May 07, 2005

• By random chance I happened to see this film at a preview showing, and it's absolutly breathtaking. Funny, touching, spectacular, magical... in my opinion it is Miyazaki's best film yet, and that's really saying something.
• It's good. The Disney website didn't mention anything about the author. Strange. 'Some really beautiful CG/Animation in there too. Have to say though, my Ghibli favorite is still Totoro
• But it's dubbed...
• >so whether or not this will be the last is anybody's guess. I recommend a visit to nausicaa.net, where the following glad tidings are on display: ---- February 25, 2005 Miyazaki to Continue Directing The new Screen International (No. 1490, 25th February) carries an interview with Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki, conducted by Mark Schilling. Most interesting quote: "A notorious perfectionist and workaholic, Miyazaki is already busy with his next project, which is pencilled in for a 2007 or 2008 release. 'He's good for another ten years at least,' insists Suzuki. 'He has no plans to retire.'" Other things: "Ghibli is planning two 30-minute animations, that may be helmed by someone other than Miyazaki. They will be released in a double-bill, tentatively in the summer of 2006. The stories are still a secret, Suzuki says." - "(Suzuki) does not intend to change Ghibli's release pattern of a new Miyazaki every 3 years. "People are eager to see his films because he doesn't make them quickly," says Suzuki. "If he made one a year, they wouldn't be nearly as interested." Pixar, suggests Suzuki, "ought to slow down."
• Whoops- the original post is from nausicaa.net, isn't it... what I meant was "I recommend a visit to *some other part* of nausicaa.net"...
• Looking forward to it.
• I hate to be the one to say this, but it wasn't that great. I've seen it. I've seen all of Miyazaki's films, and I have to rank this as one of his weakest. I don't think he really understood the source material (it originally was not his to direct), to be honest. It feels like a rehash of themes he's already explored quite sufficiently in his other movies, and the plot, I felt, just didn't make sense on its own. The rules of the universe weren't well established, and things just seemed to *happen* for no good reason. Now, don't take this to mean I hated it. A bad Miyazaki movie is still better than 95% of animated projects out there... but I don't think it will have anywhere near the staying power of Nausicaa, or Mononoke, or Chihiro. Fans of his will likely be disappointed.
• I ♥ Totoro
• >A bad Miyazaki movie is still better than 95% of animated projects out there... Better than 95% of the available filmed entertainment, animated or not, I'd say. But that's me. Here, in a similar vein, is the other movie my daughter and I will be going to see in a theater this year.
• Speaking of Mononoke...is anyone in the general SF Bay Area interested in a home-made Princess Mononoke costume? I'm looking to trade for a different costume of some kind, since I'm pretty sure my limit is 3 halloweens in a row as the same character. It is missing an earring, and you'd need to get hold of some shoes, but is otherwise nifty.
• Anime costumes go like hotcakes on eBay, as I understand, yentruoc. ...ahh, Christian Bale. That would explain the Pavlovian fangirling reaction. *cough* I am now curious about how the fanbase will react to a Miyazaki movie (ULTIMATE GOOD) based on a Western book (ULTIMATE BAD, as it believes nothing good can ever, ever come from anywhere other than Japan). No doubt they'll just excoriate the book and laud the movie, or blame the book for every little thing wrong with the movie; they're nothing if not predictable. I'm intrigued. I have to say I liked the vaguely European setting in Kiki's Delivery Service (my favorite so far, I don't know why), so hey, why not.
• Ouch. That post killed my peace of mind. A fansub is already out since February, but I absolutely thought I would wait until its theatric opening in September(Austria). Now that I have seen the trailer those are going to be really long torturous months :-)
• Yeah...I guess I could sell it. I just don't like the idea of selling something homemade. Trading seems better somehow. I'm going to try to avoid the trailer as best I can. I saw Spirited Away without knowing anything about it other than the title and that it was foreign and animated. It was a fantastic surprise. I can't replicate that, but I like the idea of sitting down and not knowing what's going to pop up in front of me.
• sorry elrick33... My bad ;) This is definitely one I'd camp out for on opening night. If you're interested in delving further into the world of Miyazaki, I highly recommend the manga version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. I just finished reading it last weekend and I could not possibly overstate how much I love it! And for the really geeky monkeys out there, did anyone else spot the Totoro reference in Alan Moore's Smax?
• I'm afraid I'm with InnocentBystander on this one. While Castle is good, it seemed like a mishmash of themes from his other films. It's like he tried to make an intimate epic but couldn't find the balance. Still, well worth seeing for the animation alone...and the cute fire spirit.
• Tinfoil - What I don't understand is why he felt the need to paste an anti-war polemic onto the film. It wasn't in the source material at all. He's already done the anti-war thing to death. We get it. The depressing thing is that when he was *adapting* the book, it was pretty good. But it goes south and quickly once he starts diverging. Had he left out the war polemic and some of the other additions (like the Howl \ Demon Bird thing that seemed like a complete rehash of Haku \ Dragon Boy) and focused on the book, it would've turned out pretty well. (and I'm sure we won't see an adaptation of the semi-sequel to Howl, 'Castle in the Air' (no relation to Laputa), which I personally thought was the more entertaining of the two books...)
• Having neaver read the book, I went into the film with no preconceptions, and I didn't find it at all disjointed or jarring. It seemed to work as a unified whole, thematically and cinematically. As for pasting in an anti-war polemic... I don't know... this is a guy who wants to send messages with his films and, as an artist, it's his perogative to turn his art to whatever end he choses. I kind of feel like saying 'yeah, you've done that theme, move on' is a bit like going 'hey Strindburg, what's with all the angst? Sheesh!' :-)
• We probably should start putting spoiler warnings on our comments * * * * SPOILER * * The war aspects heightened the tension, and gave Howl much better motives for what he was doing. The witch was also a much more interesting character, for her to have such weaknesses, and that she was driven by love, not just greed. * * * * * I read the book immediately after seeing the movie (same time as Dreadnought, and it was subbed), and the book was very good, but it just didn't have quite the same emotional oomph. The stakes weren't as high, and it felt more like just a fun silly story than the movie did. The movie made me want to know more about the characters than I was shown; the book didn't quite do that. Partly the fact that one medium is much shorter, but also that the characters (especially Howl) had more things going on, dark, mysterious things. Maybe this is just a dichotemy between people who were fans of the book first, and those who weren't. It received a huge round of applause in the theatre we were in, and just about everyone I spoke to (most of whom knew Miyasaki's work) thought it was one of the best (I'm still with Spirited Away but that has more to do with the circumstances in which I saw it for the first time). But sometimes it's really hard to enjoy films which change books you love - or even when they film them faithfully. This is actually why I can't go see the new The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - because I know I will just be harping on how it doesn't conform to the visions in my mind (for instance, I never liked the Lucy in the tv show, though she was very good - but she didn't act and move as I wanted her to). I purposely did not read Howl before seeing the film, nor reread the Lord of the Rings, so that I could go in and appreciate them for what they were, not what they weren't. (Can't do that with Narnia - it's just about memorised now.)
• Actually, I realised that I liked Howl better than Mononoke, and will probably watch it more often. As I said, I have a special soft-spot for Spirited Away (which many of the die-hard fans criticised when it came out) because it was the one that really made me a Miyasaki fan. I think I still like Totoro better, but that's like saying you like ice-cream better than a roast - you just can't compare the sheer happy feeling that Totoro leaves you with to anything else. (I believe that after seeing it for the first time, we spent the next half hour giggling and saying "Catbus! I want to go on a catbus!") But there is also somewhat of a dichotemy among ,my friends who are Miyasaki fans, some of whom (before Howl) thought Mononoke was by far the best, and two of us who much preferred Spirited Away. I think there are different things that people look for in his films.