Studio Ghibli’s Howl’s Moving Castle
Friday, 23 July, 2004
The official website for Howl's Moving Castle is now up. I wish I knew how to read Japanese!
I am going to see part of the Studio Ghibli Collection Miyazaki Showcase tonight: Castle in the Sky (I noticed they prudently have left off “Laputa” because it's a rude word in Spanish but Miyazaki was taking the name from Gulliver's Travels so the blame resides with Swift) and Kiki's Delivery Service. I am also thinking about writing a review on the Miyazaki films for SALT, the AFES student magazine. My deadline is Monday. I spent a bit of time thinking about it while waiting in the doctor's surgery this afternoon, before doing a bit of research on the web. I like the following quotes:
“People at Disney are very, very cautious. They feel children shouldn't be exposed to certain things,” says Steve Alpert, an executive at Disney before moving to Ghibli, the Japanese studio where Miyazaki is based.
“Miyazaki feels very strongly that children aren't dumb and that things happening in the world shouldn't be kept from them. There's more respect for what they are able to understand.” It seems a paradox that Disney should be distributing all Ghibli's productions in the US.
(Sheila Johnston, “Bambi is dead”, September 3 2003)
Miyazaki has never believed in exempting children from life's larger themes.
His animated features give us a world where snub-nosed teens save the world from ecological disaster, while doing battle with an extended family of spirits and monsters borrowed from Japanese myths and fairytales.
(Sandra Hall, “Miyazaki Showcase”, July 1 2004)
There's no mystery about the Disney system of turning traditional fairytales into cartoon features. First, it edits them so as not to offend contemporary liberal sensibilities. Next, it adds anthropomorphic appeal by conjuring up a couple of cute furry creatures to handle pratfalls and wisecracks. Then it thinks about the songs. Its first call is probably to composer Alan Menken. Tim Rice is also on the list, as are Elton John and, shudder, Phil Collins. And so, the syrup starts to flow ...
The fact that Miyazaki's characters have only two dimensions never inhibits him from seeing them as human and, therefore, complicated.
Spirited Away is just as uncompromising, even though it's a children's film. Its heroine, Chihiro, is a 10-year-old, inspired by Miyazaki's suspicion that lots of middle-class, modern girls of her age are bored. He wants to shake them out of their cocoons, put them in touch with their sense of adventure and show them the tough guy that lives within. And more power to him. The results do galvanise ...
Nobody is quite as he or she seems, which is part of the fun. Miyazaki doesn't telegraph his moves. Nor is he afraid to toss his audiences a puzzle or two. It's the kind of storytelling that rejoices in life's perversity—the kind we learnt about from the Brothers Grimm and from Disney in its Pinocchio days. A long time ago.
(Sandra Hall, “Spirited Away”, December 14 2002)
Miyazaki has never been one to shy away from the theme of the environment and humanity's relation to it. In fact, it is a central theme in many of his films, from Nausicaä to Princess Mononoke. But usually, it is the story of how mankind's relationship with the environment has had a detrimental effect on it.
Here, the situations are completely reversed, and the serenity of the Japanese countryside gives Satsuki and Mei, the two main characters in the story, a chance to rediscover the simple pleasures in life. As they follow a frog down the stream, or have a lunch of just-picked from the garden fresh cucumber, they find ways to occupy their days as their mother recuperates from illness in a hospital and their father works day and night to support his family.
Charles McCarter, “Tonari no Totoro”)
Plot takes a backseat to a series of setpieces along Chihiro's journey into an accelerated progress to adulthood. She is befriended by Haku, a young warrior who helps her hide from the spirits whose relationship with humans is typified by the smell of fear similar to the creatures in Pixar's Monsters, Inc. Her only hope is to make a place for herself amongst the beings by adamantly getting a job and subsequently learning valuable lessons in self-reliance, sacrifice, support of others and integrity. Don't you wish more films had such an education for today's children?
Writing about a film like Spirited Away isn't about regurgitating information out for those who know little about it, but more of an experience in reminiscing. It's an absolute delight to go back in my head and recall the various creatures and their surroundings like the giant baby and the three disembodied head servants or the brilliant setpieces including the soot creatures and their six-legged master and the showstopping bath of the Stench God. But who wants to read about it when you can discover it for yourself, for this is a film that depends on the audience's wonder of revelation and demands that you tap into the parts of your imagination that may have lay dormant for years. Children will hopefully be the ones to take the most away from this experience though, opening their minds to a new world of animation that also includes Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service, but also a new heroine for young girls to look towards.
(Erick Childresss, “Spirited Away”, September 20 2002)
Blinks:
A way of funding writing in the future: pitch and idea and get people to support it.
Place where you can hire play equipment for parties, etc.
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
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I bought a copy of Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales this year, and reading them was quite a (not unhappy) shock - lots of people meeting sticky ends, violence, superstition, cannibalism, really wicked witches. And, maybe perversely, they were the more fun for it, compared to the sanitised versions I’ve seen recently. Modern children’s writers and filmmakers underestimate their audiences when they remove such elements as “unsuitable”.