My SO and I saw that in the theater. That was a fun, fun movie.
Castle in the Sky is wonderful. I like Nausicaa, but since I had read the manga long before I saw the film, it was hard not to be a bit disappointed with how simplified the story is in the film. It’s certainly good–just not as good as the manga.
Fun fact: “Castle in the Sky” was originally called Laputa.
They changed the name due to concerns with the Spanish language…
I’m not big on anime. I was into it for a while, but I fell out of love with it for much the same reason I did for BBC comedies. Not the shows themselves, but the fans. People who watch all anime and just insist that there’s no such thing as bad anime. Who go on and on about how anime is so much better than any American cartoon. Who seem incapable of realizing that the percentage of great anime is no higher than the percentage of great American sitcoms or Australian reality shows.
Also, every time I’d decide I liked a show it’d turn out to be a goddam shojo anime that had no end. At all. Ever. Like some kind of rock band nerd, I can say that I was bored of Naruto before it even got popular.
I’ve still got plenty of anime films in my collecton. Most of Studio Ghibli (though I hated Grave of the Fireflies) and Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metropolis, that move about an oppressive future where Red Riding Hood is used as an allegory for freedom of choice, but I forget its name.
I wouldn’t say I hate all anime any more than I’d say I hate all gameshows. Hey, I like Cash Cab.
Have you seen Tales From Earthsea? It was from Hayao Miyazaki’s son and wasn’t very good imo. But my girlfriend loved it (and doesn’t usually care for animated films) so ymmv.
I voted Mononoke as it’s been one of my favorite movies for a very long time, but The Cat Returns is a close second.
Totoro is best, Kiki is second. Anything else is wrong.
Also, disagree that everything they’ve done is at least ‘good’. Nausicaa is just okay and Howl is pretty bad. That’s just Miyazaki’s stuff.
Totoro is best, Kiki is second. Anything else is wrong.
Spirited Away is better than Kiki, so you, sir, are wrong. Indubitably, irredeemably, irrevocably. Period, full stop, end of sentence, stop here do not pass Go.
Whee!
Spirited Away was a disappointment for me. I’m not gonna get started on it cause it seems to be a favourite around here (I’m pretty surprised how well-liked it is). Kiki is like Totoro - it felt real.
I just watched spirited away again. It all comes together at the end, when they are falling from the sky. Just fucking brilliant. It is one of those movies that I watch when I am in a bad mood. It always makes me feel better, I need to own more miyazaki movies.
While I’d agree that those two are near the bottom of the Ghibli list, I would in no way categorize them as bad films. I don’t understand the bad rap Howl gets. I do agree with you on being a bit mystified at all the love Spirited Away gets. I like it, but it’s not on my Ghibli short list.
I don’t understand how you could think howl’s moving castle is bad film? I think it gets a far too bad rap, it is definitely exaggerated. It may look bad compared to some of their best films, but it goes like this
Spirited away a.k.a -----Howl’s----------------------------------All the other animated shit.
Still miles above the rest.
Perhaps there are expectations that are fulfilled by Totoro and Kiki that Spirited Away doesn’t address. Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle are classic fairy tales, in the Tolkien sense of the word, while Kiki and Totoro are not, though for different reasons. They’re all explorations of fantasy, all of them well-seated into the literary (not literal) definition of the word, they all have similar characters and relationships between them, but they create and express completely different worlds and symbolic vocabularies between them.
They all blow the other anime out of the water with effortless ease. But, as someone pointed out, comparing Miyazaki’s work to Anime is like comparing oranges to apple groves.
Reminds me of an old favorite among SF fans:
“SF’s no good!” they bellow till we’re deaf.
“But this is good.” “Well, then it’s not SF.”
Totoro is especially fascinating in this manner, because it has no real conflict and absolutely no villain whatsoever. It’s as languid and unhurried as a warm spring day remembered from your childhood, and is eminently satisfying because of it. While most movies can be summarized as “This is the story of…”, Totoro is better put as “This is why we are content on a beautiful afternoon.”
I really liked the Nausicaa manga, but have never seen the anime and I suspect that it would suffer in comparison. Spirited Away was the first Miyazaki I’d ever seen and recognized as such and it just out and out staggered me with how good it was. One of the few movies I own. (I’d seen Princess Mononoke earlier, because of the Gaiman translation, but didn’t connect it to anything in particular before seeing Spirited Away.). I love all of them, of course, Laputa the least…it’s a film that really should have clicked with me given the steampunky aesthetic and flying castle and all, but it just didn’t. I might like Totoro better if the Disney re-release had been out when I tracked it down. The original Fox DVD was shockingly bare of options, lacking even English subtitles (something I thought was universally present on anime DVDs), and I inevitably hate all dubs, so the fact that I hated this one distinctly spoiled the experience. (Which is to say, I need to rewatch it on the new edition with subtitles.)
Or rewatch the new version dubbed, because all of Disney’s Ghibli dubs are incredibly good except for Mononoke.
Well, content except for the anguish the two girls experience for much of the film about their seriously ill mother, and the anxiety when one of them goes missing, feared to have drowned.
I went for Spirited Away just because of the incredible immersion in weird Japanese mystical shit. Mononoke comes close for sheer strangeness, but Spirited Away still trumps it. So I voted based on my personal taste.
On the other hand, Totoro is the first movie our daughter ever watched all the way through. She was only two and she was utterly captivated. She STILL busts out laughing at the scene where Sakaki and Mei are running all over the house trying to find the upstairs. She also likes Kiki a lot. So those two are the runners-up.
I haven’t seen Porco Rosso or Howl’s, but I definitely will. Someone busted on Howl’s for being too derivative of Spirited Away, but isn’t that backwards? Spirited Away is his most recent movie, no?
Totally agree about the innocence, wonder, and essential goodness that are foundational to every Miyazaki movie. Miyazaki and Miyamoto are kindred souls, I think – one in movies, the other in games. Both have the joy of childhood exploration permeating their souls and all their works.
Hell yes. It’s probably the Miyazaki film that hit me hardest emotionally, in a really, really good way. The combination of soaring up into the blue sky and the garden paradise among the clouds was beautifully uplifting.