Comments | mattmn: Miyazaki Achievement Complete!

mattmn

Miyazaki Achievement Complete!

Jul 27, 2010 10:48

Over the past year, spacevlad and I have been watching all of Hayao Miyazaki's films. He's a very famous writer/director of animated films in Japan. We kicked off the series by watching Ponyo in theaters in August 2009 and then backtracked to 1979's The Castle of Cagliostro and have been watching them all in release date order since. We came full circle ( Read more... )

Comments 12

fillerbunny9 July 27 2010, 16:03:32 UTC

The problem with Cagliostro is Rupan (Lupin in the US) and crew are established characters. I personally love Cagliostro, but then I enjoy Lupin the Third (theme music stuck in my head now >.>)

I think that more than other movies, Mononoke had a distinct message it was trying to get across (man's encroachment upon nature) and was using the gore/violence to really hammer the message home. It's certainly less of a "children's" movie. Whether it's presentation succeeds is certainly up for debate, but I also think it would be a challenge to represent the time period the movie is set in without a lot of strife/violence. (not to mention that it's posing the question of who is the bigger monster in the move. Again, not the best subject for a studio renowned for making family movies full of whimsy and wonder.)

Nausicaa is fucking fantastic, I highly recommend the Manga. I need to pick it up myself, as I've not read it since borrowing it off a friend over a decade ago.

Pon-Poko is cute, but also depressing, just a bit of warning.

spacevlad July 27 2010, 16:24:35 UTC

I like your explanations...I was kind of curious why you did your rankings the way you did after seeing Howl's last night ( ... )

petsnakereggie July 27 2010, 16:44:58 UTC

There are a few Miyazaki films I've not seen but for me, Spirited Away is by far his masterwork (as an aside, the Onion A/V club just ranked it as one of the top 25 films of the 2000's). After that, I would put My Neighbor Totoro. For a remarkable deconstruction of that film, I'd look at Roger Ebert's great movie column on the film.

I place Howl's Moving Castle near the bottom. I enjoy it but I agree with jmanna that it is sort of sloppy.

Interestingly enough, I'll be watching Castle in the Sky as part of the alphabetical movie project very soon.

davidkingsley July 27 2010, 17:07:14 UTC

I have only seen Princess Mononoke, Sprited Away, and Ponyo. I will have to watch some of the others.

tokenfanboy July 27 2010, 17:17:51 UTC

He also did another TV series as well called Sherlock Hound, we have the first disc in the Anime Detour library. http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=290

Sherlock Hound and Castle of Cagliostro are the only Miyazaki titles that have been shown at Anime Detour, since I could get screening permissions for free for those titles.