→ May 23, 2018
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Mary and the Witch’s Flower.

Hayao Miyazaki is retired, or so he says – he’s pulled this trick before, at least – but his protégés continue to make films that are very much in the spirit of his work, with the latest incarnation Mary & the Witch’s Flower (amazon • iTunes), a 2017 release in Japan that received a brief theatrical release here in January. Directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi (who also directed The Secret World of Arriety and When Marnie Was There for Ghibli) and animated by Studio Ponoc, the film was an enormous commercial success in its native country and deserved a far better fate here. It was eligible for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature this past winter, and was yet another entry that was passed over for the execrable Boss Baby.

Based on a children’s novel by Mary Stewart called The Little Broomstick, Mary & the Witch’s Flower tells the story of the young girl of the title, who discovers a rare flower in the woods near her great aunt’s estate: the fly-by-night, a glowing flower that, according to local legend, is valued by witches for its immense magical powers. She finds the flower with the help of two cats, Gib and Tib, who then lead her to a broomstick that takes her to a secret magical school in the clouds, Endor, but this isn’t Hogwarts or Brakebills, and something is very amiss with the headmistress (voiced by Kate Winslet) and the chemistry teacher (Jim Broadbent). When they find out Mary (Ruby Barnhill of The BFG) has the fly-by-night, they drop all pretense and seem willing to try anything to seize the flower, including kidnapping Mary’s friend Peter to try to turn him into a warlock. Mary has to choose whether to use her last remaining bulbs to rescue her friend, and also finds out (somewhat predictably) that this isn’t her family’s first encounter with the fly-by-night or Endor and its faculty.

Miyazaki’s films have a distinctive look and feel, including a particular appreciation for natural landscapes and an obsession with flying; Yonebayashi brings all of those visual and aural elements to Mary & the Witch’s Flower, to the point where I doubt most casual fans of the genre would recognize that Miyazaki wasn’t directly involved in this film. It also has the same sort of childlike sense of wonder that most of the master’s scripts brought, but the story itself isn’t as tight or compelling; it’s pretty obvious that Mary’s getting home, Peter probably isn’t going to turn into some sort of monster, and who the mysterious girl in red from the cold open grows up to be. It’s a kids’ movie that’s really just for kids, whereas Miyazaki’s best movies — Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Ponyo — were much more nuanced and thoughtful, so that they offered something for adults as well as children. I know Miyazaki’s students won’t and can’t just replicate all aspects of his films, but Yonebayashi seems to have focused here on mimicking the style of his mentor without providing the same kind of substance that a film like this should offer.

Of course, it’s still #BetterThanBossBaby.

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→ March 9, 2018
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In This Corner of the World.

In This Corner of the World is a Japanese anime film based on a manga of the same name, and I present it here as part of our ongoing #BetterThanBossBaby series, looking at films eligible for the 2017 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature that were passed over in favor of that unfunny, unimaginative, big-budget film. This one, as with The Girl Without Hands, is critically acclaimed in its own right, and features some gorgeous animation that draws on both conventional anime styles and alludes to many painters of the western canon, while also telling an epic drama that has much in common the works of great Japanese authors like Junichiro Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata.

In This Corner is narrated by Suzu, a young girl who loves to draw and who grew up in Japan between the wars, turning 18 in 1944 when a young man, Shusaku, arrives at the house and asks her parents for her hand in marriage. The bulk of the film takes places between that point and the end of the war, and follows Suzu through what first looks like it will be a traditional story of a young woman struggling to adapt to life with her new family, but what then becomes a broader tragedy when the town where they live, Kure, is raided with increasing frequency by Allied forces. Suzu endures several calamities that would break the spirit of many people, but she is fortunate in one sense, as her home town, where her parents still lived, was Hiroshima. It’s available to rent now on iTunes or amazon.

Suzu’s drawings form a critical through line in this film even as its tone and her circumstances change dramatically, and even when she can no longer draw as she once did, recollections of those drawings and the memories associated with them continue to drive the narrative forward. This thread is critical because there is no traditional story arc in this movie; the war and time push us towards the conclusion, but the movie lacks a second, entirely fiction plot that might have been grafted on top of this. The marriage between Suzu and Shusaku is not depicted as some great romance; there’s even a one-that-got-away subplot that appears a few times in the film that underlines how Suzu was not the master of her own destiny. She’s put through the ringer – the film doesn’t stint on the horrors of war, and serves as an inadvertent but potent reminder of how awful our actions in Yemen have been – but continues to grow and evolve as an adult because life forces her to do so.

The backdrop and Suzu’s artwork are really stunning, and easily form the film’s best attribute, given the somewhat aimless plot – although I think this is all aimless by design. I caught allusions to Van Gogh and Monet, at the very least, and I’ve mentioned before what a philistine I am when it comes to art. The renderings of the landscapes, buildings, and even warships are gorgeous and meticulous, giving the film a lush, textured feel like you’d expect from CG (think of the verdant backdrops in Tangled) but with the hand-drawn look of anime.

That aimlessness in the plot, however, seems rather deliberate. We think we have control over our lives, but that’s only the case until some greater force comes in and reminds us that we are merely fighting for control against a tide we can’t stop. The war isn’t there, and then it’s a tangent, and then it subsumes their lives, becoming a daily threat and leading to food shortages and rationing. Keiko, Suzu’s widowed sister-in-law, arrives not long after Suzu moves in with her in-laws, and serves as a figurative harbinger of what’s to come, pushing Suzu out of her new role as the dutiful daughter-in-law and taking out her own grief on the younger girl, who is powerless to defend herself given her age and the gender roles of the time. She’s pushed along by forces well beyond her, often that she doesn’t understand, and becomes the hero because it’s that or perish.

I know one of you commented recently that this was the best animated film of last year, and I wouldn’t necessarily argue against that, but I did have a few quibbles with the production, especially the abrupt ending to many scenes. Some of those scenes only last a few seconds, as in a few showing the family eating their meager dinners, which interrupts the moderate ebb and flow of the story in a way I found annoying – you can’t maintain a mood or atmosphere like that. The young men are also drawn too similarly, and there were a few points in the script where I was fairly sure I missed some detail because they jumped too quickly to the next speaker or scene. If you’re thinking of this for family viewing, there are a few scenes of violence that are quite graphic, and the content as a whole is not appropriate for kids. The bombing of Hiroshima is seen from a distance, but the effects are described in a few ways that would also likely disturb younger viewers.

While the story was imperfectly told in In This Corner of the World, it also has the broad scope you might expect to see in a highly regarded live-action film; if you made this into a ‘regular’ movie with famous actors (the English voice work is all done by folks who are not household names here), it would be discussed as a Best Picture hopeful. That makes it so much more ambitious than many animated films, even many live-action ones, and that along with the remarkable, beautiful animation have it rivaling Coco and The Girl Without Hands for the top spot among animated films last year. And I think you know what’s in last.

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→ March 5, 2008
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Howl’s Moving Castle.

I’m a big fan of the movies of film director Hayao Miyazaki, but just got around to seeing his last release, Howl’s Moving Castle. After the triumph of his previous film, Spirited Away, it was a disappointment, although it’s still a strong film when compared to the rest of the field – animated or otherwise.

Sophie is a 19-year-old girl working in her family’s hat shop, but after an odd encounter with a handsome young wizard in the streets of her town, she’s visited by the Witch of the Waste (voiced by Lauren Bacall), who casts a spell that turns her into an elderly woman. She sets out in search of the wizard Howl and his “moving castle,” a building that walks on mechanical legs, powered by the fire demon Calcifer (Billy Crystal). Her hope is that Howl can reverse the aging spell cast on her, but it turns out that Howl and Calcifer both have spell problems of their own.

Howl’s moves along well until its final quarter, at which point the plot becomes needlessly complex and ends up in a horribly clichéd and quick resolution. It’s a shame, because the first three-fourths of the movie is strong and the writers were unafraid to deviate from the normal paths of animated films. (The movie was adapted from a young-adult novel by Diana Wynne Jones.) Howl’s starts out as an action film, then settles into a more deliberate pace to try to explore the psychological drama behind the characters’ various curses, but never fulfills that promise before returning to action-film pacing and rushing to the finish.

As with all Miyazaki films, Howl’s has more than its share of arresting imagery and sheer inventiveness. The design of the moving castle is phenomenal, and it threatens in some ways to become a character in its own right (and perhaps it should have). The landscape scenes are gorgeous and rich, with layers and textures that are more associated with CG on these shores. The folks at Pixar who oversaw the English dubbing made a pair of inspired choices of voice actors in Crystal, who does a sort of poor man’s Robin Williams/Genie with Calcifer, and Lauren Bacall, whose voice is perfect for the evil witch who turns out to be something a bit deeper than that.

If you’re not already a Miyazaki fan, the place to start is with his masterwork, Spirited Away, probably the best non-CG animated movie ever made. I also highly recommend My Neighbor Totoro, which is a little more of a children’s story than most Miyazaki films but makes the application of the word “charming” to any other film seem fraudulent. I also recommend Castle in the Sky and Princess Mononoke, as well as Whisper of the Heart, a romantic film for which Miyazaki wrote the screenplay but which was directed by a colleague of his, Yoshifumi Kondo, who died just three years after its release.

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