Hayao Miyazaki came out of retirement and made one of his best films. The Boy and the Heron is everything you want a Studio Ghibli film to be – exciting, adventurous, weird, funny, and ultimately moving. I love it. You can read my review of the 4K UHD disc over at Cinema Sentries.
Like most kids, I suppose I grew up watching animation. I loved Disney films and the movies of Don Bluth. Every afternoon and Saturday morning I watched television series like G.I. Joe, Thundercats, The Smurfs, and Muppet Babies. Later I fell in love with the films from Pixar.
While these types of films told different stories and used somewhat different animation styles, they all held a certain familiarity. They were all distinctly American.
Princess Mononoke was the first Studio Ghibli film I’d ever seen. This was the late 1990s, maybe or possibly early 2000. I was just becoming a true cinephile. I’d heard rumblings about Studio Ghibli for a while but I think this was the first big breakout it had in the States. Or maybe just in my orbit. It definitely got a big American release because the English dub included folks like Billy Crudup, Billy Bob Thornton, Claire Danes, and Gillian Anderson.
Anyway, I sat down with Princess Mononoke with high hopes. All the critics loved it. Honestly, I was a little disappointed. No, disappointed isn’t really the right word. I just didn’t know what to make of it. It was like no movie I’d ever seen before.
The animation was strange. In the opening scene, a demon attacks a village. But it doesn’t look like any demon I’d ever seen before. It wasn’t full of fire and horns. It was an enormous boar covered in slithering black worms. Later we meet tree spirits with human bodies and rattle-like heads, and a Great Forest Spirit with a deer-like body and an almost human face.
The story wasn’t like typical American animation with clear-cut good and bad guys. The characters were murkier. Our hero sometimes brutally murdered his enemies. The villain, if you can even call her that, rescued young women from a life of prostitution.
I think on that first viewing I just didn’t know how to process what I was watching. It was so different than anything else I’d ever seen, I wasn’t sure of what to make of it.
I’ve seen it several more times since then (and many more Studio Ghibli films) and now I just love it. What was so strange on that first viewing is endearing to me now. I love that it is different from most animated films.
So, quickly, the story involves Ashitaka (Crudup) the last prince of a small village (the one that gets attacked by that demon). He kills the demon and in the process, his arm is infected by it. This gives him super strength, but also seems to possess him at times and ultimately will kill him. When he learns that an iron ball lodged inside its body is what turned the Boar God into a demon he sets off to find out how it got lodged there.
The iron ball was actually a bullet from the newly invented gun (the film is set vaguely in the time before modern warfare) and it came from Iron Town, which is run by Lady Iboshi (Minnie Driver). She’s ostensibly the villain. But she’s also the one I was talking about earlier who has rescued women from a life of prostitution and given them a certain amount of autonomy. She also uses old men, warn down by disease and injury in her town. In many ways, she’s a good person. But she also has no problem destroying nature (and the gods that protect it) to enrich herself.
Ashitaka is ostensibly our hero, and yet we see him cut the heads off of numerous soldiers (accidentally, sort of – his demon-possessed arm gives him super strength which does most of the brutal damage but he’s still out to kill them.)
It is a movie filled with morally ambiguous characters, people who aren’t fully good or fully evil. They are complex, just like real people. And those gods? They have no problem with destruction either. The Great Forest Spirit indiscriminately kills.
The titular Princess (Claire Danes) is a human girl, raised by a wolf goddess and she hates humans. She wants to destroy them.
I love that. It is a complex, beautifully drawn story. The animation, while strange to my American eyes at first is beautiful as well.
Hayao Miyazaki who founded Studio Ghibli, and wrote/directed this film is one of the greatest animators of all time. I won’t say Princess Mononoke is his greatest achievement, but I won’t deny it either.
Japan has a thriving animation industry. At a guess, I’d say it is much larger and more successful than American animation. Yet in the States, Japan’s output is mostly a cult phenomenon. That does seem to be changing. The comic book section at my local Barnes & Noble has almost been overcome by Mangas, and streaming services like Crunchyroll, which specializes in Japanese animation have become very popular. My daughter is a big fan.
I mostly know Japanese animation from Studio Ghibli. Oh, I’ve watched the odd film or series with my daughter, and I have fond memories of watching Robotech: The Macross Saga as a kid, but I’ve not really dug deep into the Anime waters.
I’m trying to change that and Suzume was a good start. Like a lot of Japanese animation (I think, again I haven’t seen that much) Suzume mixes intimate human drama with the fantastic.
In a small Japanese town, Suzume (voiced by Nanoka Hara in Japanese and Nichole Sakura in English) a 17-year-old girl lives a quiet life with her aunt. Her mother passed away when she was quite young.
On her way to school, she crosses paths with Souta (voiced by Hokuto Matsumura in Japanese, and Josh Keaton in English) a handsome young man who asks her if she knows of any abandoned towns nearby. He’s looking for a door, he says. She points him in the direction of a small spa resort that was destroyed in bad weather.
He thanks her and she continues on her way to school. But when a friend notices her face is flush from the encounter, she thinks twice and runs to that abandoned resort, hoping to find him. Instead, she finds a strange door standing all by itself. She opens it and sees a field full of stars. But when she passes through the door nothing happens. That magical land is seemingly off-limits to her. On one of her passings, she notices a stone cat statue on the ground. When she picks it up it turns into a real cat and runs away.
With nothing more to see she goes back to school. Later that day she noticed a huge column of smoke emanating from where the resort was. Strangely, none of her classmates can see it.
Once again she runs to the resort to find the smoke billowing out of that door. This time Souta is there and is desperately trying to close the door. With her help he does and with a magical key, he locks it.
He tells her that he is a Closer, and his job is to find these magical doors scattered across Japan in abandoned places and keep them shut. That black smoke he calls a worm and if it escapes it will cause massive Earthquakes.
That cat is a Keystone and they must get it to return to one of the doors to keep the worm in place forever. But the cat is mischievous and is enjoying its newfound freedom. It sets to scurrying around Japan. Also, it turns Souta into a three-legged chair.
Suzume and Souta then spend the rest of the film chasing after the cat and closing all the doors before the worm can cause too much damage.
The basics of that plot do nothing to explain just how wonderful this film is. The animation is simply gorgeous. The backgrounds reminded me of the less fantastical Ghibli films in that it is detailed and layered with just enough artistic flourishes to make them fantastical. The characters are drawn realistically and well. There are some wonderful shots where the camera pulls back to show the scope of the worm and the cities it is about to destroy that are just awesome. And the magical world beyond the doors is exquisite.
There is a lightness to its execution and a playfulness. When Souta becomes a chair it is joyful and very funny. But there is a soulfulness too. I believed in their developments, and in their plight.
It is perhaps just slightly too long, and there are a few moments that drag just a little bit. But mostly this is a wonderful film.
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