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Go and see PONYO
I was lucky enough to tour Panasonic Hollywood Laboratory last month, and one of the few things they’d let me point my camcorder at was Miyazaki’s PONYO (hey, you know how Hollywood is with intellectual property). Today I finally got a chance to see the film, digitally projected at the Glasgow Film Theatre.
First of all, I do not normally like anime. Although I have a special fondness for the likes of Spirited Away, I find most Japanese animated features to be incredibly plodding. For every enjoyable one, there’s something like Akira (which has a really neat setting, but honestly just bored me), or the mind-numbing Paprika, which seemed to have the idea that incomprehensible weirdness was enough to get by on. Normally, I like fully animated, classic, American cartoons which are unashamedly, well, cartoon-like.
Ponyo is my favorite film of this year, so far. OK, it’s technically a 2008 film, but it only just played here, so cut me some slack. The whole thing is mesmerising in a plausible way, and is gorgeous to look at. It’s filled with appealing abstraction (that means appealing characters and poses, not 50-foot tall robots with 20 bazillion parts) and the animation is several times better than the previous Studio Ghibli movies I’ve seen. I could have sworn it goes onto ones, that is, full animation, in parts, which is a sight to behold for Japanese animation. Oh, and it’s also very nice to watch something like this that’s free of the usual patronising messages which infect US studio animated features. There are no kids exclaiming how they “just want to believe in themselves” or how they want to please their fathers, etc.
Throughout the whole thing, there was one thought at the back of my mind: live action movies can’t possibly compete with animation done like this. Imagine a film like this one, then strip out all of the abstraction, a good chunk of the hand-craftedness, and consequently, a lot of the delight, and you’d have something that would probably be called “Good” by live action standards. Here’s what the film might look like if it wasn’t made of drawings:
Dubs vs subs: I ended up seeing the dubbed version with a friend today, and I loved it, as you can tell. I look forward to watching the BD at home in Japanese with English subtitles, but John Lasseter and co seem to be making sure that things are handled as competently as possible. (Except for a song that plays over the end credits, which is slightly horrifying, that is). The only way to “properly” see Japanese movies is to learn Japanese, and other than the kana chart on my wall (I can just about remember SE and GA), that isn’t happening any time soon.
There is also the issue of shared experience (something a lot of home theater people are too quick to forget). The audience I saw the film with was about a 50/50 split between kids and their parents, and adults like myself. Subtitles are a flawed but decent way of watching foreign material, but excluding a large part of your audience wouldn’t be good for anyone from a shared experience point of view. It would have been very different seeing the film with only the faster readers (probably not kids, although I may be overly patronising with that) being able to get it.
Now all I need are BDs of Spirited Away, Porco Rosso and Totoro (ESPECIALLY Spirited Away – all of the DVDs I’ve seen are complete blur-fests).
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I’d really like to see a decent Blu-ray transfer for Tenkū no Shiro Rapyuta (Laputa: Castle in the Sky). That’s always been my favourite feature-length Japanese anime.
I always watch these with Japanese audio and English subtitles because the intonation is often lost in the dubbing process.
Although I’m a bit weird in this respect as I generally watch English movies with the subtitles turned on too….
btw I think a dutch Blu-ray [1] already exists for Spirited Away but is (ridiculously) just upscaled from the existing DVD master. It seems even the supposedly HD broadcasts in Japan of Ghibli films are just upscales too.
[1] http://j.mp/94dYYg
(third post in a row heh)
Seems there is some hope for a Disney release judging by these captures from the Snow White BD extras.
http://forum.blu-ray.com/blu-ray-movies-usa-region/121004-spirited-away-snow-white-blu-ray.html
Interestingly this also points to fresh DVD releases of ‘My Neighbor Totoro,’ ‘Castle in the Sky,’ and ‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’ released in March
(fourth and final post)
The ‘fresh’ DVD releases will offer only the English dubbed audio #fail
Dom, what version of Laputa: Castle In the Sky do you have? The best one I could find was the UK Buena Vista version which was on sale for a while before Optimum got the rights and released an interlaced version.
Are they serious about dubs only on the new DVDs? Why the hell would Disney do that? I have the original US 2006 release of Totoro, supposedly it was really, really limited.
Yeah it does seem odd they’d bother to reissue them and not include the Japanese audio that most people planning to buy 20-year old anime films would be looking for
I think I’ve got the old 2002 HK (R3) NTSC release that you can buy from play-asia. There’s quite a few different versions you can buy:
http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/video/laputa/
^ it is a shame this site doesn’t have comparison video captures for all the releases
David, if you want to view some “good” anime, check out these two releases:
FLCL (2000) – OVA
Ghost in the Shell (1995) – movie
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2002-2005) – T.V. series
These examples are on the opposite ends of the anime spectrum, but are outstanding.
The preferred audio for anime films is generally which I see/hear first.
I watched Princess Mononoke with the original audio, and since then tried watching with the english dub and found it cringe worthy (Billy Bob Thornton especially). I also cant watch Pom Poko or Whisper of the Heart in anything but the original audio.
Whereas with Spirited Away and Howls Moving Castle I watched them with english dubs first, so when I watch again that’s what I choose.
I’m a big fan of Studio Ghibli
Chuck – I’ll check those out soon.
Tokyo Godfathers is one I also really liked (especially since the animators used the transvestite character as a reason to use more expressive animation). I meant to watch it at Christmas but didn’t get around to it…