We all owe a lot to Walt Disney. He and his
team have given us movies that are imaginative and colorful and have become
dear childhood memories for generations on end. A side effect to all this,
however, is that animated movies are now almost automatically labeled as
“kiddie movies”. This is a shame. Animation is as good a way to tell a story as
live-action, and in many cases it allows for things that are simply impossible
in “real” movies. Point in case: the films of Hayao Miyazaki.
Miyazaki is the head of Studio Ghibli, and
that name alone is enough to have many a filmnerd squeal with glee. Under his
supervision this animation studio (which is one of the last one left which still works
with hand-drawn animation) has created movies which should (and are beginng to
be) recognized as the modern classics they are: Spirited Away, My Neighbour Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies, among others.
What a sweet old man.
The choice to keep working with the
time-consuming method of hand-drawn animation isn’t simple stubbornness, though. One of the adavntages of drawn animation is that everything in the frame
is put there by the same means. In effect, this means that the characters all
look like they perfectly blend in with the world, even if they’re non-human. In
live-action with CGI you can clearly tell which characters are real and which
aren’t (see Avatar), but in an
animation film humans can interact with demons, animals and forest spirits
without them looking out of place. And that is exactly what Miyazakis
characters do. Even though a normal world is sometimes hinted at (see the
beginning of Spirited Away), all his
movies plunge into a mystical world of shapeshifters, enormous insects and
witches.
Which is not to say his movies don’t mean
bussiness. Far from it. In Princess
Mononoke a giant demon-monster, who seems to be build entirely out of
crawling worms, attacks a village and kills everything around him until he is
stopped. This happens in the first ten
minutes of the movie. At the climax, a god is shot in the goddamn face. And
for those of you who have seen Spirited
Away: remember No Faces angry rampage through the bathhouse, eating
everything that crosses his path? Not the kind of stuff you’d call family
friendly.
Oh yes, that's EXACTLY what you think it is
A lot of labels have been put on the work of
Miyazaki: humanist, feminist, environmentalist. But I think those are hollow
statements. Miyazaki isn’t a political activist. He doesn’t try to make any
sort of point. He’s just trying to
tell a story. And if that means having strong female characters: so be it.
Which, truth be told, makes it a lot more enjoyable to watch. No-one likes
getting a point rubbed into their face, after all. Even if he has any cause, he
treats in the best way possible: not by telling everyone how right he is, but
just telling a story while assuming it.
What sets Miyazaki apart from so many other modern
filmmakers is that he isn’t cynical. He looks at the world with a child-like
wonder, and tells about it with the wisdom of an old man. He is one in a long
line of bards, the type of persons who tell the stories of their ancestors in
their own special way. And like the other bards, Miyazaki is too much
intertwined with his craft to ever give it up: even though he announced his
retirement in 1997, he came back four years later to make Spirited Away, which promptly won him an Oscar.
Alias
And once again an Icelandic song for Miyazaki. What is it that makes their styles line up so well? Maybe it's the whole "island" thing, or all the fish... Well anyway, here is Sigur Rós
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