Miyazaki Achievement Complete!

[mattmn]

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

Comments

[lugia222]

I'll echo what so many others have said and express surprise that you rated Howl's so highly, and Spirited Away so comparatively low. I will admit that I've only see Naussica, Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Howl, but I remember being somewhat disappointed when I left the theater after seeing Howl. I agree with jmanna, but I think for you it clearly tapped into everything you love about Doctor Who, so it will always be special for you in that regard. =D

[mattmn]

I'm kind of surprised that Howl's was so low on everyone else's list. I guess I enjoyed the world - it combined a Victorian take on European towns and amped up the magic/witches elements that were first introduced in Kiki's.

I really liked the characters too and the plight of Sophie - being cursed with old age. It also had a lot of memorable scenes for me - Sophie and The Witch of the Waste climbing the steps to the King's castle, Sophie's slow, deliberate, and plodding journey to the wastelands, etc. Plus I think Markl was hilarious. His disguise and his character reminded me a lot of Sokka and Aang from Avatar.

A lot of it reminded me of Stardust, another film I love, as well - the eating of a falling star and gaining powers, etc.

As far as Howl's being a sloppy film - the only parts I had a problem with was the warring nations backdrop - it seemed to come out of nowhere and it wrapped up really quickly as well. But other than that, I loved it.

[mattmn]

I guess my problem with Spirited Away was that, at the end, you are left wondering whether the whole thing was a dream. I've always had this problem with films (or TV shows) where the whole "dream" element is used. Kind of like "What was the point?" and "Why did I get invested in something?" I know all stories are fiction but when it gets so meta that you are watching characters in a fictional story that may or may not being experiencing another fictional story within that first framework that I lose the attachment and interest.

It's a personal bias - one that has prevented me from enjoying the holodeck episodes of Star Trek as well as preventing me from fully enjoying films like Inception. It's also not an internally consistent bias - and I'm the first to admit that - because it didn't prevent me from enjoying films like The Neverending Story, The Matrix, or Pan's Labyrinth.

[petsnakereggie]

I actually disagree with your interpretation. I don't feel there was any ambiguity to the story at all. I feel quite strongly that the spirit world in that film is real.

I've watched it several times because my kids absolutely loved it. There are, in fact, quite a few things in the ending that support only the conclusion that the spirit world exists.

[belindabird]

Glad that you enjoyed your Miyazaki quest :) I think my personal top three are Nausicaa, Mononoke and Totoro.

Mononoke Hime is a film I enjoy because it's so different in tone from Miyazaki's other works. It has a fairly complicated message that I only feel like I really fully understood after seeing it multiple times - I think it's a mistake to label it as a simple environmentalist narrative, because it has such a strong theme of Westernization, of which the environmental message is really a smaller part. I read an article while I was still in college that stuck with me, about the extinction of the Japanese wolf. In essence, it explains how the Japanese people in ancient times viewed their native wolf population with reverence (or at least some amount of respect), until Western influence changed that perception (much like with farmers in the US, the wolf came into conflict with agricultural interest and became reviled) causing the eventual extinction of the native sub-species. The article is here if you're ever interested.

[mattmn]

Thanks for the information and thoughts. Yeah, I don't know what it is about Nausicaa either! I actually got Matt "Starting Point" as a gift earlier this year but neither of us have read it yet.