of his other films, is that it is a kids movie free of any bad guys. It populates the world with characters who are only polite, caring, heartwarming, plucky and fun, and yet it creates a story with emotional poignancy and drama.

Its title heroine is a 13-year-old witch in training. Her responsibility at this age is to find a city free of other witches to call home for one year and make it on her own. It’s a simple story of a girl growing up and leaving home, with the only magical difference being that she can fly. It takes a lot of growth for Kiki to find the thing she does best and make a living out of it, and her problem is not finding business for her delivery service but sticking to it, putting up with the hardships of the job and learning to bounce back when she’s unable to fly the way she used to. Miyazaki finds a way to illustrate the excitement, struggle and tedium of Kiki’s job, and he does so without manic action or mean-spirited characters.

There’s a scene in the movie that sums up just how adorable this film is. Kiki goes to a little old grandmother’s house to make a delivery. It’s a pie that she wants delivered to her granddaughter’s birthday party, but it isn’t prepared, so Kiki is about to be sent on her way with her agreed upon pay when Kiki decides to stick around and help fix the granny’s oven so she can still make the delivery. She does all of this work with pluck, not magic, and it pays off in spades when she visits the granny again later. The harsh twist is that after frantically delivering the pie through the pouring rain, the recipient is ungrateful and announces to the party, “Grandma sent us one of her disgusting pies again.” It exposes the hardships of life without making a classical villain.

Miyazaki has a wonderful visual imagination, but there’s nothing fantastical to see in “Kiki’s.” Rather, the real world beauty and pastoral landscapes are the most impressive and truly emphasize Miyazaki’s gift for sharp cinematography. Take a look at the striking low angles during the opening shots that paint Kiki as someone deep and in thought, not a spoiled, excitable brat but someone with room for growth. Notice how he creates the illusion of motion within his films and generates suspense. When Tombo’s bike is careening down the highway, there are lines approaching the bottom of the frame that quickly vanish and reappear whereas another director wouldn’t be so diligent. Even when Kiki prepares to fly on her broom, she doesn’t just take off in a whoosh. We see her hair and dress billow in front of her intense focus. In fact “Kiki’s” flight sequences are not nearly as graceful as those seen in “Nausicaa,” “Castle in the Sky” or otherwise, but they have invigorating and joyous moments of action, especially in the film’s climactic rescue.

“Kiki’s Delivery Service” may not be the best place to start in exploring Miyazaki’s catalog, but it’s a cute, funny and exciting film that is one of his best.

Rapid Response: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

There are a lot of people who enjoy Studio Ghibli films, but a surprising number of them would probably say they don’t much care for Anime, if they can even claim to have really seen it, and I would likely be one of them.

Hayao Miyazaki’s “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind” treads that line between Japanese Disney masterpiece and “Dragonball Z” territory more than any of his other films, mainly because it’s based on Miyazaki’s own seven volume manga of the same name. It’s Miyazaki’s second film and his first under the Studio Ghibli name, and although it has the hand-drawn visual splendor and establishes most of the dominant environmental themes that would carry through the rest of his films, it’s an action heavy movie most closely comparable to “Princess Mononoke” or “Howl’s Moving Castle,” lacking the sense of humor and whimsy that made me and so many others love him.

The story is a bit of an apocalyptic mess. For a thousand years since modern day, the human race has been threatened by toxins from the Sea of Decay, an ever growing ecology of monstrous bugs and poisonous pollens that threatens to engulf the whole planet. Nausicaa is the princess of a peaceful safe haven powered by windmills, and her gifts with animals teach of patience and resolve but also a love for nature. She moves about magically on a rocket glider, clinging to it in a pommel horse pose and emerging in and out of mountains and seas of clouds. She realizes that nature itself is not toxic, humans are, and the obvious metaphor that pops up is that when you attack one insect, a swarm of others become enraged and nature destroys you.

These naturalistic ideas are years ahead of their time for an ’80s film, as are of course the visuals. Some of the early images in one destroyed village or all those in the depths of the planet are so foreign from anything on Earth that to have come from one man’s pen and paper is astounding. Miyazaki makes images of towering scope and depth that would be virtually impossible in a live-action film, like the ravenous ohmus with golden feelers, glowing red eyeballs and enormous layers that make it look like a steampunk beetle.

Nausicaa herself is a wonderful heroine. She’s the one youthful, likeable and multi-dimensional figure in the movie, whereas most of the other humans are destructive forces driven to violence by ignorance. They’re not completely villainous in the way you see with most kids movies, but they’re part of an elaborate war of cataclysmic explosions and firefights. The film can get tiring, and you long for “Nausicaa’s” quieter moments that, although they would be beyond the kids, offer some adult magic.

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

Can a child understand war? Can any of us, really, understand war?

A child cannot grasp why people must die or why violence must destroy everything they know, but they do know emotion, perhaps more purely than we ourselves can express it.

Despite being a cartoon, “Grave of the Fireflies” is not a children’s film. But it envelops us with pain, sadness and loss on a simple level such that perhaps a child could understand and embrace this Japanese film’s otherwise tough, gruesome images.

Isao Takahata’s film is an early masterpiece from Studio Ghibli, which also spawned Hayao Miyazaki and this year’s “The Secret World of Arrietty.” The animated style is a bit rough around the edges compared to its more contemporary siblings, but it shares the natural world’s stark and colorful beauty that wash over our eyes like visual poetry.

The look and feel of this film is bleak and war-torn, but Takahata uses animation as a way of instilling a sense of magic serenity. An early scene shows a radiant red bloom of fireflies rising from a grassy field. The moment is hardly lifelike, but it is stunning.

It tells the story of a teenage boy, Seita, and his toddler sister Setsuko in Japan during World War II. Their father is a naval officer and their mother has just been killed in a bombing raid. Seeing the charred remains of Seita’s mother is no pleasant site for the queasy, least of all for children. The animation however makes watching it grippingly possible.

The brother and sister try to stay with their aunt, but she’s cruel and stingy in a time when everyone is rationing for the war. She eggs Seita on to join the army or battle the unbeatable napalm fires, but he can neither bring himself to die, nor to abandon Setsuko.

As they set out to live on their own free of their parents, “Grave of the Fireflies” becomes one of the most powerfully saddening films you’ll ever see about independence, hardship and loss.

By centering on these two children, the story becomes instantly more relatable and heart wrenching. Takahata builds a lovely bond between brother and sister through enchanting musical montages. Whether it’s a scene of the pair sharing a laugh on a beach, doing chores at home or scurrying during an air raid, everything they share is handled artfully as though it were one of their most tender moments.

Can any war film ever made boast so many moments of beauty and levity peppering the film’s otherwise desolate landscapes? Live action filmmakers can learn from how elegiac “Grave of the Fireflies” can be. This is such a sad movie, and yet it’s all so delicate and simple.

Perhaps it’s because animation grants the film a level of emotional range almost not capable with human actors. Whether or not these anime figures with big eyes and even a lack of nipples look lifelike, the faces of Seita and Setsuko have such an engrossing level of expression. Their tears are anything but artificial.

One of “Grave of the Fireflies’” most devastating segments is a pair of quick shots as Setsuko aims to bury her collection of fireflies in the same way her mother was likely buried. A morbid image of a mass grave in the city flashes through Seita’s head, and we’re left with a grim sense of mortality after war.

This is a child who has drawn this parallel. “Grave of the Fireflies” is great not because it is painful and beautiful, but because it is universal.

The Secret World of Arrietty

The Studio Ghibli film “The Secret World of Arrietty” isn’t as strong as Hayao Miyazaki’s movies, but it’s colorful and inventive all the same.

A lot of American children’s films are all about friendship and being yourself. The movies hold your hand and soothe your kids with familiar voices and hypnotizing madcap action.

Only Japan’s Studio Ghibli tosses kids into the dangerous world and exposes them to a lonely, often painful existence before showing them the magic within. “The Secret World of Arrietty” is a touching, but tough children’s film about survival, self-sufficiency and looking the fear of the world right in the face.

After beloved masterpieces like “Grave of the Fireflies” and at least a dozen great ones over the last few years by Hayao Miyazaki, Disney has swept up the distribution of the studio’s output and redubbed their films with American actors so that even obscure animes like “The Secret World of Arrietty” can be seen widely. Continue reading “The Secret World of Arrietty”