Pom Poko Credit: Studio Ghibli. Especially when they use their scrotums to such comic effect. Like many Ghibli movies this has a strong environmental message, as a tribe of raccoons prominent in Japanese folklore have to settle their own differences to stop developers razing the wooded hillside where they live to make way for a housing development.
Porco Rosso Credit: Studio Ghibli. Utterly captivating and memorable. Grave of the Fireflies Credit: Studio Ghibli. Grave of the Fireflies is not an easy watch but it is a necessary one.
One of the earlier Ghibli features, released in , it tells the story of Seita and his younger sister Setsuko, who are fighting to survive in Japan during the final days of World War Two. Unlike the more famous manga Barefoot Gen, which covers similar ground in comic-book form, Grave of the Fireflies does not focus on the atomic bombing of Japan, as Western audiences might expect, but on the blanket firebombing of cities such as Kobe. It is no less horrific for that — possibly more so, as it is a lesser-known tale.
With their mother dead in a bombing raid and their father fighting with the Japanese Navy, the children are forced to fend for themselves. Whisper of the Heart Credit: Studio Ghibli. Studio Ghibli has you well served with several movies.
Whisper of the Heart is a coming-of-age story about a bookish girl, Shizuku, who finds that all the books she borrows from the library have been checked out by the same boy, and resolves to find him. Princess Mononoke Credit: Studio Ghibli. Then Princess Mononoke is for you. It is set in a fanatical feudal Japan where a young prince is caught up in a conflict between the ecologically-rapacious denizens of an industrial town intent on clearing a huge forest to mine for iron, and the diverse spirits who live in the threatened woods.
The Tale of Princess Kaguya is one of the more recent movies, released in and based on the folk story The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. Due to this, no scene throughout the movies feels unnecessary or lackluster. Hayao Miyazaki is a master world builder, and that never fails to show in any of his films. It's not something you would naturally consciously notice, but if you go back and look for this the next time you sit down to watch a Ghibli movie, you'll see what I mean.
Providing the audience with a mystical place is great, but what makes it truly phenomenal is the way that Miyazaki combines magic with realism. We remember all his movies as being magical, but if you actually look into it, he includes a good amount of realism as well.
For example, according to the South China Morning Post , Miyazaki and his team actually took field trips to the forests in Japan to do research for films such as My Neighbor Totoro. The best way to connect an audience to a fantastical work of art is by adding just the right amount of realism to it, and Miyazaki captures this balance perfectly.
Yet another reason that his films are so successful is because both children and adults from all cultures can resonate with them. Isao Takahata's adaptation of the popular Nono-chan manga feels like a slice-of-life version of Totoro , exchanging the fairy-tale creatures for hilarious vignettes of the everyday life of a regular family.
What makes this special is the way the film is animated to look like newspaper comic strips, using the medium to tell a story in a way that otherwise could not be replicated. Though it was made before the actual founding of Studio Ghibli, Nausicaa gives viewers a glimpse into much of what would make Studio Ghibli the powerhouse it'd become.
It's a less graphic version of Princess Mononoke that nevertheless shares its anger at the way humans treat nature. What differentiates Nausicaa is that it doesn't offer the same nuance approach to villains that Mononoke has, because it doesn't extend them any sympathy.
The film is set in the far future, where the air has become so toxic that humans are forced to wear face masks and live in isolated cities to protect themselves from giant mutant insects.
Though it may feel a bit redundant if you watch Mononoke beforehand, the worldbuilding, creature design, and more optimistic ending to Nausicaa make this a film worth seeking out. There comes a point in everyone's life when they realize life didn't turn out to be the way they imagined as kids, so of course Takahata would make that into a movie.
Only Yesterday follows a woman reflecting on her childhood memories while on a train ride to the countryside. The film is an observation of everything from social class, the role of women in Japanese society, urbanization, generational gap, and the question of whether you betray your past self by not following every one of the dreams you had as a kid.
Though this is the most low-key of Ghibli's films, it's still a powerful narrative, one that feels like the kind of indie drama that would win every award at a film festival. Intended to be Miyazaki's final film before retirement, this is a great film about an artist reflecting on his legacy.
Like Takahata with The Tale of Princess Kaguya , Miyazaki takes his love of planes to tell the story of a WWII airplane designer which also serves as a reflection of a lifetime making anti-war films that were never seen as sufficiently anti-war. Miyazaki splendidly and meticulously gives us a glimpse at the complexity of both loving airplanes and being a pacifist who knows the true purpose of those planes. The Wind Rises , then, becomes as much a film about a designer coming to terms with his creation being used for horrible purposes, as a filmmaker coming to terms with his creative output being misinterpreted, and reinterpreted in ways he never imagined.
It may be a more muted film than Miyazaki's earlier work, but it's a fantastic film about being forced to become a realist and a great look back at the work of a master at the top of his game. This is a love letter to WWII-era epics like Casablanca , following an Italian flying ace in the s hunting air pirates in the Adriatic Sea, only he also has the face of a pig. Porco is one of Ghibli's most memorable characters, a classic hotshot, chauvinistic adventure-movie star you could totally see Humphrey Bogart play if it was made in the s.
Of course, Miyazaki is not going to just give us an adventure movie, because he also takes the opportunity to comment on the rise of fascism in Italy during the s, with Mussolini's face a constant presence in the background, talk of secret police becoming more prominent, a flashback scene that walks the line between fantastical and super grounded in reality, all leading to a rallying cry that feels all the more powerful today: "I'd rather be a pig than a fascist.
Studio Ghibli has a lot of weird films, but there's no film as balls-to-the-wall sorry weird as the one with the giant magical tanuki scrotums.
You heard that right. Though Grave of the Fireflies is Isao Takahata's rawest and darkest film, this is his version of Princess Mononoke — a furiously angry dark comedy about nature striking back against suburban development. Defending nature is a group of tanuki or raccoon dogs who aren't afraid of haunting nearby construction sites to put the fear of god into people by using their huge scrotums to shapeshift.
This being Takahata, you shouldn't count on Pom Poko having a cheerful ending, especially given that the film is based around a real residential development around Tokyo that already existed by the time the film was released.
There's a surprising amount of body horror, sexual tension among tanuki, and unrepentant murder that you'd expect on a children's movie, but there's no denying Takahata's infectious passion for the message that comes up time and time again in the works of Studio Ghibli — urban development and expansion does irreparable danger to nature, and when we lose that, we lose ourselves.
Technically the first proper Studio Ghibli title, and the beginning of many tropes that the studio would repeat for years. Once again, the story is simple enough, following a boy and a girl trying to find a magic crystal and a castle in the sky before a group of pirates catch up to them. And once again, the story is but a starting point for a grander exploration of the struggle between nature and man-made technology, which would become such a big part of Ghibli's work.
This is one of the rare Ghibli films to feature a fully recognizable and unsympathetic villain, yet it's one hell of a despicable and fun-to-watch villain. Also known as the Ghibli movies you don't show to kids, or to people who don't want to cry every 5 minutes, Grave of the Fireflies is one of Takahata's most powerful films, and one that should nonetheless be experienced by people of all ages. The film follows two siblings during the final months of WWII, as they face unspeakable horrors following the death of their mother during an air raid.
Make no mistake, this is far from the whimsy of Totoro or Kiki , but a grim and grounded anti-war film that catches you off-guard with a story of loss, pain and also love. Be sure to have plenty of tissues at hand.
0コメント