It's a magical world

Karigurashi no Arrietty | The Secret World of Arrietty. Dir. Yonebayashi Hitomasa, 2010.

This movie is so bad. The English dub is awful, the underlying movie is terrible, this movie is bad. I have seen almost every movie Studio Ghibli has made, and this has to be the worst.

There, I said it. I cannot understand how this thing had a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes! I cannot understand how it is an NYT Critics' Pick! It is a bad movie. I went with four of my friends, and all five of us independently considered (and rejected) walking out during the first third, except for my one friend who just fell asleep, because the movie is not good.

No, okay, I can be rational about this, I swear. The movie is based on Mary Norton's The Borrowers, and it was written and planned by Miyazaki Hayao himself, so it's not like it's totally without pedigree. Sickly child "Sean" goes to stay at the house of his aunt "Jessica" in the countryside of western Tokyo before his heart operation, and there he discovers the borrower Arrietty and her family living in secret inside his house. "Sean" is more or less a moron (or, to be more fair, a privileged idiot), so he manages to screw up the lives of Arrietty and her family but good in trying to "help" and "protect" them (why he thinks they need his help and protection? Because they're smaller and weaker than he is, obviously!), no thanks to the inexplicably evil creeper housekeeper Hara.

As you may have guessed from my liberal use of quote marks in the above, the English dub (directed by Gary Rydstrom) is ham-handed at best and flat-out terrible at worst. None of the characters are well done by in their translated dialogue, and whoever wrote it has a lead ear, because the dialogue is just terrible. Even worse, Disney apparently couldn't be bothered to shell out the big bucks for people who can actually voice-act this time around, so almost everyone delivers their lines in a monotone or without much affect. Combined with the ridiculous dialogue, we were cracking up at how bad it was by the halfway point, after we started being appalled enough to realize that we could laugh.

So, the dub is terrible, but the movie itself is not good either. There is no plot for the first third or so, and what plot that emerges is inexplicable and boringly predictable. Characters (Hara) have no explicable motivation for their actions, and all in all it really just feels like Ghibli is phoning it in--Hara is cribbed off Yubaba in Spirited Away, Arrietty's future husband the caveman borrower is cribbed off Ashitaka in Mononoke, and Arrietty herself is a generic retread of every other Ghibli heroine ever, without the benefit of a personality or, again, discernible motivations to explain her behaviour. I liked the cat best of all in the end, partly because the cat looks just like the Cat Bus. You thought I was joking about this movie being auto-derivative.

Ugh. We did get some good laughs out of how bad it was in the end, at least.

Massive disclaimer: Obviously I saw the U.S. version. It may well be that the U.K. version isn't atrocious! In which case, I am jealous, though as I said, I don't think even a stellar dub could rescue the movie from its underlying problems.

Kokurikozaka kara | From Upon Poppy Hill, prod. Studio Ghibli, dir. Miyazaki Gorô, 2011.

I've had an embarrassment of riches in terms of anime movies this summer, and I'm happy to report that this last film, Studio Ghibli's newest, did not end my streak on a sour note. To wit, this is classic Ghibli, decidedly not very innovative within the main line of the oeuvre but warm and human and quietly beautiful in that way that life is, if we keep our hearts open for it. Certainly Miyazaki Gorô has redeemed himself in my book after the travesty that was Gedo Senki.

The internet tells me that the movie is based on a 1980 manga, set in southern Yokohama in 1963. It's very much a movie of that time, right down to the inclusion of Sakamoto Kyu's classic "Ue wo Muite Arukô" in the soundtrack not once but twice. The film follows Matsuzaki Umi, a second-year high school student, and her burgeoning relationship with her classmate Kazama Shun. Shun's a member of the student newspaper, and Umi has good penmanship, so she starts helping write out their articles to be inked and run off. Not long after that she gets the idea to clean out the old mansion that serves as a clubhouse for the student activity groups, and learns some surprising things about hers and Shun's parents.

When I put it like this it sounds horribly slight, and I suppose it is, if you think that family and love and grief are not inherently important topics. Umi and her sister and mother and the women who live with them are all finely etched, and Shun and the students--radical as all students in the 1960s were, so earnest it's painful, unaware or determinedly ignoring the fact that the nails have already been pounded into the coffin of their activism--are achingly real too, in that Ghibli sketch way. The scene where the students instantly switch from a near fist-fight debate to singing classic songs en masse to fool the school principal is brilliant.

It says something about this film, I think, and about Japan today, that it's set in the spring of 1963, when Japan's economy was starting to really lift off and everyone has the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 firmly on the brain and the war that stole Umi's and Shun's parents wasn't the Asia-Pacific but the Korean War. This is, of course, a movie soaked in nostalgia, but various sharp notes keep it from being saccharine, and if the movie's shocking plot twist is revealed in the end to be not a twist at all, that doesn't change the fact that the plot does feint where it feinted. (Yes, I'm being vague.) Fifty years later, it all seems very far out of reach, but closer in some ways than Miyazaki Hayao's Gake no Ue no Ponyo, even though that movie was aggressively set in the present.

Aside from Ponyo, I was reminded most of Mimi wo Sumaseba, which has similar themes and which, significantly, was the only film directed by Miyazaki Hayao's hand-picked successor Kondô Yoshifumi before the latter's untimely death. (I was also reminded somewhat of Kiki's Delivery Service, in that one of the women living in Umi's house is a painter, but unfortunately we never get to hear her views on art and creation.) If Miyazaki Gorô can keep this up, Studio Ghibli will be in good, if perhaps not brilliant, hands for the foreseeable future.

You know, I might be the only person in the world still willing to admit this, but I actually liked the Blood + anime. I thought it had a good horror plot, interesting and sympathetic characters and angst, and equally importantly an intelligent take on contemporary imperialism and colonialism and fucked-up global power relations. ( Spoilers are bloodthirsty )

In conclusion: I think I have better things to do with these 24 minutes every week, but I'll probably hang on for another episode or two to make sure.

Kon Satoshi has died at the age of 47. Rumor says the cause was cancer, according to news agencies & his New York Times obituary.

Via @alexleavitt on Twitter, I think this post at Subatomic Brainfreeze says it best, both in regards to what Kon had done already and in what we could have expected from him in the future. Hopefully his final feature film will be released at some point.

This definitely means there should be a panel on his anime at Wiscon next year.

It's all inkstone's fault that I'm watching this. Thanks!

( The truth lies in that which is hidden from your eyes. )

So, in conclusion, I like that this show has the occult and time travel and aliens. It is the triathlete of wacky anime! By way of Haruhi, of course.

Steamboy. Dir. Ootomo Katsuhiro, 2004.

Yeah, it's pretty sad that Ootomo Katsuhiro spent ten years trying to revise Castle in the Sky and not only failed to improve on it, but also failed to make a decent movie.

( Oh tell me, why--do we build castles in the sky? )

Summer Wars. Dir. Hosoda Mamoru, 2009.

Summer Wars tells the story of Kenji, a young math geek who takes a part-time job pretending to be his older classmate Natsuki's boyfriend for her grandmother's 90th birthday party and accompanies her out to the family seat in Nagano prefecture (significant because the Jinnouchi family descends from people who backed the wrong side in Japan's wars of unification, and the losers had to decamp to some pretty remote places; Nagano's actually comparatively central). Kenji's other part-time job is as a code monkey for OZ, the global massively multi-person online environment which has grown to include over one-sixth of the world population. It's Google's cloud Chromium, with a few more amenities and better accessibiilty. When Kenji decrypts OZ's 2056-bit encryption key unknowingly, by hand, he comes under suspicion as the person behind a hacker A.I. that swiftly mounts a coup d'etat in OZ.

( The Wired is real.  )

I wrote the following for one of the two history classes I took in college in spring 2006. I'm still really pleased with it.

---

Samurai Stew: History and Anime in Edo
“…Yet there is something that’s special, that one ingredient that makes it a stew. And do you know what that is?”
“The meat?”
“That’s what everyone says. The meat. But that same meat could be used for anything. Curry, goulash, it’s the same ingredients.
It’s the stew mix that makes it a stew.”
—Cowboy Bebop: Knocking on Heaven’s Door
To the average person outside of Japan, one of the most familiar images of the country is undoubtedly that of the samurai. While the age of the samurai lasted approximately 700 years, from roughly 1185 to 1876 CE, these stereotypical images are almost always drawn from the early-modern Edo period (1603-1867), when Japanese society was “frozen,” at least according to official ideology, in the patterns it had acquired in the sixteenth century and before.

One of the primary vehicles for constructing this image of Japan, both in Japan and abroad, is that of the moving image. ( Anime & history in Edo )

Kiki's Delivery Service | Majo no takkyubin. Dir. Miyazaki Hayao: Studio Ghibli, 1989.

This is the last of the major Studio Ghibli films that I hadn't seen--the only Ghibli films I haven't, in point of fact, are the minor Umi ga kikoeru and Omohide poroporo, (For the record, we don't talk about Gedo senki around here.)

In some ways this movie is the most flight-obsessed of all the Ghibli movies, though of course this is arguable; flight is a central motif in Ghibli, maybe the central motif. I really do enjoy the way Ghibli presents flying, too, and girls' relation to it; in this movie in particular the gender divide is stark, as Tombo notes when he wishes that he had been born into a witch family so that he could fly naturally, rather than only with the aid of ungainly technology. Indeed, Kiki's ontological ease with flying, and the fact that it's her talent and her livelihood, makes the disappearance of her powers of magic and flight all the more wrenching, and the climax all the better; she has found herself again, and won a place in her town's heart doing it. ("Look, up in the sky! That's not a bird, it's a girl! No, it's Kiki!")

In some ways too this movie also seems to be the most female-centric of the Ghibli corpus: Kiki derives her powers from her mother, it's the female baker Osono who gives Kiki her room, Kiki's customers are almost all women, and it's the painter Ursula who helps Kiki deal with her depression when she does lose her power. Even Jiji, a male cat, is voiced by a woman in the Japanese version (as is standard in Japanese animation)--and in the Japanese version Kiki does not regain the ability to talk to him, significantly. Despite Miyazaki putting Kiki on the back of Tombo's bike in that one scene, I really did enjoy the movie's presentation of one girl's struggle to find her independence, and her eventual success at it.

All of these are connected in some fashion to halfamoon.

arefadedaway has made a wonderful vid combining two of my favorite things: Princess Tutu and Revolutionary Girl Utena. The vid spoils both anime, so don't watch it if you're concerned about such things, but if you don't care or if you've seen both shows (you totally should watch both shows, they are both amazing), the vid is marvelous. Great song choice, and a great story: women choosing their own stories' ending.

zahrawithaz has a roundup of vids focusing on Amazing Ladies. There's some great stuff here. (I am in love with that Kamikaze Girls/Shimotsuma monogatari vid,I have to say.)

thedeadparrot has made a great video focusing on one amazing lady in particular, Toph from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Bonus points for using a song by an artist of color (in this case, M.I.A. I think it's the remix for Slumdog Millionaire, but I'd have to check to be sure.), to say nothing of awesome editing.

And in halfamoon itself, harriet_spy has a feminist vid sampler. Oo, fannish history!