Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  Gedo Senki (2006)

  Tales of Earthsea, the first feature directed by Miyazaki’s son Goro, should have been part of Studio Ghibli “passing the torch.” This, however, was a somewhat ill-fated production, and publicity about the film was less about the film and more about the publicity itself.

  The story is loosely based on parts of Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea series of fantasy novels. Her books tend not to embrace traditional science fiction or fantasy, but treat tribes and cultures as characters. This is no surprise, since her father was an anthropologist. Her work was known to Hayao Miyazaki, who was interested in filming the Earthsea books back in the 1980s before he began work on Nausicaä. When Studio Ghibli again approached LeGuin, Hayao Miyazaki was not at the helm.

  Films at Studio Ghibli, however, seem to have a history of having control revert to Hayao Miyazaki. Howl’s Moving Castle, for example, was to be directed by Mamoru Hosoda, but he left the project and went on to direct The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. He has refused to discuss why Hayao Miyazaki took the reins. In the case of Tales of Earthsea, Ghibli CEO Toshio Suzuki decided that Goro, a landscaper, would direct the film.

  Suzuki has a reputation for seeking publicity; this time, he got it. During the production, Goro took the extreme step of keeping a public blog about the work on the film and on his father. It wasn’t flattering; Goro said that Hayao Miyazaki was a better director than he was a father. Nonetheless, when the film premiered in Japan in 2006, Hayao was there and issued a statement: the film was good because it was “honest.” Whether he was referring to the film or also to the blog is unclear.

  Tales of Earthsea had a good box office run but was also vilified in the press. Again, perhaps this reaction was more about the blog than about the results of a neophyte director. In any case, at the end of the year Bunshun magazine gave out its version of the American “Raspberry” Awards (or Razzies); Goro “won” for Worst Director, and Tales of Earthsea “won” for Worst Picture.

  And that wasn’t even all of the criticism. LeGuin herself weighed in on the character design, saying that she had written the Earthsea books with a specific vision in mind about the various tribes in the books.

  Her books had been very specific about describing skin color and other attributes of these people because she wanted to avoid the tendency for Hollywood (and anime) to use basically Caucasian features as the “default setting” for the characters. While saying the film was beautiful, as she had always expected, she had hoped the film would at least stay true to the look she gave the characters.

  Another problem was built into trying to condense several volumes of a Western medieval-magical fantasy series. Anime and manga came relatively late to the Western “sword and sorcery” genre, whose ground rules were well established by 1986 when Ryo Mizuno created a series of light novels that were essentially transcripts of playing sessions from the role-playing fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons. This series appeared under the name Record of Lodoss War, and, in 1991, it became a series of OAV anime that showed a masterful handling of the genre. In 1998 it became a weekly series of twenty-seven TV episodes, even including self-parody in a series of vignettes with super-deformed versions of the characters.

  Looking at Tales of Earthsea without the backstage drama of its production, it’s not a flawless movie. Details pop up and either are never explained or never properly used. There’s a single allusion to a narcotic berry early in the film, but it never reappears. The business of someone’s True Name has to be figured out by the viewer, and, while this is more than possible for those who haven’t read LeGuin, waiting for the payoff can alienate an audience.

  Tales of Earthsea, however, finally works as anime and as Ghibli anime. The two young people at the core of the story, a prince named Arren and a peasant named Therru, are multidimensional and—atypical for a Ghibli film—dark; they’re marked as damaged goods, Therru having been burned on the face and Arren split into two Arrens, one of them subject to barely controlled rages. This being a Ghibli film, though, the voice of reason—a wizard named Sparrowhawk—offers a Japanese solution to the film’s big problem of a quest for eternal life sought by an evil sorceress. The answer is mono no aware, the very transience of life itself that makes it valuable and makes us value rather than abuse each other.

  By the way (spoiler alert), the reason that Therru’s parents beat and burned her may have been that she was a dragon. The difference between new director Goro Miyazaki and his father can be summed up with this: Therru’s shape-shift only happens at the end. In Spirited

  Away, we learn early on that Haku is a dragon. The big reveal at the end is that he was the spirit of the river Chihiro had once fallen in. Any director or writer can turn a friend into a dragon; Hayao Miyazaki turned a dragon into a friend.

  Tales of Earthsea (its English title) wasn’t released in America until 2010, thanks to another adaptation of the books that triggered a “non-compete” clause and kept Disney from releasing its dub. By then, Studio Ghibli had been around for a quarter-century, and Hayao Miyazaki for longer than that. Ghibli anime naturally would change over time, yet—as with Disney—some audiences didn’t want too much change.

  Gake no Ue no Ponyo (Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea) (2008)

  Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea, to give the movie its full name, could be viewed side by side with Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Both films are ostensibly based on the same 1836 fable by Hans Christian Andersen, yet they couldn’t be less alike, and neither really reflects the source.17 In some respects, Disney’s The Little Mermaid was an evolutionary step for American animation: while pretty much everything from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to that point had been based on European operetta, The Little Mermaid marked a shift to contemporary Broadway musicals as a model. On the other hand, it continued a Disney tradition since Snow White: no matter the locale, no matter the source material, everything is Americanized.

  Ponyo, in contrast, reduces the romantic leads to five year olds, which certainly affects the nature of the romance. And, while the sea creatures in the Disney version are all humanized to one degree or other, Ponyo begins with a look under the sea at creatures that are uncompromisingly exotic. They aren’t vaguely human, except for the redheaded guy who looks like Beetlejuice. This wizard-like character is Fujimoto, who turns out to be the husband of the Sea Goddess Grandmamare, and by extension the “father” (probably not in the biological sense, although the details are never explained) of a goldfish named Brunhilde and her dozens of sisters.

  Another difference between the two film versions is the nature of the sea itself. For one thing, Disney’s Ariel finds only the occasional human artifact in the sea; she collects them for a personal museum. In Ponyo these aren’t curiosities; they’re pollution, and they’re everywhere. This is a preoccupation with Miyazaki and also became part of the plot of Spirited Away when Chihiro recognizes that a river spirit came to the bathhouse to be cleansed of all the human trash it had accumulated. Brunhilde, early in Ponyo, gets wedged into a discarded jar from which she is rescued.

  Before that, we see a couple of self-referential bits of other Ghibli films, which is unusual for Miyazaki. Brunhilde uses a jellyfish as a dome, resting under it to gaze up through the water at the sun. In doing this, she reminds us of Nausicaä resting under the eye of the Ohmu at the beginning of Nausicaä. Later, another character actually sings a couple of bars of the opening song from My Neighbor Totoro!

  Brunhilde’s rescuer is Sosuke, a boy whose parents are kept apart by his father Koichi’s job as captain of a freighter. His mother Lisa, meanwhile, works at an old folks’ center that’s next to Sosuke’s preschool. The events take place in a very real Japanese location: Tomonoura, a port in Hiroshima Prefecture. I believe that it is the mix of the magical and the mundane in Ponyo—Fujimoto with his potions versus Lisa spooning honey into a teacup—and the very real affection between mother and son (with the occasional temperamental outburst keeping things real) that make this Ghibli film one o
f the most accessible to Western audiences.

  Karigurashi no Arrietty (2010)

  The next film in the pipeline, Karigurashi no Arrietty (The Borrower Arrietty), released in Japan in the summer of 2010, will seem familiar; based on a fantasy novel by Mary Norton about a race of little people who live close to the human world, it was filmed in 1997 as The Borrowers, was a made-for-American-TV movie in 1973, and should not be confused with a very similar series of books by John Peterson, which became an animated TV series called The Littles. Here again Studio Ghibli made news by assigning Hiromasa Yonebayashi to direct; an animator for Studio Ghibli since Princess Mononoke, at age thirty-seven he’s the youngest director of a Studio Ghibli film.

  You’d hardly know it from the finished film, dubbed by Disney and released in America as The Secret World of Arrietty. There are some echoes of Nausicaä as the teenaged Borrower, Arrietty, moves through the jungle of a country house yard, fending off insects and other hazards while foraging for the family’s daily bread, even if that bread is baked with flour made of stolen cookies. Into the house comes a human boy (known simply as “Boy” in the book, Sho in Japan, and Shaun in the American dub). He spends a great deal of time in bed or lying in the sun because he has no choice in the matter: he suffers from a weak heart, and he’s resting in his aunt’s house before a surgery that he admits is “probably hopeless.” Thus, like Totoro, the sunny pastoral landscape has one of the darkest of all clouds hanging over it: the potential for death.

  The graphics are of the highest quality, as expected, but the story also centers on human emotion in both the Borrowers and the people. The friendship between Arrietty and Boy is classic shojo manga romance: two young people experiencing something like love for the first time in their isolated lives, wanting to understand, making mistakes, and trying again. It is inevitable that they must part at the end, with Arrietty’s family travelling to a new home after having been discovered. It’s heartbreaking yet also hopeful, since we learn from the narration that Boy survived the surgery. Arrietty, meanwhile, has met Spiller, an almost feral Borrower who has lived on his own and seems modeled after a Native American tribesman, including face paint and broken English.

  In another evocation of Totoro, one vignette during the final credits puts Arrietty and her family in a teakettle-boat drifting down a creek toward their new home with Spiller at the helm. Without a word, he pulls out a raspberry as big as his head and offers it to Arrietty—without even looking at her. When she accepts this gift, he allows himself to smile, then goes back to piloting the teakettle. We saw Kanta behave similarly when offering Satsuki an umbrella, in a small but important rite of passage.

  Kokuriko-zaka Kara (2011)

  It’s no surprise that Ponyo won Japan’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2008, and The Secret World of Arrietty won in 2010. There was doubt, however, about the next feature from Studio Ghibli, since it marked the return of director Goro Miyazaki, whose Tales of Earthsea was roundly panned as one of the studio’s worst efforts.

  However, something happened this time. Hayao Miyazaki again limited himself to adapting the source material with Keiko Niwa, who had also scripted Tales of Earthsea and The Secret World of Arrietty. Kokuriko-zaka Kara (From Up on Poppy Hill) was drawn from a shojo manga published in 1980 by Tetsuro Sayama and Chizuru Takahashi, and published in Nakayoshi girls’ magazine. Miyazaki and Niwa departed widely from the original manga story of a schoolgirl named Umi (which means “the sea”), who lives in the port city of Yokohama and whose father goes missing at sea. The film tells a more nostalgic story, one that marks an event that affected Japan for the rest of the century.

  Since the 1945 surrender that ended World War II, Japan had spent the Occupation and the postwar years shaking off the stigma of its membership, with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, in the Axis powers. Their efforts at national reclamation ranged from the building of Tokyo Tower (see the sidebar “Tokyo Tower” in part 2, chapter 9) to the announcement in 1959 that the 1964 Summer Olympic Games would be held in Tokyo. In the five years from the announcement to the games, Japan rushed to accommodate the global spectacle. Highways were improved, the Shinkansen “bullet train” was rolled out, seaports and airports were modernized, and Japan embraced the games, coming in third in the gold-medal competition (behind the United States and the Soviet Union). Japan’s gold-medal win in Women’s Volleyball was the most-watched television program of the year, and the Games became the first to be telecast around the world.

  As perhaps the most dramatic symbol of Japan’s evolution on the world stage, the Olympic flame was lit at the opening games by a teenaged track star and later sportscaster, Yoshinori Sakai, who had been born in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945—the day it became Ground Zero for the first atomic bomb. The most enduring legacy of the 1964 Olympics is Taiiku no hi (Health and Sports Day), inaugurated in 1966 on the anniversary of the start of the 1964 Games, in which all of Japan’s schools hold outdoor sporting events.

  From Up on Poppy Hill takes place in 1963, when the port city of Yokohama was not yet absorbed into the Tokyo metropolis. Along with Umi’s romantic feelings toward a boy named Shun, there’s a dispute in their high school about a rundown old building that was still serving as a gathering place. Called the Latin Quarter, this throwback to an earlier time was scheduled for demolition as part of the Olympics. This begs a question often posed in pop culture: Must the old give way to the new? Doesn’t it offer something of value? As the young people in the movie wrestle with these questions, Shun and Umi wrestle with their feelings and with the frightening prospect that they might be related, which would put romance out of the question.

  When the film premiered in July 2011, worries about Tales of Earthsea were forgotten. The art was up to the usual Ghibli standards, with some echoes of other films based on shojo manga, mainly Whisper of the Heart and Ocean Waves. The movie not only had a healthy box office, but it also won Japan’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, one year after Arrietty.

  Ni no Kuni: Ghibli Got Game

  In September 2008 a dual interview was published in the Japanese gamers magazine Famitsu. One of the interviewees was no surprise: Akihiro Hino, President and CEO of the computer game company Level-5. The other was Toshio Suzuki, producer and managing director of Studio Ghibli as well as its long-time public face. In the article they announced the development of a single-player RPG (role-playing game) for the PlayStation: Ni no Kuni (The Second Country). This is one country where Ghibli had never entered before.

  Fans of both gaming and anime needn’t have worried. Apart from some linguistic issues that kept the first version, designed for the Nintendo DS, from travelling outside Japan, the PlayStation 3 version was released in Japan in late 2011, and in the rest of the world in early 2013.

  In many RPGs there’s a clear stylistic difference between the animated cut scenes and the actual battles. Not so in this game; the guiding hand of Studio Ghibli can be felt in all aspects of the play, even in the opening premise. A young boy named Oliver (resembling Sosuke, who befriends Ponyo in Ponyo) doesn’t merely get into trouble but watches his mother have a heart attack and die. His tears for her fall onto a doll she made for him, and the doll, which resembles a big-beaked toucan, comes to life. This is Drippy, whose “beak” is an extra-long nose with a lantern hanging from it and who speaks in a thick Welsh accent. He is Oliver’s traveling companion and guide throughout the game, helping Oliver on his quest to assist a magical princess in defeating an evil wizard, which could serve to also bring back his mother.

  Just as Oliver recalls Ponyo, the visual style of the game is made up of lush forests out of Princess Mononoke and medieval lands from Tales of Earthsea. The lazy Cat King Tom is a less scruffy version of the King in The Cat Returns, while the town of Hamelin plays off its name by being home to a race of armored pigs. There are many minor characters, some reminiscent of Pokémon, but all infused with the look and spirit of Studio Ghibli.

  The masterstroke in the
quest is the currency: Oliver progresses through the game by mending broken hearts. In this world, the magic includes being able to borrow emotions—such as enthusiasm or restraint—from some characters and give them to others in whom they may be deficient, thus restoring their broken hearts. Since Oliver’s sorrow at the death of his mother brought Drippy to life in the first place, his quest to save this alternative world is also part of his own healing.

  The game play doesn’t get in the way of the graphics, which are really the star of this show. You don’t have to be a fan of Studio Ghibli already, but anyone who plays this game to its end will surely become one.

  Meanwhile, Studio Ghibli is also releasing on DVD a thirtieth-anniversary edition of Isao Takahata’s TV anime version of Anne of Green Gables, long a popular Western work in Japan.

  * * *

  No one can truly predict when Miyazaki will retire from filmmaking altogether; he said Mononoke would be his last work as a director, then went on to direct three films and adapt three more, and the Ghibli website lists three more features: Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises), which has already premiered in Japan and will come to America for consideration for the 2014 Oscars; Kaguya-hime no Monogatari (Story of Princess Kaguya), directed by Isao Takahata; and a proposed sequel to Porco Rosso. (This doesn’t even include a live-action movie based on Kiki’s Delivery Service, directed by the unlikely horror director Takashi Shimizu of The Grudge.) There has even been speculation that Miyazaki might give a green light to a sequel to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, directed by Hideaki Anno, creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion. I won’t even try to guess what’s coming, but it’ll be worth the wait.

  1. That includes what has been written online. This chapter benefited greatly from the very comprehensive fan domain on Miyazaki and his work, http://www.nausicaa.net.

  2. Information on this film is thanks in part to Andrew Osmond, “The Castle of Cagliostro,” Animerica 8, no. 4 (May 2000): 8.