Here we are, at extremely long last: the end of Drowning in Nineties Anime, a project I started on a whim back in (checks) oh, my goodness, 2015, that's insane. 11 years! I was a mere child back then, full of boyish hopes and dreams! What have I been doing with my life? Whose is this wrinkled face that stares back at me from the mirror?
Eh, what the heck, it's been fun. Who wouldn't want to spend 11 years watching a metric buttload of vintage anime and writing dumb reviews of it? And whatever the travails along the way, we get to end on the highest of highs with the last part of our Studio Ghibli special, a particularly nice note to finish on since there's essentially no risk of a bad film, or even a less than great film, sneaking in. A controversial claim? Surely not when we've got Pom Poko, Whisper of the Heart, Princess Mononoke, and My Neighbours the Yamadas ahead of us...
Pom Poko, 1994, dir: Isao Takahata
There's some fun to be had in comparing and contrasting Japan's premier animation studio with its Western counterparts Disney and Pixar, and Pom Poko draws that sort of comparing and contrasting more than the majority of Ghibli films, in that it's hard not to go into it feeling you know more or less how it's meant to go. If you're a parent with young kids or enough of a die-hard animation nerd to watch movies that are primarily geared towards such an audience, you've inevitably seen more talking animal movies than you can begin to count, and even the subgenre of films that pit talking animals against the devastation caused by their human neighbours is hardly small; just this year we had Pixar's Hoppers doing precisely that. But while I doubt Takahata, a director who's always struck me as extremely unconcerned with what anyone else was doing, was thinking in such competitive terms, nevertheless, for the average Western viewer, Pom Poko hits differently for how similar it is to its endless counterparts - which is to say, barely at all. Because, you know, magical racoon* testicles and all that.
It sure is hard not to get caught up with the magical racoon testicles; but really, the frequent display of animal genitalia, while something it's fair to say we'll absolutely never see in a Disney movie, is only one small part of it. For a start, Pom Poko positions itself as a documentary of sorts, in that it's narrated to us and structures itself according to the illusion of presenting true events as they happen rather than by any narrative structure; though, as the Japanese title hints heavily, it's really more like a war record, since the sole throughline is its protagonists' conflict with the selfish humans who are rapidly annihilating the habitat they've made their home for countless centuries.
Whichever way you look a it, there's not a lot of plot; in common with basically all of Takahata's Ghibli work, it instead favours chapters composed of roughly related incidents. Being documentary-like, Pom Poko spends an awful lot of time on topics that would have no place in a more narrative-heavy film: it's quite happy to put whatever minimal story it has on the go just to observe its cast eat, play, tussle, bicker, and flirt. Indeed, those are essentially its only two modes: we're either watching racoons battle their unknowing human antagonists, mostly using the range of magical abilities granted to them by Japanese folklore, or we're watching them hang out. You might say it's not a lot to fill a nearly two hour running time, and you might be right; even by Takahata's standards, Pom Poko feels a little aimless at points. On the other hand, and again as with all things Takahata, it's hard to point at any single moment and say, "Well, that needed cutting," when everything is so delightful in its own right.
Inevitably, that has a lot to do with the animation, which is a leap in ambition from a director who was never remotely lacking in that department. The considerable cast all have at least four modes of representation, from realism through a couple of levels of cartoonish deformity to the human forms they adopt as part of their terrorist campaign, and the mind boggles at the thought that must have gone into keeping all this comprehensible, the more so since Pom Poko makes it look effortless, switching between modes with playful abandon, sometimes to land a joke but often apparently for the sheer joy of such animation tomfoolery. It's perhaps not the loveliest of Ghibli films, but it's inarguably the most fun in how it makes use of its exquisite craftsmanship to get up to some often very silly things.
Yet I'd hate to leave you with the impression that silly fun is all Pom Poko has going for it, or even what it's primarily up to. As much as it's often charming, weird, and funny, it's also, at times, an immensely dark, difficult piece of work: were we not talking about the director of Grave of the Fireflies, I'd say unhesitatingly that it contains the grimmest scenes in Ghibli's canon, and I still suspect that its ending hit me that bit harder. More here than elsewhere, Takahata's humanism and unwillingness to moralise or villainise lead to some heart-breakingly empathetic places. Pom Poko doesn't hate humans, as its raccoon protagonists don't; indeed, it struck me on this most recent watch how, though they're never not raccoons, they're also often stand-ins for humanity, constantly doing the wrong thing for the most innocuous of motives. Pom Poko shows with a clear-eyed gaze where that's led us and acknowledges that we've lost more than we can ever replace - a moral that, again, makes Disney and Pixar at their most dour feel almost chirpy. Then again, that Takahata perfectly balances that essential bleakness with so much giddy light-heartedness points to just what an incomparable genius the man was, and why, ultimately, such comparisons are bound to fall flat.
None of which is to say that Kondō did nothing other than synthesise, or even that Whisper of the Heart feels particularly beholden to anyone's idea of what a Studio Ghibli movie ought to be. A lot of what sets his approach apart is a fixation on capturing the realistic texture of 14-year-old Shizuku Tsukishima's life, whether that be emotionally - it invests much energy into a potential love triangle that basically goes nowhere, but teaches us a good deal about who she is as a person - or in terms of the physicality of its Tokyo locations, which is a significant leap in the representation of real spaces from anything the Studio had tried before. Indeed, there are times when Kondō's adherence to reality borders on the pathological, with multiple scenes of foot and vehicle traffic that must have absorbed many hundreds of animator hours and could mostly have been snipped without dinting the narrative.
This is, obviously, not meant as a criticism: a huge part of the whole Ghibli thing was about providing exactly the amount of resources necessary to make a project the best version of itself and not a yen less, and as a result both of that refusal to stint and Kondō's obvious fascination with moving his cast through a variety of real-feeling spaces, Whisper of the Heart has a concreteness that surpasses anything in the Ghibli catalogue. By the same measure, Kondō's willingness to include any number of tangents large and small so long as they deepen our understanding of and identification with Shizuku pays enormous dividends by the end. This first becomes apparent in a scene midway through the film that would comfortably sit among my Ghibli top ten, as a musical interlude develops into both a character-defining revelation and a thesis on the social value of art, whilst also being heart-stoppingly lovely. And from there onwards, the benefits of Kondō's approach never stop being obvious, as he transforms some basically rather slight material into the stuff of epic drama.
Aside from a bit of will-they, won't-they romance that never worries itself unduly with the won't-they part, the only real conflict in Whisper of the Heart is between Shizuku and herself, as she strives to turn her half-hearted passion for writing into something deeper and more meaningful and in so doing discovers both the transcendental joys and soul-wracking despair of being truly creative. That right there, incidentally, is surely the most Miyazaki-esque part of a script that, given how much it might seem to tie in with some of his other projects, most notably Kiki's Delivery Service, doesn't actually have that many of his fingerprints visible upon it. But while "creativity is absolutely necessary to a civilised society and also makes nigh-impossible demands on those who commit themselves to it" is a thoroughly Miyazaki message, Kondō's take still feels distinctive, largely refusing to be about anything other than Shizuku and how she gets through this first big artistic trial by fire.
If I have any criticisms, they're all very trivial. While the animation is largely phenomenal, there were odd moments of character art that felt below Miyazaki / Takahata levels of perfectionism, though of course that's a ridiculous bar to measure anything by. Perhaps the biggest issue plot-wise is that the climatic scene feels kind of odd and old-fashioned, though it's book-ended by a wonderful moment of Shizuku figuring out what sort of person she'll be in a romantic relationship and is followed by one of those classic Ghibli 'let's actually finish the movie over the closing credits' sequences that wraps things up on a far more perfect note. Other than that, you might certainly argue that it feels rather minor compared with much of Ghibli's output, focusing as it does so narrowly on its heroine and the handful of people around her. You could argue that, I say, but I'd counter by pointing out that few films had more influence of me as a writer or taught me more succinctly that doing anything of value requires effort, sometimes more effort than you believe yourself capable of giving - and if you're the sort of person that speaks to, there's really nothing minor about Whisper of the Heart at all.
There was a time when I'd have told you that Princess Mononoke was my favourite film of all time, and for a much longer period, I'd have insisted it was my favourite of Studio Ghibli's works. And it's not as if I've exactly changed my mind on either front, more that, the older I get, the less inclined I am to pinning myself down to favourites. Still, I'm never going to be the guy who tells you that Princess Mononoke isn't a masterpiece for the ages. And I wouldn't have even considered that an opinion in need of defending until I discovered that my favourite film reviewer (okay, I still do have some favourites!) Tim Brayton expressed some ever-so-slightly damning opinions on it.
Now, it would be churlish to write a counter-review, so I won't be doing that, but that knowledge did leave me with a return viewing where I felt the need to dig down into precisely what about this particular film had affected me so profoundly in my early twenties. Most obviously, of course, it was that I'd never seen anything remotely like it: I'd seen hardly anything from Ghibli and not much anime in general, but even if that weren't true, it wouldn't have made much difference, because there wasn't another film like Princess Mononoke in 1997, within or without anime. Compared with everything Miyazaki had done previously, it was startlingly violent: for me as an anime newbie, seeing arms and heads being lopped off in an animated film was shocking enough, but I can only imagine what the impact would have been for those who'd been following the director's career. More than that, however, Mononoke is a film for adults in the best of ways: it's smart and complex and demanding, sometimes a little too much of those things to be wholly entertaining. And in 1997, that just wasn't what fantasy movies were - though describing Miyazaki's dizzy cocktail of history and myth as fantasy is awfully reductive in itself. Granted, there was plenty of live-action Japanese cinema that had mixed historical fact with folkloric fantasy, but nothing came close to the intricate cosmology Miyazaki built here, which borrows from Japanese mythology without ever seeming beholden to it.
Uniqueness needn't necessarily equate to greatness, though when you're dealing with one of the finest directors of all time, there's a fair chance of one leading to the other, and even if Princess Mononoke were somehow a failed experiment, its bold genre reinvention would be thrilling in itself. For me, Mononoke is absolutely not a failure of any sort, but if I was pressed to accept a single criticism, it's that the movie has to keep a heck of a lot of plates spinning, and there's a stretch towards the middle where that threatens to become too much. Part of the issue is that the first hour or so is almost perfect in how it tethers our perspective to that of protagonist Ashitaka, so that, though we learn a lot and meet a sizeable cast, we do so as he does and through his actions and interactions. And here it helps that Ashitaka is an exemplary main character, a patently good man who, as we encounter him, suffers a terrible, unfair fate that will test his goodness to the core. Even as he tries to do the right thing by everyone, whatever the cost, a part of him - his demonically possessed arm, strictly speaking, but I think we can allow a bit of metaphor here - is aware that there are quicker, bloodier solutions at his disposal, and that those might even work out better in the long term.
His counterpoint is Lady Eboshi, for my money the greatest of Miyazaki's ambiguous antagonists. You could very easily make a film in which Lady Eboshi, who has carved out a small empire within a wholly patriarchal world and then filled it with rescued prostitutes and lepers, among other undesirables of the outer world, was an unequivocal hero, and I suspect you could even cut it together out of the footage that exists in Princess Mononoke. But then, she isn't really the villain of the piece: that would be the monk Jigo. Except that Jigo is really only a cynical pragmatist working in service to the emperor, so maybe the emperor is the truest villain - except that we never get to hear their side of things, and anyway, that's assuming we choose to agree with Ashitaka that the deeply ambivalent divinities and spirits of nature that throng the movie are essentially good, which is quite the leap.
Like I said before I got sidetracked, a lot of spinning plates, and for a brief spell towards the middle, when we lose Ashitaka as our narrative anchor, it arguably gets a bit much. But that's as far as I'd go, it really is: there's a stretch of Princess Mononoke, between the essential perfection of the first act and the apocalyptic grandeur of the last, in which the number of moving parts Miyazaki has set in motion becomes mildly overwhelming. Could he have streamlined things? Perhaps dropped a character or two? I think so, yes, but I also think the cost would have been considerable. And here's where I differ hard from Tim's opinion: for me, Mononoke is Miyazaki's most profoundly humanist and empathetic film, and it gets there largely through complexity and counterpoint. Strip that away, strip the ambiguity of so many conflicting agendas that we can't simply dismiss as wrong and the manner in which irreconcilable perspectives are given equal space, and you lose the core of the film's argument, or perhaps rather it's refusal to present a clear argument. For Princess Mononoke isn't a film of answers, and especially not of easy ones; though it's widely regarded as an ecological fable, even that's a simplification given how dangerous, merciless, and strange nature is frequently shown to be and how its central avatar is a god who grants both life and death without apparent discrimination.
By all means, then, come for the exquisite animation, for Joe Hisaishi's flawless score, for the thrilling action, the gut-wrenching horror, the weirdness and whimsy: you could absolutely watch Princess Mononoke as a work of epic fantasy, and though it's perhaps more arduous and depressing then nearly any other work in that genre, nevertheless, it's extraordinarily successful. What's kept me returning, though, and I think what truly made me fall in love so hard all those years ago, is watching Miyazaki attempt to process all of his troubled views on humanity and nature via a single motion picture, and, like Ashitaka, to do so with eyes unclouded by hate. He may not offer much in the way of answers, but the questions he posed here have stayed with me for more than two decades.
Uniquely among Ghibli's output, I bounced off My Neighbours the Yamadas pretty hard when I first watched it, many a year ago, to such an extent that I never revisited it until I was obliged to for this review. I doubt I'm the only one, and I don't exactly blame my younger self. Takahata's films are invariably less immediately accessible than Miyazaki's, more episodic and less propelled by clear-cut narratives, and, without exception, his Ghibli movies where more focused on Japanese culture and geared towards Japanese audiences that those of his co-founder, or indeed of most anime directors obliged to keep one eye on the international markets. Then there's his interest in eschewing strict realism in animation, which had been building steadily throughout the latter half of his career and drifting ever closer to full-blown abstraction.
All those trends would reach their pinnacle with My Neighbours the Yamadas. Based on a manga series by Hisaichi Ishii, Takahata's film eschews an overall plot altogether, opting instead for a series of episodes of varying lengths, from a few seconds to a few minutes, bound together by loose themes, hand-drawn intertitles, and a handful of haiku, which probably comment more on the action than is obvious to the non-Japanese viewer. But then, here we find Takahata showing as little interest as he ever would in said viewer, making My Neighbours the Yamadas the sole Ghibli film that gains meaningfully from having a solid knowledge of Japanese lifestyles and culture and that can be a bit off-putting without it. (A superficial example: there's a lengthy gag built around the fact that none of the characters know the difference between Kekko Kamen and Kamen Rider, one so untranslatable that Optimum's subtitles simply decline to try.)
Then there's the animation, which really deserves a paragraph to itself. It's up to some pretty extraordinary things, but ones that, bar a few showcase scenes, are only likely to seem extraordinary to those with a bit of a handle on how animation works. The goal, clearly, was to take the style and format of a gag-strip manga and translate it into three-dimensional motion without in any way sacrificing its gag strip nature. This Takahata and his crew did by reproducing the manga's simple character designs - by Ghibli's standards, simple is a small word indeed to get at how utterly stripped of detail they are - and then using computers to an extent the studio had never previously considered to put us, effectively, inside the comic book world. Think it through like that, take time to understand the complexity that's going into making something that superficially looks sparse and crude, and you really have to be impressed, even before you get to the handful of sequences that go all-in on the capacities of computer-aided three-dimensional animation and are wildly impressive by any stretch of the imagination.
Not an easy film then - except that, on a minute-by-minute basis, it's very easy indeed. Takahata being Takahata, the episodes are every one terrific, with jokes that are frequently laugh-out-loud funny backed up with just enough thematic backbone, emotional depth, and appreciation that life can be pretty horrible on occasions to keep the movie from feeling too lightweight. If it's about any one thing, it's about marriage, with family following a close second, specifically the notions that to weather a marriage over the course of years and to make a family work, whatever your part in it, are tasks that takes actual, constant commitment, but that making such a commitment brings its own rewards, be they often small and silly. Which is a damned nice theme, coming from the man who was perhaps cinema's greatest proponent of niceness, a quality that, in Takahata's hands, reaches heights of genuine profundity.
Reader, with all that, I still didn't quite love My Neighbours the Yamadas. Oh, I certainly spent the opening few minutes bewildered at the idea that I'd somehow failed to appreciate its merits, just as I'd hoped I would, in large part because its first big set piece is one of the most dazzling feats anywhere in Ghibli's oeuvre, as audacious in its use of abstraction and collapsed time to convey the highs and lows of years of marriage as its more widely celebrated equivalent in Pixar's Up. And all that good feeling had returned by the end, which does a splendid job of convincing us that something that's felt rather aimless throughout its running time, has, in fact, been a single, uniform movie. But there were definitely a few minutes during the middle where I felt that aimlessness and wondered if what I was watching mightn't have worked even better as a TV series - perhaps because many a great anime TV series has subsequently followed this formula to often excellent effect. Maybe, just maybe, 104 minutes is fractionally too much running time for something so loosely structured, though I'd hate to be the poor editor who had to choose which wonderful sequence or other would end up on the cutting room floor. On the other hand, I'm finding Takahata to be one of those directors whose work takes time to get and benefits greatly from exposure, so maybe next time I really will adore it - and for the uninitiated viewer, my advice would be to start elsewhere in the great man's CV and find your way back to this one, safe in the knowledge that there'll be plenty to reward your patience.
-oOo-
* I know, I know, they're tanuki not raccoons, but somehow "magical raccoon testicles" is just more fun to type.
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