The Boy and the Heron: Soars unevenly

The Boy and the Heron (2023) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for violent content, dramatic intensity and bloody images

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.15.23

In a nod to Mark Twain, who in 1897 was contacted by an English journalist responding to rumors of the author’s death— prompting Twain to reply, in part, “The report of my death was an exaggeration” — I viewed famed Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s announced retirement, upon completing 2013’s masterful The Wind Rises, with a raised eyebrow.

 

After discovering that a pesky heron actually is a dwarfish little man magically garbed
like a bird, young Mahito grudgingly agrees to let this creature be his guide during an
enchanted mission.

Impossible, I thought. Miyazaki could no more cease to create breathtakingly wonderous fantasy realms, than he could will himself to stop breathing.

And while this just-released new film also arrives with the renewed insistence that it will be Miyazaki’s swan song, I remain dubious. He’s “only” 82 years old, which — should he change his mind yet again — gives him plenty of time for at least one more.

 

All this said, The Boy and the Heron does have the somewhat somber atmosphere of a farewell: a summing-up of the autobiographical touches; Lewis Carroll-style mischief; dream-like confusion; colorful blends of wonder and danger; and gentle, real-world warnings that have been hallmarks in all of Miyazaki’s films.

 

On top of which, this new film is a treat for the senses: old-style, hand-drawn animation that dazzles in a manner CGI has yet to deliver. We marvel at the wind-blown sweep of tall grass in a massive field, the savory intensity of purple jam on bread — you’d swear we smell the fruit — and the palpable confusion of the story’s young protagonist, Mahito (voiced by Soma Santoki), as he plunges into a senses-confounding trip through a metaphorical looking-glass.

 

But that comes later. Miyazaki’s film opens on its most harrowing sequence, in the chaos of 1943’s war-time Tokyo. Mahito awakens late one night, to the scream of sirens and fluttering embers of ash filling the air, because a nearby hospital has been fire-bombed. Knowing that his mother, Hisako, is working a late shift there, the boy scrambles in panic — the “camera” following him suspensefully, as he races back and forth to his bedroom, initially having forgotten to dress — and then pursues equally alarmed neighbors, as they all rush toward the hospital.

 

Where Mahito is just in time to see his mother engulfed.

 

Except ... Hisako doesn’t seem to perish in the expected manner, instead somehow bonding with the flames.

The Wind Rises: This film soars

The Wind Rises (2013) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rating: Rated PG-13, for dramatic content and disturbing images
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.14.14

Animation fans who think of Hayao Miyazaki’s films solely in terms of fantasy realms and whimsical (sometimes dangerous) supernatural creatures — 2001’s Academy Award-winning Spirited Away having much to do with this genre affiliation — are in for a surprise.

To his amazement, young Jirô (running in foreground) seems to share his dreams with
the flamboyant Caproni, a famed Italian aeronautical engineer who designs planes for
the sheer joy of mechanical artistry. Can a bespectacled country boy hope to do the
same, when he achieves adulthood?

Quite a surprise.

Although The Wind Rises opens with a surreal quality that feels like vintage Miyazaki, focusing on a young country boy smitten by the rhapsodic magic of aircraft, this film is grounded in historical fact: much more biography than imaginative fancy. The year is 1918, the boy is Jirô Horikoshi, and he often finds himself in plane-laden dreams that seem to be shared by famed Italian aeronautical designer Giovanni Battista Caproni, whose bombers played a significant role in World War I ... but who also has far-reaching concepts for peacetime passenger aircraft.

This is mere prologue: the spark that ignites Jirô’s determination to become an aircraft engineer. A few years pass; having reached young adulthood (now voiced, in this dubbed American version, by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Jirô boards a train in order to attend college in Tokyo, little realizing that Miyazaki — employing the artistic license so beloved by writers who play with time and place — has orchestrated an appointment with fate.

What later came to be known as the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 strikes just as Jirô’s train reaches the city outskirts. He meets and rescues Nahoko Satomi (voiced by Emily Blunt), re-uniting her with family while firestorms sweep through the city and surrounding areas. Without much of a backward glance, Jirô then pushes on to his university, where he and new friend Honjô (John Krasinski) do their best to rescue books and other valuable property.

Time passes anew; Jirô and Honjô join the Mitsubishi engineering company in 1927, where they’re constantly browbeaten by their grumpy, imperious boss, Kurokawa (Martin Short). Even so, Jirô’s innovative concepts quickly catch the attention of senior designer Hattori (Mandy Patinkin).

These initial years at Mitsubishi unfold against Japan’s Great Depression, which forces the seriously understaffed and overworked Mitsubishi engineers to labor under significant handicaps. Jirô revels in the work for its own sake, having no outside life to distract him; Honjô supplies some outer-world context by lamenting that their primitive conditions are keeping them 10 years behind superior German designers.

By way of illustrating this disparity, Mitsubishi’s test aircraft must be hauled onto fields by oxen.

From Up on Poppy Hill: Young love and simpler times

From Up on Poppy Hill (2011) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: PG, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang

From its very first frame, From Up on Poppy Hill is breathtaking.

You’ll literally gasp at the hand-drawn watercolor lushness of the opening tableau, as the young heroine’s neighborhood is unveiled, her home set high on a hill that overlooks Japan’s Yokohama Port. Computer animation, for all its delights, never looks like this; one must go all the way back to the Walt Disney Studio’s early days, and Snow White or Bambi.

When Umi forgets some ingredients for the evening meal, her new friend Shun offers
to speed her down the hill, in order to reach the market as quickly as possible. The
resulting trip is exciting for its breakneck danger, and also for Umi's close proximity to
a young man she's beginning to care for quite deeply.

Or any of the recent offerings from Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, of course, which deliver the same painstaking level of luxurious quality.

From Up on Poppy Hill — incidentally, Japan’s top-grossing 2011 film — marks the first feature collaboration between the legendary Miyazaki and his son, Gorō; Hayao wrote the screenplay with Keiko Niwa, while Gorō directed. The film is adapted from a 1980 manga series by Tetsurō Sayama (writer) and Chizuru Takahashi (artist); the story is a gentle and poignant coming-of-age saga about a teenage girl who can’t let go of a past tragedy.

Aside from the visual splendor, we’re immediately struck by the fact that this is a real-world period piece. For the most part, animated features are set in fantasy realms that involve magical creatures, talking animals or other mythological tropes. Exceptions, such as 2007’s Persepolis, tend to rely on grim political content.

But while From Up on Poppy Hill certainly has its solemn moments, they result from family secrets and unexpected revelations, rather than complex issues playing out on a broader national or global stage.

The year is 1963, a time of great excitement in Japan, as ambitious plans are made to showcase the country during the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. References to construction and renewal allude to Japan’s emergence from the still-recent horrors of World War II, but the script never calls undo attention to this sobering element.

Nor do the upcoming Olympics have any impact on Umi Matsuzaki (voiced in this American release by Sarah Bolger). The 16-year-old lives in Coquelicot Manor, a boarding house she essentially runs, while caring for her grandmother and two younger siblings, Sora (Izabelle Fuhrman) and Riku (Alex Wolff). Their mother, Ryoko, is studying abroad in the United States; their father was killed in the Korean War.

Every morning before school, Umi rises early to handle various chores and prepare an elaborate breakfast for her family and the manor’s residents. She does the same with each day’s evening meal. We immediately realize that this dutiful young woman maintains an exhausting schedule from before dawn to late at night, while diligently keeping up with her studies.

Her final ritual each morning, before walking to school, is to raise a set of signal flags on the manor flagpole that her (now deceased) grandfather built for her long ago.

The flags’ message: “I pray for safe voyages.”

The Secret World of Arrietty: Spread the word!

The Secret World of Arrietty (2010) • View trailer
Four stars. Rating: G, and suitable for all ages
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.17.12


Those already familiar with Studio Ghibli need not be reminded of Japanese animation impresario Hayao Miyazaki, famed for classics such as Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle and My Neighbor Totoro, the latter lending its corpulent title character to the company logo.

When necessity finally prompts Arrietty to reveal herself, Shawn initially is
astonished by her tiny size. But he quickly overcomes his surprise, realizing
that in every respect, Arrietty is much like any other kid his own age. More to
the point, they'll need to work together to defeat a common enemy.

Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli are synonymous with lush, painterly work, done in the elegant, hand-drawn manner that we rarely see today. We tend to forget the gorgeous beauty of early Disney animated films — Snow White and Pinocchio, in particular — and Miyazaki and his colleagues are among the very few keeping that style alive.

Vibrantly alive.

The introductory garden setting of The Secret World of Arrietty — Japan’s highest-grossing film of 2010, and only now making its way to our shores — is luxuriously fashioned, with an impressive eye for detail: ladybugs taking flight, droplets of water clinging briefly to leaves before falling earthward. It feels like a magical place, and in a way it is: Any setting that teems with life is deemed magical by Miyazaki.

No surprise, then, that this film opens as a tiny girl, standing perhaps as tall as a cigar, flees from a pursuing cat. The girl reaches the shelter of a nearby house’s basement, safe behind the grill of an air vent; the feline yowls in frustration.

The girl is Arrietty, and this film is Miyazaki’s adaptation of Mary Norton’s 1952 children’s classic, The Borrowers. Miyazaki produced and co-scripted this project — sharing the latter credit with Keiko Niwa — and turned over the director’s chair to protégé Hiromasa Yonebayashi, who has worked as an artist/animator on Studio Ghibli films dating backing to 1997’s Princess Mononoke.

The Japanese setting notwithstanding, this film follows Norton’s book reasonably well; since we never leave this isolated house and its garden, it obviously doesn’t matter whether the nearest big city is Tokyo, Toledo or Tunbridge Wells.

Arrietty (voiced in this U.S. version by Bridgit Mendler) lives with her parents — Pod (Will Arnett) and Homily (Amy Poehler) — in the basement beneath a house owned by the elderly Jessica (Gracie Poletti). Arrietty and her family are “borrowers”: tiny people who collect cast-off items discarded or forgotten by the much larger “beans” (human beings) who mostly remain unaware of their existence. Rare sightings are written off as rumors and urban legends.

Ponyo: Style over substance

Ponyo (2008) • View trailer for Ponyo
Three stars (out of five). Rating: G, and suitable for all ages
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.20.09
Buy DVD: Ponyo• Buy Blu-Ray: Ponyo (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo)


Japanese animation impresario Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo is gorgeous, lyrical, poetic and deeply moving at unexpected moments.

It's also slow and very, very strange.

Despite the magical Fujimoto's desperate efforts to "calm" his unusual daughter
back to her normal state, Ponyo -- originally a goldfish -- has tasted the
delights to be experienced as a human being. Then, too, she has made a
land-based friend in the world above: a little boy who already wonders what
has become of his new companion.

To a degree, the latter can be excused by the stylistic disconnect between Western and Japanese fairy tales. Miyazaki, who both wrote and directed this film, relies far more heavily on visual storytelling than narrative exposition; while U.S. directors John Lasseter, Brad Lewis and Peter Sohn clearly tried to clarify details for this English-language version, much remains oblique and only minimally explained ... if, indeed, explained at all.

The broad strokes are easy to discern, though, and other issues can be excused if "magic" is accepted as the reason for various events. Even so, adults likely will emerge with dozens of questions that simply don't have answers.

Children, on the other hand, may be completely satisfied with the core relationship between a 5-year-old boy and the rather unusual goldfish he rescues one day.

The would be Ponyo, introduced as a mute, reddish goldfish: a bit larger than her hundreds of sisters, and all of them carefully sheltered by Fujimoto (voiced by Liam Neeson), a wild-haired, undersea mad-scientist type who mutters dire imprecations while carefully pouring various colored potions into the oceans, in an effort to maintain a harmony constantly under attack by pollution from the lands above.

Ponyo, having grown old enough to be curious, hitches a ride to the surface on an obliging jellyfish: an act that very nearly ends her life, when she is scooped up by a massive dredger and gets stuck in a discarded jam jar.

Fortunately, she's spotted by young Sosuke (Frankie Jonas, yes, of that Jonas family), who quickly rescues the little fish and makes her a pet. He does this by filling a bucket with tap water, which might raise eyebrows among viewers savvy enough to understand the distinction between fresh water and sea water ... but this is the first of many, many details we simply must roll with. As far as this story is concerned, water is water; it's magic, remember?