The Mouse Is Dead
Disney have completely gone off the boil recently, and not since the 1992 release of Aladdin have the made anything halfway decent or particularly memorable. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet, and Brother Bear have all been flops. Home on the Range; the 2004 Disney disaster of a movie where the animals of a farm try and save their home from being sold by going bounty hunting for a notorious outlaw, was the last “traditionally animated”, film from Disney studios ending the 44-film legacy that began with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. The film reportedly earned less than half of its estimated production cost, one of the final factors that led to the decision to make it the last traditionally (“hand-drawn”) animated Disney feature for theatrical release.
Pixar are proving to be Disney’s saviour with instant classics like Finding Nemo and The Incredibles which have racked up some large numbers of Academy Awards. When Disney acquired Pixar in January 2006 for $7.4 billion, making Pixar a wholly owned subsidiary of Disney, there were many fears that Pixar’s track record would ground to a halt. Whether this happens or not remains to be seen, John Lasseter has the authority to approve films for both Disney and Pixar studios, which means Disney may turn out something a bit better now, but I am led to believe that Cars wasn’t up the Pixar’s previous standard of quality story telling.
Disney have put out some real crap recently, and it’s about time we look beyond the shores of the US for animated entertainment… How about Japan?
Since the early 1980s a Japanese animation film studio has turned out some of the greatest animated films of all time, Studio Ghibli. Headed by master director Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli is the Japanese version of Disney, except that it makes good films. My plan is to get some in-depth reviews of the Ghibli films I’ve watched so far, but for the moment this is more of an overview.
Some of the films from Ghibli include; My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Spirited Away (2001), and Howl’s Moving Castle (2004).
So what sets Studio Ghibli apart from Disney? Well the attention to detail, the breathtaking quality of the work, the imaginative invention and the desire to tell a suburb story. On the IMDB Top Rated “Animation” Titles chart, you’ll Ghibli and Pixar films equal in number on the Top 10. The beautiful Spirited Away is a master-work of fantasy. The magical, amazingly imaginative, and intelligent story is packed with invention, that makes Finding Nemo look… well a rushed afternoons work. The film was the winner of the Best Animated Feature Oscar in 2003, and received an incredible amount of critical acclaim.
This “Alice in Wonderland” of the East, tells the story of Chihiro, a little girl who is moving to a new town with her parents. She is clearly unhappy about the move and appears rather petulant. During the drive to their new house, they lose their way and come across a tunnel, which they enter out of curiosity, unaware that it actually provides access into a spirit world, specifically, to a spirit bathhouse where spirits of the Shinto religion go to rest and relax. The film is visually stunning, instantly engaging and gloriously surreal yet it still manages to be as detailed as a photograph.
Howl’s Moving Castle is the most recent Studio Ghibli film to get to the UK, and it’s just as stunning as Spirited Away, although perhaps more “accessible” to a Western audience, as it is based on an English novel by Diana Wynne Jones. Again, the film is peppered with Japanese influences, which I think are what entice me into the Ghibli films- it’s something new, something I don’t really understand, which in a fantasy film is really what you want.
The miss-understandings with Western and Eastern cultures are sometimes a problem, such as in the 1995 film Whisper of the Heart, in which a young girl finds that all the books she chooses in the library have been previously checked out by the same boy, the translation into English sometimes makes the plot seem… well “odd”, or far-fetched which is a shame as the original is packed with subtleties and inflections that we as a western audience simply don’t pick up on.
I am going to be looking at many of the Ghili films in much more detail later on, partly because I have Princess Mononoke under the Christmas tree waiting for me to watch. However, if you get a chance, grab a copy of Spirited Away if you’re yet to see it and take a watch- you never know you just might like it!