Jason H. Schaumlau
2003-09-13 12:16:35 UTC
Miyazaki, the great master of anime and almost religiously regarded
among American animators, has had two widely acclaimed successes with
Mononoke Hime and Spirited Away. Neither movie, however, won the
hearts of majority of American moviegoers and regrettably I must side
with the American public.
Both movies are heavy and cumbersome, more cluttered than detailed,
repetitious, and horribly contradictory in terms of style. However,
let me at the very least state that both films are worth seeing for
Miyazaki's scope, ambition, and many nice touches by master filmmaker.
Yet, why do both movies fail to achieve greatness? First, Miyazaki's
main strength is that of a fascist aesthetician. It doesn't matter
that he's ideologically anti-militaristic or anti-fascist(even though
this too is debatable); Miyazaki is at his best when portraying and
presenting that very thing he's condemning. As an artist he's the heir
to Riefenstahl and Wagner; he's superb at conjuring up world torn
asunder by mighty war machines, apocalyptic visions and renewal thru
destruction, heroic striving to attain god-like status. A movie
director who shares the same kind of strength is George Lucas. Sure,
Attack of Clones is a cautionary epic about fascist menace yet the
very strength of Lucas's vision is inseparable from what he's
condemning.
Both Lucas and Miyazaki are limited artists but at their best they can
mount incomparable spectacles of the grandest scope. Miyazaki's best
film is Laputa Castle in the Sky for it chanced Miyazaki to exercise
his primary talent: images of war, thunderous action, soaring
adventure, epic destruction beautifully balanced by friendship between
two wonderful children, wisdom of quietude, striving toward proportion
and balance. Same could be said for Nausicaa, Miyazaki's first great
artistic and commercial success.
Among his later works, one really stands out: My Neigbor Totoro.
Unlike Nausicaa and Laputa, it's essentially a treat for kids though
adults will be delighted on the first viewing. It's basic idea and
plot work wonderfully, and Miyazaki's designs of supernatural forces
and wonders are brilliant in their simplicity and warmth. Totoro looks
like a cross between a bear and a sumo wrestler. The cat bus is both
big & roomy and nimble & nifty.
Less satisfying was Kiki with a plot that sunk and ended abruptly,
inexplicably, unsatisfactorily; worse, its message for girls was to be
a timid servant of society. Still, it had many lighthearted moments
and was generally cheerful.
Porco Rosso had more adult themes and characters and many bravura
action sequences but degenerated into pointlessness, culminating in a
dumb fight scene. Yet, it did have one of the most powerful pacifist
images ever put on screen and its flaw was that of underachievement
than overstriving.
Then came Mononoke Hime and Spirited Away, two movies where Miyazaki
strained himself to excess yet with comparatively meager results.
Mononoke Hime had some great images but Miyazaki's depiction of nature
lacked a sense of aura, the smell of earth and leaves, the rich
texture of earth and water. Though utilizing more advanced and
expensive animation process the movie resulted in images that were too
cleanly scrubbed, too precise to have that impressionistic sense of
bewilderment that is at the heart of nature. Worse, Miyazaki began to
make the mistake he carried to new heights in Spirited Away; he began
to repeat his established ideas; worse, to distort them into something
grosteque and ugly.
So, if in Laputa there was a baldheaded man with thick beard and
goggles, in Spirted Away that creature has been given 4 elongated
arms. If My Neighbor Totoro had dustbunnies, Spirted Away has
dustbunnies with legs. If his earlier films had a nasty old lady,
Spirited Away has a bigger, uglier, nastier old lady with a wart
several times bigger than those of old grannies in My Neigbor Totoro
and Laputa combined.
Gone are the simple but effective ideas like the creature Totoro.
Instead, we get 20 times more weird creatures but their odd
appearances are merely superflous, uninteresting, even annoying like
the alien creatures in Star Wars. Instead of wonderment, affection,
and/or awe inspired by Totoro or Ohmus in Nausicaa we get an endless
parade of goblins, deformities, and grossness. Miyazaki isn't tuning
his imagination but merely indulging in it as Federico Fellini in his
later films(starting with Juliet of the Spirits). Miyazaki, best
suited for grand images and bold gestures ala Lucas and Riefenstahl,
seems to have discovered surrealism of, say, Bunuel. He's doing things
his talent is wholly unsuited for. He's stretching his ideas to
unintelligible visual gibberish, straining fantasy ideas into pompous
quasi-spiritual gobbledygook phantasmagoria. There's nothing in
Spirited Away that's as simple and fun as the catbus. Instead, we have
an underwater train that recalls the arthouse antics of Ingmar Bergman
or the dream imagery of painter Dali. What is this bogus shit?
What I admired about Miyazaki at his best(even at his not-so-best)
prior to Mononoke was his movies had basics most anime works
disregarded: sense, character, story. Compared to airheaded cyberjunk
blow-em-ups like Akira, Miyazaki knew how to tell a story instead of
relying merely on empty fireworks. Yet, Spirited Away is nothing but a
series of effects, riots, and nonsensical chaos. It holds our
attention thru hysteria, headbuttings, pointless violence, and
tiresome magical interludes. It has stuff like a Jabba the Hut sized
shit taking a bath, the creature from Zeiram swallowing a Japanese
Kermito the frogu, a two ton baby who throws fits one moment and then
later spouts timeless wisdom to his two ton grandma who--don't ask me
why--sometimes turns into a crow(though unfortunately her ugly mug
remains 'human').
Miyazaki, to be sure, follows up each one of these excesses with a
lesson about life and nature, ecological mumbo jumbo but really, if
you gotta show this amount of fecal matter and vomit to make us wiser,
no thanks.
The movie is similar in some respects to Alice in Wonderland but
Miyazaki's(perhaps Japanese, as a whole)style and approach are most
unsuited to creating the kind of world of Lewis Carroll. In Alice in
Wonderland, book and Disney film, the hallucinogenic unreality derives
from within, from Alice's mindbending dream-logic psychology.
Miyazaki's strength as artist is the polar opposite of what
constitutes surrealism. Even Miyazaki's fantastic visions are mythic,
grand, otherworldly; they are not psychological, inner directed,
probing, or deep. Miyazaki is not Bunuel or David Lynch, not Lewis
Carroll. At best, he's a bombastic director of grandiose stories told
on a titanic scale. Even dreamstates in My Neighbor Totoro Miyazaki
work because they are flights into fanciful worlds, not as meandering
search for hidden symbolisms within our psyche. And so, unlike Alice
in Wonderland, Spirited Away is simply gross, oddball without being
fundamentally weird in a deeper, more unsettling sense. Also, the main
character is another Miyazaki archetype that's half conservative timid
Japanese girl and only superficially enlightened modern girl. The
message of the movie is modern people only know consumption and
excretion. That we eat up nature and have no clue as to how out of
whack our accounting is with nature and the spirit world. And, so the
little heroine learns something about how to be a dutiful, servile
girl who suppresses her modern individuality and learns to be humble,
devoted to the mythic past when man and nature supposedly lived in
harmony. Somehow, this was more fun with Kurosawa's dreams than in
Miyazaki's latest visual gross out fest or feast that sadly more
resembles one especially odious skit in Monty Python's Meaning of
Life.
Yet, how did this movie become the biggest boxoffice hit in Japan? I
think it has more to do with its calculated blend of endless array of
empty but distracting effects with its tiresome but always comforting
message about how we need to restore balance and order in our hearts
and in the world. Snore!
among American animators, has had two widely acclaimed successes with
Mononoke Hime and Spirited Away. Neither movie, however, won the
hearts of majority of American moviegoers and regrettably I must side
with the American public.
Both movies are heavy and cumbersome, more cluttered than detailed,
repetitious, and horribly contradictory in terms of style. However,
let me at the very least state that both films are worth seeing for
Miyazaki's scope, ambition, and many nice touches by master filmmaker.
Yet, why do both movies fail to achieve greatness? First, Miyazaki's
main strength is that of a fascist aesthetician. It doesn't matter
that he's ideologically anti-militaristic or anti-fascist(even though
this too is debatable); Miyazaki is at his best when portraying and
presenting that very thing he's condemning. As an artist he's the heir
to Riefenstahl and Wagner; he's superb at conjuring up world torn
asunder by mighty war machines, apocalyptic visions and renewal thru
destruction, heroic striving to attain god-like status. A movie
director who shares the same kind of strength is George Lucas. Sure,
Attack of Clones is a cautionary epic about fascist menace yet the
very strength of Lucas's vision is inseparable from what he's
condemning.
Both Lucas and Miyazaki are limited artists but at their best they can
mount incomparable spectacles of the grandest scope. Miyazaki's best
film is Laputa Castle in the Sky for it chanced Miyazaki to exercise
his primary talent: images of war, thunderous action, soaring
adventure, epic destruction beautifully balanced by friendship between
two wonderful children, wisdom of quietude, striving toward proportion
and balance. Same could be said for Nausicaa, Miyazaki's first great
artistic and commercial success.
Among his later works, one really stands out: My Neigbor Totoro.
Unlike Nausicaa and Laputa, it's essentially a treat for kids though
adults will be delighted on the first viewing. It's basic idea and
plot work wonderfully, and Miyazaki's designs of supernatural forces
and wonders are brilliant in their simplicity and warmth. Totoro looks
like a cross between a bear and a sumo wrestler. The cat bus is both
big & roomy and nimble & nifty.
Less satisfying was Kiki with a plot that sunk and ended abruptly,
inexplicably, unsatisfactorily; worse, its message for girls was to be
a timid servant of society. Still, it had many lighthearted moments
and was generally cheerful.
Porco Rosso had more adult themes and characters and many bravura
action sequences but degenerated into pointlessness, culminating in a
dumb fight scene. Yet, it did have one of the most powerful pacifist
images ever put on screen and its flaw was that of underachievement
than overstriving.
Then came Mononoke Hime and Spirited Away, two movies where Miyazaki
strained himself to excess yet with comparatively meager results.
Mononoke Hime had some great images but Miyazaki's depiction of nature
lacked a sense of aura, the smell of earth and leaves, the rich
texture of earth and water. Though utilizing more advanced and
expensive animation process the movie resulted in images that were too
cleanly scrubbed, too precise to have that impressionistic sense of
bewilderment that is at the heart of nature. Worse, Miyazaki began to
make the mistake he carried to new heights in Spirited Away; he began
to repeat his established ideas; worse, to distort them into something
grosteque and ugly.
So, if in Laputa there was a baldheaded man with thick beard and
goggles, in Spirted Away that creature has been given 4 elongated
arms. If My Neighbor Totoro had dustbunnies, Spirted Away has
dustbunnies with legs. If his earlier films had a nasty old lady,
Spirited Away has a bigger, uglier, nastier old lady with a wart
several times bigger than those of old grannies in My Neigbor Totoro
and Laputa combined.
Gone are the simple but effective ideas like the creature Totoro.
Instead, we get 20 times more weird creatures but their odd
appearances are merely superflous, uninteresting, even annoying like
the alien creatures in Star Wars. Instead of wonderment, affection,
and/or awe inspired by Totoro or Ohmus in Nausicaa we get an endless
parade of goblins, deformities, and grossness. Miyazaki isn't tuning
his imagination but merely indulging in it as Federico Fellini in his
later films(starting with Juliet of the Spirits). Miyazaki, best
suited for grand images and bold gestures ala Lucas and Riefenstahl,
seems to have discovered surrealism of, say, Bunuel. He's doing things
his talent is wholly unsuited for. He's stretching his ideas to
unintelligible visual gibberish, straining fantasy ideas into pompous
quasi-spiritual gobbledygook phantasmagoria. There's nothing in
Spirited Away that's as simple and fun as the catbus. Instead, we have
an underwater train that recalls the arthouse antics of Ingmar Bergman
or the dream imagery of painter Dali. What is this bogus shit?
What I admired about Miyazaki at his best(even at his not-so-best)
prior to Mononoke was his movies had basics most anime works
disregarded: sense, character, story. Compared to airheaded cyberjunk
blow-em-ups like Akira, Miyazaki knew how to tell a story instead of
relying merely on empty fireworks. Yet, Spirited Away is nothing but a
series of effects, riots, and nonsensical chaos. It holds our
attention thru hysteria, headbuttings, pointless violence, and
tiresome magical interludes. It has stuff like a Jabba the Hut sized
shit taking a bath, the creature from Zeiram swallowing a Japanese
Kermito the frogu, a two ton baby who throws fits one moment and then
later spouts timeless wisdom to his two ton grandma who--don't ask me
why--sometimes turns into a crow(though unfortunately her ugly mug
remains 'human').
Miyazaki, to be sure, follows up each one of these excesses with a
lesson about life and nature, ecological mumbo jumbo but really, if
you gotta show this amount of fecal matter and vomit to make us wiser,
no thanks.
The movie is similar in some respects to Alice in Wonderland but
Miyazaki's(perhaps Japanese, as a whole)style and approach are most
unsuited to creating the kind of world of Lewis Carroll. In Alice in
Wonderland, book and Disney film, the hallucinogenic unreality derives
from within, from Alice's mindbending dream-logic psychology.
Miyazaki's strength as artist is the polar opposite of what
constitutes surrealism. Even Miyazaki's fantastic visions are mythic,
grand, otherworldly; they are not psychological, inner directed,
probing, or deep. Miyazaki is not Bunuel or David Lynch, not Lewis
Carroll. At best, he's a bombastic director of grandiose stories told
on a titanic scale. Even dreamstates in My Neighbor Totoro Miyazaki
work because they are flights into fanciful worlds, not as meandering
search for hidden symbolisms within our psyche. And so, unlike Alice
in Wonderland, Spirited Away is simply gross, oddball without being
fundamentally weird in a deeper, more unsettling sense. Also, the main
character is another Miyazaki archetype that's half conservative timid
Japanese girl and only superficially enlightened modern girl. The
message of the movie is modern people only know consumption and
excretion. That we eat up nature and have no clue as to how out of
whack our accounting is with nature and the spirit world. And, so the
little heroine learns something about how to be a dutiful, servile
girl who suppresses her modern individuality and learns to be humble,
devoted to the mythic past when man and nature supposedly lived in
harmony. Somehow, this was more fun with Kurosawa's dreams than in
Miyazaki's latest visual gross out fest or feast that sadly more
resembles one especially odious skit in Monty Python's Meaning of
Life.
Yet, how did this movie become the biggest boxoffice hit in Japan? I
think it has more to do with its calculated blend of endless array of
empty but distracting effects with its tiresome but always comforting
message about how we need to restore balance and order in our hearts
and in the world. Snore!