I've broken practically every rule I set myself to try and keep the scope of these Drowning in Nineties Anime posts at some kind of manageable level, but one I hung on to for quite a while was to steer away from the recognised classics, partly because I was too emotionally attached to most of them to say anything useful and partly because, well, what would be the point? You don't need me to tell you that, say, Ghost in the Shell is a great movie. And while that, too, fell to the wayside eventually, there was another line I was less willing to cross. Because there's classics and there's classics, and some stuff you really don't need me to tell you is good, not when it's reached the level of beloved world classics.
But obsessive completism is obsessive completism, and so here we are, with part one of what will eventually be three posts covering all of Studio Ghibli's pre-2000 output (plus a small cheat, which you'll find immediately below.) And yes, this is certainly pointless, but it means I get to rattle on about some films that I adore beyond all reason, and then annoy myself by attempting to be remotely critical about them, and what the heck, right? Let's talk about Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Laputa, Castle in the Sky, My Neighbour Totoro, and Grave of the Fireflies...
What struck me most, coming back to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on Blu-Ray, was how little the passage of four decades has harmed it. I guess nobody's ever likely to mistake it for a modern film, but if someone were to adapt Hayao Miyazaki's manga today, staying faithful to his distinctive designs and not leaning too visibly on CGI, the results would be awfully similar to what he put out all those many years ago - though I suppose that's ignoring the fact that only a tiny handful of directors could possibly marshal the sorts of resources these days to produce hand-drawn animation of such astonishing quality.
But that, in any case, isn't really what I was getting at; it's as much, if not more, to do with the themes and attitudes and ethos that the film presents. And obviously that's partly a consequence of its enormous influence, and the enormous influence of everything Miyazaki would go on to do subsequently, but regardless, there's not a lot from 1984, animated or otherwise, that offers such a complex, fully-formed female protagonist, or such nuanced villains, or such intricate, elaborate world-building, or such a sophisticated, persuasive environmentalist message. And that last has never really been bettered, except perhaps by Miyazaki himself and his career-long collaborator Isao Takahata, for it's easy to say "We have to learn to exist alongside the natural world or terrible things will happen" and difficult indeed to weave that message into the core of your narrative in such a manner that it's both utterly convincing and barely the slightest bit preachy.
Granted, Nausicaä herself gets the odd speech in that direction, but her attitude is more one of desperation than condescension, and mostly it's the imagery that does the brunt of the work: we're given just enough time to get to know the Valley of the Wind as a location of delicate peace and harmony before it comes under threat, and since we know what the world beyond its borders has been reduced to, there's something profoundly wrenching about the sight of, say, a stray fungus spore attached to the root of a tree. It's easy to forget just what a spectacularly good director of horror imagery Miyazaki can be, but there are moments of real nightmare fuel in Nausicaä, and the nightmare is one of nature made sick and warped and inhospitable. Though, notably, the film never tries to persuade us that the insect-ruled wastelands that hem in its few last human habitations are in and on themselves a bad thing. Indeed, they're routinely portrayed as having their own strange beauty and majesty, and that's nowhere truer than in the case of the enormous Ohmu that comprise its main non-human threat. They're alien and potentially dangerous, but, as we'll learn, also absolutely necessary - and so, Nausicaä argues persuasively, the only rational response is to coexist.
This is all of a heck of a lot for a sort-of-debut to be even attempting, let alone pulling off with such easy grace. True, Miyazaki had a ton of TV work behind him, including the splendid precursor that was Future Boy Conan, and of course he'd already made one extremely good movie, albeit one that probably nobody would describe as a passion project; but you can see why, for a lot of people, this is the first Miyazaki movie proper. This is the point from which everything we've come to think of as the elements of a Miyazaki film began, and even if there would be modifications - the villains, for all their interesting shading, are inarguably villains, a storytelling crutch he'd rapidly abandon, and it's hard to imagine the Miyazaki of later years showing off quite so much of his female protagonist's bum - the vast majority of the pieces were firmly in place from the beginning.
For so ambitious a work, its imperfections are awfully trivial. The pacing is arguably a bit off, somewhat languid in the early going and rather rushed in the last third, to the point where I always have a slight struggle to keep track of where everyone is and what exactly their motivations are in that moment; there are odd shots that a later Miyazaki wouldn't have let slip through, though that's an absurd standard to hold anything to; and while I very much like Joe Hisaishi's score, and while its main theme is one of his finest, it never quite gels into a coherent whole the way his later works with Miyazaki would, and a couple of pieces are the sole element of the movie that feel distinctly of their time. But stacked against those small, small flaws are such astonishing achievements! We've had time to get used to Miyazaki's greatness in the intervening years, but what must it have been like to encounter Nausicaä back in 1984, a science-fictional animated film of a scale, lavishness, intelligence, and emotional breadth so wildly beyond what almost anyone had attempted prior to that point? Pretty mind-blowing, I'm guessing, and forty years really haven't done a whole lot to dull that impact.
I couldn't possibly be more biased towards Laputa: it's the first anime movie I ever saw, way back before I knew what anime was, and even though I came in halfway through, and even though I had no idea what I was watching, and even though I wouldn't learn its title until many years later, it blew my young mind. It's fair to say that the fact I'm writing this post for this blog series at this very moment can be traced back to that day, and planting the seeds of my anime geekdom was only one of many ways in which Miyazaki's third movie has influenced me.
So while I'll try to be objective, let's accept that it's a fool's errand, and also that any criticisms I manage to provide come from a place of deep and implacable love. Let's start, then, by acknowledging that, compared with what Miyazaki conjured a mere couple of years earlier, and indeed with almost the entirety of his later output, Laputa feels kind of trivial and goofy. I don't know that it has any themes beyond "weapons of mass destruction are bad, as are the sorts of people who would use them," and even that it never takes especially seriously. It's not a very serious film on any level, and if seriousness was all we cared about, we might grumble that it was a step back after the epic gravity of Nausicaä. Certainly it feels more of a piece with what Miyazaki was up to before that, most obviously Future Boy Conan, which it borrows from in ways big and small; but I'd argue that of his preceding two films, it's The Castle of Cagliostro that Laputa shares most DNA with, for all that, in being a science-fictional action adventure with teen protagonists, it's Nausicaä it superficially resembles.
I like Miyazaki when he's in serious mode, but I'm also very happy indeed with a Miyazaki who's content to cut loose with almost non-stop action sequences that aren't terribly committed to things like gravity and physics when the alternative is to be absurd and thrilling. There's arguably no real story at all: we learn of the existence of a floating island full of treasures and ancient technologies by the name of Laputa, we meet various folks who'd all like to go there for one reason or another, and then go there they do. Even the animation is a touch slapdash by comparison with Nausicaä, with a notable absence of shading in places and a frequent descent into cartoonishness, though being a Studio Ghibli film - indeed, being the first true Studio Ghibli film - it's still stunning by any reasonable standards, with a fair number of individual sequences that are practically without peer. Oh, and while I'm nit-picking, having just praised Nausicaä for its timelessness, Laputa feels distinctly like a product of the mid-80s, albeit in almost entirely good ways.
If this was all Laputa had to offer - charming characters hurtling through gloriously animated, thrilling action set piece after set piece in search of one of cinema's greatest McGuffins - I'd still love it. Obviously I would! But then we arrive at the third act, set almost entirely on the titular island, and immediately Miyazaki raises his game. That's no mean feat given how wonderful everything that's come before is, but my goodness, the third act of Laputa is simply breath-taking, paying off perfectly on what's come before and escalating the action whilst also becoming rich and satisfying and emotive in ways even Nausicaä never quite managed, or at any rate not so consistently. It's the combination of a truly awe-inspiring location brought to life with flawless imagination - no wonder those robot gardeners have become one of the signature Ghibli images! - and a genius director firing on all cylinders, backed up by a genius composer who seems to have finally tuned in to exactly what the material needs. Laputa as a whole may have been the film that birthed the greatest animation studio of all time, but it's arguably in its third act that Miyazaki the peerless master of his artform was born, along with one of the greatest director / composer collaborations of all time. Both would go on to do work that was better as a whole - indeed, arguably in the immediate future! - but for forty or so glorious minutes, Laputa stands toe to toe with any masterpiece of animation out there.
Such an integral part of anime culture has it become in the three and a half decades since its original release that it's hard to get your head around what a drastic swerve My Neighbour Totoro was in Miyazaki's career. Until that point, his trajectory was certainly interesting and varied, but there were plenty of common elements between his major projects, and particularly between Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Laputa, Castle in the Sky, both of which were grandiose, elaborate fantasies with a heavy element of science-fiction centred around young adult characters and their perspectives without necessarily slanting towards younger viewers, and both were pretty damn long by anime movie standards. Then in 1988 came a Miyazaki film that was practically none of that: one set primarily in our own world, one with child protagonists, one on a much more intimate scale and with a comparatively brief 86-minute running time. And accordingly, but shockingly if you're watching these things in order, even the character designs shifted toward a simpler aesthetic - toward something that, arguably, looks kind of like a kids' movie, albeit one that still has some truly lavish animation by any reasonable standards.
Fortunate, then, that My Neighbour Totoro is a stone-cold masterpiece, and pity the poor viewer who can spend more than a few minutes in its presence and still rue the fact that Miyazaki had no intentions of being anything approaching a one-trick pony. I confess that everything he did up until this point is theoretically more up my alley, but I'd also argue that that's perfectly okay given that Totoro definitely is a film aimed first and foremost at children. And its miracle - one of its miracles, rather, since it's a fairly miraculous piece of work from top to bottom - is that it manages to be that in a manner that's still completely inclusive to an adult viewer. Or this adult viewer, anyway; I can't speak for everyone, though I've never met anyone who doesn't love this much-loved film, so I reckon the point holds.
And the thing of it is, Miyazaki gets there by about the hardest route imaginable. Though there are adult characters too, a small handful of them, we're never really encouraged to treat them as our point of engagement. I undoubtedly have more in common with Satsuki and Mei's father than I do with either of those young girls, yet never once while watching have I felt the urge to line myself up with his perspective. No, while I'm watching, it's always little Mei I'm on side with, and to a marginally lesser extent her older, slightly wiser sister. And that, when you think about it, is a heck of a thing, the more so since Miyazaki doesn't really try and soften the pair to fit in with an adult sensibility. Mei is absolutely a toddler, with all the wild energy and mercurial moods and mad tangents of thought that entails, and yet somehow - again, I'm inclined to just put it down to magic and leave it at that - we're caught up in her view of the world almost from the off.
This is crucial for making My Neighbour Totoro that rarest of things, a true family film - rather than a children's film with the odd rude joke thrown in to keep the parents from getting too bored - but it's also crucial to how the fantasy works. I said Totoro was set in what's recognisably our world, albeit quite a few years in the past and in a rural part of Japan I imagine would be unfamiliar to even many native viewers, but it remains a fantasy movie of a different kind. And something that always strikes me when I watch it is how almost any other director would have encouraged us to doubt the fantastical elements, to chalk them up to childish dreams or imagination, whereas in Totoro, the very notion of suggesting that Mei and Satsuki's strange brushes with the otherworldly are anything but real feels like a cruel betrayal. That's partly because those otherworldly elements are so absurdly delightful and off-kilter that we want them to be real, and partly because the grown-ups are so willing to accept the possibility of their existence even though it's made clear that adulthood has shut them off from such encounters forever, but ultimately it's down to how determinedly Miyazaki erases the easy distinctions between reality and fantasy, physical presence and metaphor. Totoro is a force of nature in the most literal sense; he's also so thoroughly tangible that you can practically smell him. And to Mei, and to Miyazaki, and to you the viewer while you're caught up in Miyazaki's tale, there's no contradiction in that at all.
I could go on and on: for all that it's not even an hour and a half long, My Neighbour Totoro feels bottomless in the way that it always manages to surprise me, however many times I come back to it. It's awfully shapeless and plotless in the early going, tied up in something that's almost but not quite dream logic, and that makes it hard to piece together in retrospect. But by way of one last thought, I'll just note the extent to which the film, for all its sweet, kind, good-naturedness, doesn't shy away from darkness. Its third act is driven by the possibility of death, and by the fact that Mei is just barely old enough to conceive of a world in which death could snatch away her mother, and later, Satsuki is made to reckon with a similar possibility, leading to a scene that's almost heart-stoppingly distressing if you pause to think about it too hard. (I'm trying to avoid spoilers, so suffice to say it involves a shoe and a pond.) The fantasy stuff is a little scary too: Totoro is never exactly a safe presence, and the catbus is awfully close to being the stuff of nightmares. But it's okay, because Miyazaki isn't trying to tell us the world is safe and free of dangers, only that it's full of wonder and goodness if you're willing and able to look.
Grave of the Fireflies, 1988, dir: Isao Takahata
I spent the entirety of my latest watch of Grave of the Fireflies feeling faintly puzzled that it wasn't having more of an emotional impact on me. Hadn't it hit me like a freight train in the past? Hadn't I put off this rewatch precisely because I wanted to schedule it for an evening when I felt emotionally sturdy enough to take it on? But here I was, dry eyed. And then the final scene arrived - I won't talk about it, except to say that I'm baffled by the comments I've seen suggesting it's in any way a happy ending - and something finally broke, and there I was, sobbing my heart out. And not good sobbing, not the cathartic kind that leaves you feeling as if you've worked something out of your system; no, this was hopeless, physically painful even. I didn't feel one iota better by the time I finally got a hold of myself, and how could I? We live in a world where children die slow, painful deaths, and more, a world in which those deaths can pass practically unnoticed.
Any movie that can provoke that kind of an emotional response isn't one to be approached lightly. But the flipside of that is, any film that can provoke that kind of an emotional response is one you absolutely need to experience, when so much art makes us feel nothing, and so little is willing to leave us a little scarred and wounded if that's what it takes. If Isao Takahata was a master of one thing - and obviously, he was a master of a whole heck of a lot of things - but if we really had to strip down his genius to one single element, it would be his ability to treat emotive material with a certain unflinching sentimentality, almost a pragmatism, that makes it connect with us in a manner almost unequalled in cinema.
Grave of the Fireflies never really prods at us to feel sad, and though there are what we might describe as sad scenes, they're arrived at honestly: they present us with necessary details rather than merely sitting there tugging at our heartstrings. But then, it's a film about two young children trying to survive in Japan in the last days of World War 2, and by extension of two young children failing to survive, a fact made exceedingly clear to us in the opening sequence, and what need could a director of Takahata's calibre have to try and make us feel sad? Honesty is more than enough. Heck, Takahata barely even insists on our sympathy. Throughout, Seita makes his share of questionable decisions in his quest to protect his little sister Setsuko, and a couple of those decisions are actively frustrating to the point where you want to yell at the screen. But that in turn forces us to acknowledge that we have the advantages of both adult knowledge and the wider context on our side, and so we can recognise, for example, that the odds of Seita and Setsuko's sailor father returning to rescue them are slim indeed.
Then again, wider context isn't something the film is especially interested in. This explains, I think, one of my few quibbles, which is that at times the animation is lacking in the sort of background detail you might expect, with still images of smoke and flames standing out particularly. Conceivably it was a cost-cutting measure, but I suspect the intention was rather one of limiting anything that might distract us from the character animation in the foreground, which has to do so much of the emotional heavy lifting and so ably meets the challenge. Always, Takahata's focus is on his two protagonists, for all that they barely register as characters in the usual sense: beyond some trivial details, we learn little about their past circumstances, their hopes and dreams, their likes and dislikes. We never really get to know them, yet we feel as if we do, because Takahata keeps us in such inescapable proximity to them for ninety minutes. And that's not to say Seita and Setsuko are abstracts, stand-ins for every child that suffered a similar fate - though the final scene does go there, somewhat, and that's part of why it left me such a blubbing mess. But for the vast majority of its running time, the tale Takahata's telling isn't that of Japan's last, tortuous months of being on the losing side of a war, but rather, and with singular intensity, the small, inexcusable, soul-rending tragedy of two children that wouldn't live to see its end.
And there we have it, part one of the Drowning in Nineties Anime Studio Ghibli special For anyone wondering, part two will be coming with post number 145, and I'm saving up the last entry for the big 150, our probably final post. Spoiler alert, there are no pre-2000 Ghibli films I don't complete love, so don't expect much in the way of drama and controversy! More gushing praise, on the other hand, now that there'll likely be a fair bit of...
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
