Post number one hundred! For ages, I never imagined I'd reach this landmark, because that would mean four hundred reviews and approximately a quinzillion hours of anime-watching. But once I'd accepted that the big one hundred post would happen, I knew I'd need to come up with something suitably momentous, given that whatever I went for ought to sum up this crazy years-long endeavour and the whole landscape of a decade's worth of anime, from magical girls to fantasy pastiches to cyberpunk to gross-out horror to giant robots to tentacle porn to every possible combination of the above. Was that even possible?
Well, after much wracking of whatever brains I have left after watching most of the anime films and OVAs released in the West between 1990 and 2000, I reckon I've cracked it. And so, with great pleasure and no small amount of pride, I bring you ... the Drowning in Nineties Anime classic-anime-children's-films-based-on-major-works-of-Western-culture-all-of-which-happen-to-include-a-few-songs-and-to-have-been-released-by-Eastern-Star-and-none-of-which-are-from-the-nineties special!
Ha, yeah, that other stuff was a lie! Actually, my original plan was to review some nineties Studio Ghibli films, but as much as I love those, a big part of this blog has been trying to make the point that Ghibli aren't the be-all-and-end-all of anime, and also I'm not sure there's much I can add to that conversation. And since the only self-imposed rule I'm yet to break here is that I haven't gone back as far as the seventies, I figured I'd jump on the opportunity to go somewhere totally different for this anniversary post. Which, to be specific, means taking a look at Swan Lake, Animal Treasure Island, Nutcracker Fantasy, and A Journey Through Fairyland...
Given how extraordinary it is that they're putting out stuff like this at all, you can hardly blame Eastern Star for the lack of extras on their disks, but sometimes it would be awfully nice to have a spot of background information that would explain, for example, just what series of decisions led to longstanding anime studio Toei deciding to adapt a century-old Russian ballet. A little digging offers some insight, in that this was part of their ongoing "World Masterpiece Fairy Tales" series, but why a ballet of all things, and why this particular ballet? I'm not knocking Tchaikovsky here, and since I've never seen a performance of Swan Lake, I don't have much knowledge to work off, but a scan of the plot on Wikipedia suggests that there's not a ton of material there out of which to craft a feature film, even one of a slender seventy-five minutes.
Then again, it's possible that was precisely the point, because the anime Swan Lake is an utter delight, and a big part of the reason is that it doesn't feel as though anyone involved considered themselves terribly beholden to their material. I'm not suggesting it's a bad adaptation, by any means; I can't find anything to say that the Tchaikovsky version includes a pair of comedy-relief talking squirrels, but apart from that, it seems to hew quite closely to what scant plot the ballet has to offer. But with so many gaps big and small to be filled in that narrative, there's ample room for diversions and asides to put some meat onto the bones of a skeletal story. The villainous Rothbart, for example, whose machinations and obsessive love of the heroine Odette are the main driver of everything that happens, is a tremendously appealing creation, silly and menacing in equal measure and an all-round wonderful piece of animation - no surprise since he's effectively the reincarnation of Lucifer from Yabuki's equally captivating 1969 classic The Wonderful World of Puss 'n Boots, even down to having the same voice actor.
As for the visuals in general, that cover art up there should give you a fair idea of what to expect. Swan Lake is transparently drawing on the classic Disney aesthetic, which was quite different to what Disney were actually putting out by 1981, more Sleeping Beauty than The Fox and the Hound. And Toei being Toei, we could go a step further and say it's that classic Disney aesthetic but on a much reduced budget, which would no doubt be true but would give a very wrong impression of how lovely Swan Lake is. Sure, the character designs are simple, but they're just right in their simplicity, tapping into a certain vibe that positively screams "fairy tale". And if that's true of the characters, it's ten times truer of the lushly painted backdrops, which nail that look about as well as Disney ever did anywhere. The forest of thorns young Prince Siegfried has to ride through at one point is just the creepiest, spikiest forest of thorns you could hope for, while Rothbart's castle is as cartoonishly grim as you can imagine. As has been proved on many an occasion, the heightened sense of style that's part of the bedrock of anime turns out to be a terrific fit for Western fairy tales, and I don't know that that's ever been truer than here.
On top of that, of course, the film has a heck of a score, unless you absolutely hate Tchaikovsky I guess. The film, admittedly, doesn't foreground the music half as much as you might expect or even treat it with a great deal of respect: more than once, pieces are cut off abruptly, and there are frequent scenes where dialogue gets pushed to the front of the sound mix. But again, that just brings us back round to the fact that this feels less like an attempt to make the definitive adaptation of the ballet and more like an attempt to be a really terrific little anime fairy-tale adaptation that just happens to have a lot of excellent music along the way. And given what a basically perfect job it does on that front, I can't imagine Tchaikovsky would be too bitterly offended.
A slight odd-one-out in this list - and how I'm kicking myself that I've already covered Gauche the Cellist, because that would have been a perfect fit! - Animal Treasure Island is nevertheless a worthwhile inclusion to make the point that Japanese kids movies prior to the advent of the nineties weren't all sombre, artsy affairs devoted as much to raising cultural awareness as to providing entertainment. Animal Treasure Island doesn't give a good goddamn about your cultural awareness, and even seems as though it might be quite happy if you come away less cultured than when you arrived, so long as you've had fun in the process. It's hard to imagine a film more invested in providing enjoyment for the sake of enjoyment, without having any qualms about being substantial or educational, but also without straying into being flat-out dumb in the manner of so many kids' films before and since.
Still, Animal Treasure Island doesn't half butcher its source material - that being Robert Louis Stevenson's seminal pirate adventure novel Treasure Island - and since I have quite a lot of love for the book, it follows that I've always found the film hard to feel the same affection for. Simply put, I don't know that the writing team (among them a certain Hayao Miyazaki, in one of his earliest breaks) had to mutilate the novel so heftily as they did. There are some bizarre decisions along the way, and though you can rationalise them to a greater or lesser degree independently, put them together and you're left with something that strays so far as to barely justify that title. I'm not talking about the fact that all but a couple of the cast have been replaced by animals, either, which is only odd if you think about it too hard; rather, there's the addition of Jim's mouse companion Gran, there's the insertion of a random toddler named Baboo whose safety Jim seems wholly unconcerned for, and most jarringly, there's the introduction of a major new character in the shape of Captain Flint's granddaughter Kathy.
Kathy looks enough like a Miyazaki design that it's easy to suppose her inclusion was an early example of the feminist bent that would become such a major element of his filmmaking, but she's written without any of the later nuance; moreover, her presence means scuppering the character of Long John Silver, and I doubt anyone familiar with the book would contest that the relationship between Silver and Jim is the heart of Treasure Island. Even if that weren't the case, Kathy's plotline requires the film to abruptly have a modicum of stakes, which fits awkwardly when until then everything has felt utterly inconsequential. Honestly, the more I think about it, I like very little about Kathy, who plays like the sort of shallow "strong female character" type that litters many a modern Hollywood movie; she's tough in a one-note fashion that's much less interesting than Jim's plucky bravado, and still manages to end up as something of a damsel in distress.
This would all matter more if Animal Treasure Island was properly interested in being a work of drama as opposed to a wacky, anything-goes sugar-rush of an animated movie. It's a modest film aimed squarely at children, and that stretches all the way to the animation, which - despite also having Miyazaki as key animator - is resolutely simple. Never bad simple, there's not a moment when it doesn't look like the work of skilled animators, but largely the brief seems to have been to go all in on simulating a picture book given life and not get too caught up in showing off anyone's hard-learned craft. This changes somewhat in the last third, with a satisfyingly dramatic storm and a boisterous action climax, but in general, what marks the visuals out is their exceedingly bold colour scheme - the pea-green sea takes some getting used to! - and their commitment to simplicity and charm.
Taken on its own terms, then, when Animal Treasure Island works, it really does work, and that actually happens quite a lot, for all that I've not been shy about picking on its weaknesses. The songs are a joy and, in a film that consists more of loosely strung together set pieces than narrative, the majority of sequences are a success, with lots of warmth and energy and their fair share of genuine laughs. So no classic, then, by any means, but nevertheless a mostly enjoyable children's film made with sufficient quality to not waste the time of adults, and given how much rarer that is than it ought to be, I'm still happy to give Animal Treasure Island a thumbs up.
Most of the time, the business of reviewing essentially boils down to the question of whether a particular work is accomplishing whatever it apparently set out to do. If something sets itself up as a comedy, then you mostly just have to establish whether it's funny. If it's evidently aiming to be an action movie, is it exciting? That sort of thing. But then you run into a film like Nutcracker Fantasy and realise the limitations of that approach. Because I can barely guess at what the makers of Nutcracker Fantasy thought they were about. That's not to say it's bad. It does many things very well indeed. But not many of those things are what you'd expect an animated children's film from the tail end of the seventies to be even thinking about attempting.
Which is to say, Nutcracker Fantasy spends a truly surprising amount of its running time being a pretty successful surrealist horror movie, and while it's unlikely director Takeo Nakamura had been influenced by David Lynch's gonzo masterpiece of a debut from two years earlier, I frequently found myself wondering if his primary motivation wasn't "What if we could make something a lot like Eraserhead, but, you know, for kids." Children's films often stray, deliberately or otherwise, into being scary, and Japanese children's films from this period often seem quite content to throw in a bit of undiluted nightmare fuel, but I don't know that I've ever seen anything that purported to be a children's film that was so unmitigatedly weird and unsettling and driven by the purest dream logic over narrative as this. To put that in context, we're talking about a plot that reboots itself at least five times over the course of ninety minutes, and that's when it's being anything like a recognisable plot at all and not just throwing out scenes at random. The first example that really struck me was when, a few minutes into a stop-motion animated film, we're suddenly presented with live-action footage of a ballet dancer, which, sure, makes a measure of sense for what's loosely an adaptation of Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker, only it doesn't make much sense in relation to anything we've seen prior to then.
But I just got around to mentioning the animation, didn't I? And we definitely need to talk about the animation at some length, because Nutcracker Fantasy happens to be the first anime film I've come across made primarily using stop motion. On the one hand, this is absolutely the right choice for the material, in that a plot in which most of the characters are toys, dolls, or animals benefits greatly from the handicraft tactility and the frankly gorgeous dollhouse-esque sets that the makers put together with what was clearly a massive amount of effort, passion, and skill. On the other, dolls are creepy at the best of times, and jerky stop-motion animation is creepy too, and when you have a film that contains material that would be pretty damn creepy whatever the approach, that's enough to frequently push it over into "What the actual hell?" territory. Going back to that question of intent, I can definitely see that we're supposed to be scared of the screeching, two-headed rat lady that's the main antagonist, and also of the villainous child-snatching ragman who stalks the edges of the film. But are we meant to be scared of Clara, our cute child protagonist? Because reader, I confess, in a film where I found just about everything unnerving, Clara's jolting movements and dead-eyed stare were no exception.
My suspicion is that Clara wasn't meant to be quite so freaky as she is, and also that the story wasn't meant to be such a sequence of absurdist non-sequiturs, and that the goal here genuinely was to make something fun and appealing for a younger audience, the sort who like dolls and ballet and princesses and tacky songs and silly comedy. Conversely, there's so much sinister weirdness in Nutcracker Fantasy that it seems unfair to suggest that the bulk of it was accidental; if nothing else, no film that isn't interested in chucking some horror into the mix could contain this many Dutch angles. And if there's one consistent feature throughout, it's a willingness to embrace any idea and run with it, no matter whether it scuppers the pacing or is liable to leave the viewer floundering. So all in all, I wouldn't feel right in suggesting Nutcracker Fantasy is a failure, if only since nothing this hypnotically strange and meticulously crafted can deserve that word, but as a children's film that actual children might watch, the sort that don't want to be left in a state of existential terror, it's a bewildering boondoggle of the first order.
A Journey Through Fairyland may be the single loveliest-looking animated film I've ever seen. That's not quite to say it's the most well animated, though it's also not to say it isn't; it would certainly deserve a spot on any top ten, and given the sorts of budgetary restraints normally placed on anime, that's quite a statement. Certainly the animation is phenomenally meticulous, and there are shots here of striking ingenuity and complexity, and in general the sheer ambition and willingness to explore the possibilities of the medium is up there with practically anything else you're likely to encounter, especially prior to the advent of computer-assisted animation. Still, all of that's not quite what I was getting at with that opening statement; rather, it's what I can best describe as a picture-postcard quality, as though the entire film were composed of those painted images you get on the better class of greeting cards, though even that makes A Journey Through Fairyland sound rather tacky and twee and, given its subject matter, that's something it actually manages to steer fairly well clear of. At any rate, the backgrounds are invariably gorgeous, and, unusually for anime, the character work is practically on a par: sure, the designs are simple, but what's done with them is often astonishingly lavish. I heaped similar praise on director Hata's earlier movie Sea Prince and the Fire Child, but with a few caveats; here, Hata has ironed out every last kink, and the results are glorious.
Being a film that's heavily about music, it's fair to say the score is pretty fantastic, too, at least if you have any sympathy at all for classical music. Here, by the way, I'm cheating ever so slightly when it comes to our theme, in that there are a couple of Japanese composers in the mix; still, the vast majority are the big European names, practically all of whom get a look-in. Actually, this is as good a time as any to dig into what A Journey Through Fairyland is, and the short answer is that it feels very much like what would happen if a bunch of enormously talented Japanese animators watched Disney's Fantasia and thought, "Sure, we can beat that." If there's a crucial difference, it's that A Journey Through Fairyland has a persistent narrative of sorts, but it's one that often gives way to abstract sequences devoted to not much more than the joy of lushly animated objects moving in an appropriate fashion to some timeless piece of music, and so the end result still has the air of a Fantasia-esque anthology as much as it does that of a more traditionally story-driven film.
This is worth highlighting, because the story, and its two central characters, are without a doubt the weakest aspect. In a nutshell, Michael is a promising student at a music academy who's recently grown too distracted by his hobby of tending the local greenhouse to avoid screwing up in class, and his teacher has finally had enough, to the point of kicking him out of the orchestra and potentially the school. Fortunately for Michael, he's earned the devotion (not to mention the fairly blatant lust) of a flower fairy named Florence, and Florence decides the best thing for everyone would be if she transported him to her home, the magical land of flowers, for - um, a date, I guess? It's not altogether clear, and it actually turns out to be a spectacularly ill-judged move, since the land of flowers is a pretty damn dangerous place, presumably because no Japanese children's film from the eighties can keep from including at least a dash of raw nightmare fuel. Anyway, neither Michael nor Florence are remotely interesting on any level, even down to having the blandest designs of any of the characters, and while Michael's trials in our world are easy enough to sympathise with, he does almost nothing throughout the middle of the film except be carried along by events.
Luckily for us the viewer, this doesn't matter much. I mean, if you cared nothing about stunning animation and were filled with a profound hatred for classical music, then probably it would matter, and if that's true, A Journey Through Fairyland is absolutely one hundred percent not the film for you. However, I'm not that devoted to classical music in general, and I still found myself enjoying the pieces here, in large part because the animators have done a terrific job of highlighting what makes them so enduring rather than simply slapping vaguely sympathetic imagery upon them. On that front, I'd argue it's actually a better film than Fantasia, though Fantasia edges it out on variety; having set itself the plot it has, A Journey Through Fairyland is then bound to include an awful lot of fairies and flowers, and fairies dancing with flowers, and the like, and it's fair to say that repetition creeps in before the end, though the aforementioned bursts of horror definitely shake things up. At any rate, if you have an interest in animation or just fancy a beautiful-to-look-at children's movie, I'd urge you to put any reservations you have on hold and give this one a go. It's not without flaws, but they largely pale in the face of its extraordinary loveliness and breadth of craft.
-oOo-
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