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i've already watched like half of these this year already but frick it, im in. (warning: i have Opinions about Howl's Moving Castle, and people will hate me for speaking the truth)
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Sep 19, 2023 21:13
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 08:40 |
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The scene where Lupin is in the tower with the princess in the moonlight, and the romantic music is playing, is pure magic.  All of the bombast of the chase scenes and heists and spy gadgets gets replaced with really emotive character acting and wistful music. When Lupin pulls the rose out of thin air, and then starts unfurling little flags from it... Jeez, it's so wonderful. It just instantly wins you over to the idea that a thief is their own kind of hero.
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Sep 25, 2023 03:25
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The giant warrior was animated by Hideaki Anno and and is one of the real standout moments in the movie for me. Just so gnarly and completely sells the dread that's been building the whole movie about what the people and planet are at risk of repeating. In terms of the story vs. the world... The manga goes much, much further with the world and the story than the movie does. To the point that I'd almost describe the movie as a truncated, fairytale rendition of the manga, which is truly an epic.
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Sep 27, 2023 05:04
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Boy and the Heron was a really good movie, very dark. The first half hour or so (up until they get sucked down through the floor) had me entirely in rapture. Still a strong movie, but the scope of that early part of the film is told so lucidly and with such intensity. I wasn't expecting it to be so much like Night on the Galactic Railroad meets Pan's Labyrinth. It's a strange movie, because I feel like the diagetic mysteries of the story and setting compel a rewatch, but the thematic takeaways are basically out in the open (it is a movie titled "how do you live?" after all). The thing that I really loved the most about the movie is that it's so willing to just lean into being an art film. The wound at the beginning, or the swarms of animals--there's such a force to the visual metaphor, they are so arresting. I think this will be compared frequently to Princess Mononoke for being a dark and violent fantasy, but imo it is very much a direct evolution from The Wind Rises. Except that The Wind Rises may be aimed at an older generation while The Boy and the Heron is aimed at a younger generation. They are both about the connection between art and civilization. About the folly of trying to create uncontaminated art in a contaminated world, and how that very impulse somehow is a shadow of the impulse to control and order society through violence. Cephas fucked around with this message at 05:57 on Dec 9, 2023 |
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Dec 9, 2023 05:53
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I just love how metal it is that The Boy and the Heron is about an erudite nobleman finding a hollow meteorite in the countryside and going mad with power, building a tower around the meteorite's hull, digging out the ground beneath it into a series of labyrinths, becoming a wizard-god, creating a nonlinear mind palace on the foundations of the world of death, and filling that world with flora and fauna and forcing them to live and evolve against their will. it's completely batshit and rivals the Nausicaa manga in terms of how freaking rad it is.
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Dec 9, 2023 19:15
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Ohtori Akio posted:under the circumstances i think we would all do the same username checks out
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Dec 10, 2023 04:31
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I personally am not super duper interested in doing meta, autobio readings of works of fiction, but Miyazaki has certainly made it as explicit as possible in his latest two films, so I think it's inevitable. I don't have a like, definitive understanding of his artistic life or anything, but as I understand it, he really was hoping to train a successor for the company and failed to do so (largely through the results of his own actions). Three of the major figures in his life's work were his son Goro, his coworker Yoshifumi Kondo (who died quite young of a heart aneurysm), and his coworker and eventual creative peer, Hideaki Anno. In many ways, The Wind Rises can be read as a film in which Miyazaki uses the life of Jiro Horikoshi as a reflection of the role of the creative artist, imbuing the character with Miyazaki's personality as well as Hideaki Anno's (who voices the main character). The Wind Rises is a condemnation of Japanese imperialism--its corrupting influence on the entire social structure, from the economy to thought policing. But it is also a complex and nuanced critique of the very act of creating. A repeated question in the film is, "Would you rather live in a world with or without the Pyramids?" Horikoshi spends the film in a state of willful ignorance of the consequences of his creative drive. His desire to create a thing of purity and beauty--which he knows could never truly be pure and free during a wartime economy--destroys the life of the woman he loves and eventually will take countless lives, including the lives of the very pilots who would fly his planes. Miyazaki refuses to condemn Horikoshi for chasing after a beautiful dream, but shows the consequences of his actions and impels him narratively to continue living, despite everything. This seems very much in line with Miyazaki's view of his own craft of animation. The ethos of Studio Ghibli (and most of Miyazaki's works before founding the studio) is clearly centered around the idea that animation can serve a moral role in society. But otaku and fanculture led to anime taking on a sort of anime-for-anime's sake, rather than anime as a vehicle for social improvement. This critique of otaku culture is a recurring idea in Hideaki Anno's work as well. So in The Wind Rises, there is this metanarrative element--Horikoshi just wanted to create wings that could as fly as beautifully as the ideal in his mind, but the reality was a weapon of war. Miyazaki and Anno wanted to create anime that would improve the lives of the people who watched them, but animation became a consumerist commodity that lead to reflexive fixation rather than an artistic medium for social change (to describe their view). This thematic thread is continued in The Boy and the Heron, which is also about a creative person whose work gets away from them. The great granduncle character creates a tower in which form and time and space are abstracted. But this tower, with its grand designs of Creation and Imposed Order, was built on the foundation of a world of death and rebirth. The foundation of the tower seems to be the ocean world that Kiriko, the Pelicans, and the Warawara dwell in. It appears to be some sort of samsaric realm where hungry ghosts are able to prepare to be reborn as humans. Which is to say that it is a liminal space based around hunger, deprivation, and want, but also the transformation of these things into new life. The granduncle, having created a space where he can impose order, at some point during the construction of the tower seemed to have imported a great many birds to live inside his world. The titular Heron became something of a magician's assistant. The Pelicans were trapped at the lowest level of the tower--the ocean of hungry ghosts--and were forced to debase themselves and eat Warawara to avoid starving to death. Something similar seemed to happen to the Parakeets. Having lived so long in the tower, and deprived of their natural environment (a pair of them comment, in awe, at the granduncle's tropical garden full of regular parakeets, asking "is this the land of our ancestors?"), the Parakeets evolved into hungry peasants, operating on a mob mentality. They fully embrace the Parakeet King, a strongman who promises them order if they act united to a common purpose. But the granduncle recognizes that his power is fleeting. The entire enterprise of the tower is liable to topple at any moment. Because it is only a construct, a creation that attempts to impose order on the spirit world upon which it has arrived like a colony. Stones arranged in the shape of a tower are the only thing keeping it standing. Each stone is tinged with malice, and balances precariously, and if a single stone's balance is lost, the entire construct will collapse in on itself. This is where the thematic thread of The Wind Rises connects fully to The Boy and the Heron. The creative act stands at the same time for a political act. The political order of Imperial Japan (of human civilization writ large) is composed of many stones, many enterprises. Jiro Horikoshi's engineering firm is one such enterprise. Mahito's father's factory is another such enterprise. Every sector of society is balanced precariously to create this thing we call Order; but every sector is also tainted, and the tower is liable to collapse at any point. Only through great effort can it be kept going, one day at a time. This is also, the granduncle seems to be saying, true about the creative act. His tower is a great creative enterprise, but it was contaminated from the outset. The granduncle goes to great lengths to find pure stones, so that Mahito could build an order that is a truly blank slate. He wants Mahito to inherit this order, but Mahito declines. Mahito gives two reasons. The first is that, as an imperfect human being who is marked by malice, even pure stones could not create a pure order--the malice that exists in his heart would defile his tower. The second reason is that the world Mahito desires--a world where his friends and loved ones are--can be found outside the tower. So he decides to walk away from the tower, into a world of chaos and uncertainty and loss, because it would mean truly living. The Parakeet King, as a strongman, believes that Order is achieved by declaring "this is so" in no uncertain terms. He thinks that Order can be achieved by the sword. So when he tries to hastily assemble the stone blocks, Order falls. The Parakeet King is not necessarily a villain. His species was trapped in an artificial order and was forced to evolve to survive within it. So he believed in order without truly understanding how fragile it always was. When the tower crumbles and the parakeets escape, they return to their true form, which are free little birds. All of this is layered upon the death that predicates the story. Himi accepts her own death, which is why she is able to enter the tower and leave it to live her life out, and this acceptance and fearlessness of a mortal life is the gift she gives to Mahito. Violence, malice, fascism, delusions of grandeur--all of these are cursed attempts to control the shape of the world. There is no way to escape pain and loss, but pain and loss can be transformed by choosing love and family and friendship and freedom. By making this choice to live, you can burn without being afraid of burning. There is no need for a tower to hide away in, unreachable and unmalleable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXAsh4z2RuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un4p-6lzIpI anyway that's my rough reading of the movie after a couple days to digest. Cephas fucked around with this message at 09:08 on Dec 10, 2023 |
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Dec 10, 2023 09:03
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The book he reads is the classic childrens philosophy novel "how do you live," the same title as the film in Japan. Wikipedia notes the book was repressed during ww2 in Japan for encouraging free thinking. Those rad arrows are a real thing too (they're really cool in Total War: Shogun 2 lol) and Wikipedia says they are used to ward off spirits in Shinto belief.
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Dec 10, 2023 13:53
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Mahito hit himself with a rock partially bc he knew he was the son of a rich man and could pin it on the bullies as an excuse for not needing to go back to school. The reason he hits himself so hard is because he blames himself for not being able to save his mother.
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Dec 11, 2023 06:54
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Steve Yun posted:I would like to know about the murder. Was it worked to death like in Amadeus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshifumi_Kond%C5%8D Had pneumonia in 1985. Made his Ghibli directorial debut in 1995. Got tagged by Miyazaki to work on Princess Mononoke in 1997. Died in 1998 of an anyeurism. Of the working conditions for Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki is quoted as saying: “I didn’t feel obliged to keep the company going… I was a slave of this piece. I didn’t care if everyone collapsed to complete this film. I was prepared to let them work without sleep for days.” Here's a video essay about the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPbk2zf4-zQ
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Jan 6, 2024 06:47
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 08:40 |
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On a rewatch, the meta auteur's-inheritance reading of Boy and the Heron receded into the background for me. It's still a fairly mysterious movie even on a second viewing. Things that stuck out to me: 1. The noble pelican says that pelicans were brought to the tower for the purpose of eating the wara wara 2. The graveyard gate is inscribed with the message "He who seeks my knowledge shall die." 3. Kiriko reproaches Mahito for crossing the graveyard gates and warns him of a threat that we never see on-screen: that the dead would rise against him if he doesn't follow the proper ritual for leaving the graveyard. (could these be the wraith-like boatsmen, rather than the wara wara?) 4. The sea of the dead with its phantom boats is right there throughout the movie; while maneuvering around the tower Mahito briefly climbs out a window and sees it not far away. 5. Mahito intuits that the stone building blocks are made of "gravestones," which his great uncle confirms. These points lead to a kind of sinister reading of the great uncle's designs. Was he trying to have the pelicans devour all the dead spirits so he could unearth their knowledge without opposition? Was he, by having the pelicans eat the wara wara, trying to deplete the earth of life, so that his tower would be the new center of creation in the cosmos? Also, his tower is metaphorically built on the backs of the dead, going by the gravestone description--an apt metaphor for the war and its imperialism. Kiriko has a scar similar to Mahito's and says that it was from a "swamp thrasher" (English translation; no such bird exists with the common name "swamp thrasher"). It appears that she ran in to the tower at the same time as Himi (since she steps out the same door as Himi at the end). And the two of them have some degree of magical power over fire, which they use to protect the wara wara--seemingly acting against the great uncle's designs, if he brought the pelicans in to eat the wara wara. Did Himi gain "the knowledge of the dead" and thus gain control over the element that would ultimately kill her? I don't think all of these details necessarily need to be decoded for the movie to make sense to the viewer; the mysterious and magical logic of the film is certainly intentional. But it's interesting that there seems to be this hidden metaphysical structure to the story. It reminds me a bit of the Nausicaa manga, which goes to some truly wild territory as it explores the setting. the birthing chamber sequence is still the most mysterious thing in the movie to me. I don't really understand the significance of what is going on there, or why the characters make the decisions that they do. it seems to transcend normality and takes on a mythical register. Cephas fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Jan 22, 2024 |
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Jan 22, 2024 16:56
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