Studio Ghibli

[CharlesTuckerTheThird]

Love this studio, When Marnie Was There is one of my all time favourite movies!

[johnnyboy]

I was already dead keen to see it, but Big Dave has me chomping at the bit.

[johnnyboy]

Big Dave got me double-posting.

Edited November 3, 2023 by johnnyboy

[SuperBacon]

More dates added for Spirited Away.

https://londoncoliseum.org/whats-on/spirited-away/?action=book

Managed to get two cheap tickets for June for me and the eldest. Lovely stuff.

[BomberPat]

having a particularly Ghibli-heavy couple of days - off to see the My Neighbour Totoro play for the second time around tonight, and yesterday we went to see The Boy And The Heron. 

I absolutely loved it. Can I shock you? It involves a traumatised child moving to a house in the country that turns out to hide a magical secret, and also it has planes in it. Despite ticking every single Miyazaki box, it also feels completely fresh and new; it would be a cliché to say that it's a "darker" or more mature take, because I think ultimately Miyazaki doesn't think in those terms, he just follows wherever the narrative takes him. Like most latter day Miyazaki, it's very fragmentary and the pacing is idiosyncratic to say the least, but it's gorgeous, inventive, and brilliant.

I've joked about its use of Miyazaki tropes, but it feels like those are brought to the forefront more than ever; they're explicit rather than subtext. He won't let you turn away from the fact that this is a story rooted in war, that it's about grief and navigating the end of childhood, and also about creativity and the responsibilities shouldered by those who create. I think that this and The Wind Rises make pretty strong companion pieces as far as getting into the head of what makes Miyazaki tick.

Spoilers on some meta-discussion from interviews with Toshio Suzuki, nothing huge for the plot:

Spoiler

Something Suzuki said in an interview was about how personal and autobiographical parts of this movie are for Miyazaki; the central character feels like a young Miyazaki as much as The Wind Rises' scenes of plane-building felt in part like a metaphor for the act of creativity in general. The father figure being a plane manufacturer during the war, and not really knowing how to relate to his son, feels ripped from life, as well as possibly having a bit of reflection from Hayao on his own failures as a father, while the backdrop of war and a hospitalised mother obviously recurs in Ghibli movies for good reason too.

One thing Suzuki said, though, was that the "great grand-uncle" figure was a much bigger part of the story in the original plot, but that Miyazaki found it increasingly difficult to draw or write for him once the film started to be made, and Suzuki felt it was because the character was based on Isao Takahata, and that he found it too difficult to work with that character so closely after Takahata's death. That would make sense as something of an allegory for him mentoring the young Miyazaki, and teaching him the importance of creating worlds "without malice", and the responsibility of creative people to put heart and meaning into what they create, while other characters in the film seem to represent rampant consumerism at the expense of that creativity and imagination. 

 

[FLips]

I said in the movies thread when I went to see it that it’s my favourite Ghibli film. After a few weeks of letting the dust settle it still is. Truly just a wonderfully beautiful film. 

[Devon Malcolm]

Saw The Boy and the Heron today and it's very good indeed. It plays the Miyazaki hits and is familiar and lovely without reaching his heights, but that's ok. He's in his eighties after all. Nice to have him back.