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THE WINGS OF HONNEAMISE
With the voices of:
Shirotsugh Leiqunni Robert Matthews
Riquinni Nonderaiko Melody Lee
General Khaidenn Stevie Beeline
Matti Lee Stone
Written and directed by Hiroyuki Yamaga. Running time: 120 minutes.
***
By Roger Ebert
In Japan, animation is not just for family films. There's a booming industry in all kinds of animated films, including adult drama, comedy and even eroticism, and the leading directors are as well known as Spielberg or Tarantino. The genre is often called Japanimation, but its fans scorn that term and prefer "anime," a Japanese word with English origins.
"The Wings of Honneamise," made in 1987 but only now opening in the United States, is one of the most ambitious of all anime productions, a visually sensational two-hour extravaganza about an unkempt and disorganized young pilot named Shirotsugh, or Shiro, who signs up for the Royal Space Force after failing to make the grade as a Navy pilot. He seems on track to become the first man in space, little suspecting the sinister reasons why anyone would risk such an important flight on an officer as shabby as he is.
The Royal Space Force? Where is it based? The movie takes place on a planet that is not exactly the earth; a closing shot from space reveals that the continents and seas have a different arrangement. This world is sort of Japanese and sort of American, and in it an uneasy peace has been reached.
The kingdom's space program has never been taken seriously, and consists of gung-ho pilots and misfit scientists who hang around inventing stuff like old-time barnstormers. (An early scene involves funeral services for a pilot whose urine bag leaked, allowing his space suit to electrocute him.) The Space Force is amazed when its first manned space shot is given priority.
But when the leaders of the kingdom move the launch pad close to its border with a neighboring state, Shiro discovers the reason: They hope the rocket will be seen as provocation, inspiring an attack and justifying war.
Meanwhile, Shiro is on a collision course with his feckless nature. He meets a young woman named Leiqunni, a fundamentalist who passes out leaflets urging people to trust God. She befriends him and brings him to her home, where, in the sort of scene you won't see from Disney, he attempts to rape her and she knocks him out with a statue to the head. The next morning he attempts to "apologize," but she brushes him off and forgives him, inspiring him to take his destiny more seriously. This sort of sudden sexual violence is typical of both anime and Japanese comic books.
"The Wings of Honneamise" was directed by Hiroyuki Yamaga, only 24 at the time, whose drawing style is influenced both by comic books and by the graphic style of the great 19th Century Japanese artist, Hiroshige (whose work also inspired Herge, the creator of "Tintin," Europe's most popular comic hero).
The film doesn't use the Disney style of "full animation," but instead goes for more sensational set-ups and backgrounds, dramatic camera angles, and montages of details - just like American comic books.
Although some of the foreground movements are not as realistic as in a Disney picture, the press notes say "Honneamise" was hand-drawn frame-by-frame; anime's defenders argue that animation should not mimic life but stylize it. The artists visited Cape Kennedy and the National Air and Space Museum on sketching expeditions, and the animated launch looks uncannily like the real thing. The look of the characters is based on Hollywood stars: Treat Williams, young Tatum O'Neal, Lee Van Cleef and Harrison Ford. The score is by Ryuichi Sakamoto, who won an Oscar for "The Last Emperor."
One reason the Japanese like anime so much is that it isn't limited by budgets or special effects problems. Anything that can be drawn can be shown, and the artists can use bizarre angles or forced perspectives to create unexpected effects. One of the pleasures of the film is simply enjoying Yamaga's visual imagination, as in a montage at the end which shows the planet's suffering and turmoil. He also has an offbeat dramatic style, including pregnant pauses where the characters simply look at one another.
Not many examples of anime have played the American theatrical circuit; we're not used to non-family or non-Disney use of the medium. "Akira," an apocalyptic epic, has become a best-seller on video, and the wonderful "My Neighbor Totoro" has been embraced by many parents and children as a special and charming family film. Yet anime fans are a vocal underground, the genre is popular on video and on campuses, and supporters claim that the trademark of anime - the large, dark eyes of the characters - has been appropriated by Disney in all its films since "The Little Mermaid." If you're curious about anime, "The Wings of Honneamise," playing for one week at the Music Box, is a good place to start.

Rating: 3 out of 5

PRINCESS MONONOKE
****
With the voices of:
Ashitaka: Billy Crudup
San (Princess): Claire Danes
Eboshi: Minnie Driver
Jigo: Billy Bob Thornton
Moro the Wolf: Gillian Anderson
Toki: Jada Pinkett-Smith
Kohroku: John De Mita
BY ROGER EBERT

I go to the movies for many reasons. Here is one of them. I want to see wondrous sights not available in the real world, in stories where myth and dreams are set free to play. Animation opens that possibility, because it is freed from gravity and the chains of the possible. Realistic films show the physical world; animation shows its essence. Animated films are not copies of "real movies," are not shadows of reality, but create a new existence in their own right. True, a lot of animation is insipid, and insulting even to the children it is made for. But great animation can make the mind sing.
Hayao Miyazaki is a great animator, and his "Princess Mononoke" is a great film. Do not allow conventional thoughts about animation to prevent you from seeing it. It tells an epic story set in medieval Japan, at the dawn of the Iron Age, when some men still lived in harmony with nature and others were trying to tame and defeat it. It is not a simplistic tale of good and evil, but the story of how humans, forest animals and nature gods all fight for their share of the new emerging order. It is one of the most visually inventive films I have ever seen.
The movie opens with a watchtower guard spotting "something wrong in the forest." There is a disturbance of nature, and out of it leaps a remarkable creature, a kind of boar-monster with flesh made of writhing snakes. It attacks villagers, and to the defense comes Ashitaka, the young prince of his isolated people. He is finally able to slay the beast, but his own arm has been wrapped by the snakes and is horribly scarred.
A wise woman is able to explain what has happened. The monster was a boar god, until a bullet buried itself in its flesh and drove it mad. And where did the bullet come from? "It is time," says the woman, "for our last prince to cut his hair and leave us." And so Ashitaka sets off on a long journey to the lands of the West, to find out why nature is out of joint, and whether the curse on his arm can be lifted. He rides Yakkuru, a beast that seems part horse, part antelope, part mountain goat.
There are strange sights and adventures along the way, and we are able to appreciate the quality of Miyazaki's artistry. The drawing is not simplistic, but has some of the same "clear line" complexity used by the Japanese graphic artists of two centuries ago, who inspired such modern works as Herge's Tintin books. Nature is rendered majestically (Miyazaki's art directors journeyed to ancient forests to make their master drawings) and fancifully (as with the round little forest sprites). There are also brief, mysterious appearances of the spirit of the forest, who by day seems to be a noble beast, and at night a glowing light.
Ashitaka eventually arrives in an area that is prowled by Moro, a wolf god, and sees for the first time the young woman named San. She is also known as "Princess Mononoke," but that's more a description than a name; a mononoke is the spirit of a beast. San was a human child, raised as a wolf by Moro; she rides bareback on the swift white spirit-wolves and helps the pack in their battle against the encroachments of Lady Eboshi, a strong ruler whose village is developing ironworking skills and manufactures weapons using gunpowder.
As Lady Eboshi's people gain one kind of knowledge, they lose another, and the day is fading when men, animals and the forest gods all speak the same language. The lush green forests through which Ashitaka traveled west have been replaced here by a wasteland; trees have been stripped to feed the smelting furnaces, and on their skeletons, yellow-eyed beasts squat ominously. Slaves work the bellows of the forges, and lepers make the weapons.
But all is not black and white. The lepers are grateful that Eboshi accepts them. Her people enjoy her protection. Even Jigo, a scheming agent of the emperor, has motives that sometimes make a certain amount of sense. When a nearby samurai enclave wants to take over the village and its technology, there is a battle with more than one side and more than one motive. This is more like mythical history than action melodrama.
The artistry in "Princess Mononoke" is masterful. The writhing skin of the boar-monster is an extraordinary sight, one that would be impossible to create in any live-action film. The great white wolves are drawn with grace, and not sentimentalized; when they bare their fangs, you can see that they are not friendly comic pals, but animals who can and will kill.
The movie does not dwell on violence, which makes some of its moments even more shocking, as when Ashitaka finds that his scarred arm has developed such strength that his arrow decapitates an enemy.
Miyazaki and his collaborators work at Japan's Studio Ghibli, and a few years ago Disney bought the studio's entire output for worldwide distribution. (Disney artists consider Miyazaki a source of inspiration.) The contract said Disney could not change a frame--but there was no objection to dubbing into English, because of course, all animation is dubbed into even its source language, and as Miyazaki cheerfully observes, "English has been dubbed into Japanese for years."
This version of "Princess Mononoke" has been well and carefully dubbed with gifted vocal talents, including Billy Crudup as Ashitaka, Claire Danes as San, Minnie Driver as Eboshi, Gillian Anderson as Moro, Billy Bob Thornton as Jigo, and Jada Pinkett-Smith as Toki, a commonsensical working woman in the village.
The drama is underlaid with Miyazaki's deep humanism, which avoids easy moral simplifications. There is a remarkable scene where San and Ashitaka, who have fallen in love, agree that neither can really lead the life of the other, and so they must grant each other freedom, and only meet occasionally. You won't find many Hollywood love stories (animated or otherwise) so philosophical. "Princess Mononoke" is a great achievement and a wonderful experience, and one of the best films of the year.
Some of my information comes from an invaluable new book, "Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation," by Helen McCarthy (Stone Bridge Press, $18.95).
Rating: 4 out of 5


Ghost in the Shell
***

An animated film directed by Mamoru Oshii. Produced by Yoshimasa Mizuo, Shigeru Watanabe, Ken Iyadomi and Mitsunisu Ishikawa. Art direction by Hiromasa Ogura. Written by Kazunori Ito. Running time: 82 minutes. No MPAA rating (some nudity, sex and violence; not suitable for younger viewers).

By Roger Ebert

In the new Japanese animated film ``Ghost in the Shell,'' the ``shell'' refers to bodies both artificial and organic, and the ``ghost'' refers to individual identity. Ghosts can move from organic to inorganic bodies, but an inorganic body cannot generate its own ghost; identity is a uniquely human trait. Then a very advanced computer program breaks through, attaining self-consciousness and independence. It moves freely through the Internet, becoming known as the Puppet Master, ``the greatest hacker of all time.''
The film is set in the next century, when humans coexist with cyborgs, who are part human, part machine and part computer. The Puppet Master describes itself as ``a living, thinking entity who was created in the sea of information.'' It once occupied a ``real'' body but was tricked into diving into a cyborg, and then its body was murdered. Now it exists only in the electronic universe, but is in search of another body to occupy--or share.
``Ghost in the Shell'' is not in any sense an animated film for children. Filled with sex, violence and nudity (although all rather stylized), it's another example of anime, animation from Japan aimed at adults--in this case, the same college-age audience that reads Heavy Metal and other slick comic zines. Anime has been huge in Japan for years but is now making inroads into the world market; this film was co-produced with British money and includes a song performed by U2, ``One Minute Warning,'' which runs nearly five minutes under apocalyptic images.
The movie has a tendency, as does a lot of traditional science fiction, for its characters to talk in concepts and abstract information. Sample dialogue: ``Aside from a slight brain augmentation, your body's almost entirely human.'' Or, ``If a cyber could create its own ghost, what would be the purpose of being human?'' Or (my favorite), ``You're treated like other humans, so stop with the angst!''
The lead character is a shapely woman named Maj. Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg who runs an intelligence operation. Her unit is assigned to investigate an evil foreign operative who wants political asylum, but soon the case leads to contact with the Puppet Master, the ``most dreaded cyber-criminal of all time.'' The major and other characters can change shapes, become invisible and dive into the minds of others--which places them not so much in the future as in the tradition of Japanese fantasy, in which ghosts have always been able to do such things.
There is much moody talk in the movie about what it is to be human. All of the information accumulated in a lifetime, we learn, is less than a drop in the ocean of information, and perhaps a creature that can collect more information and hold onto it longer is ... more than human. In describing this vision of an evolving intelligence, Corinthians is evoked twice: ``For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known.'' At the end of the film, Puppet Master invites the major to join it face to face in its brave new informational sea.
The movie uses the film noir visuals that are common in anime, and it shares that peculiar tendency of all adult animation to give us women who are strong protagonists at the center of the story, and nevertheless almost continuously nude. An article about anime in a recent issue of Film Quarterly suggests that to be a "salary man'' in modern Japan is so exhausting and dehumanizing that many men (who form the largest part of the animation audience) project both freedom and power onto women, and identify with them as fictional characters. That would help explain another recent Japanese phenomenon, the fad among (straight) teenage boys of dressing like girls.
"Ghost in the Shell'' is intended as a breakthrough film, aimed at theatrical release instead of a life on tape, disc and campus film societies. The ghost of anime can be seen here trying to dive into the shell of the movie mainstream. But this particular film is too complex and murky to reach a large audience, I suspect; it's not until the second hour that the story begins to reveal its meaning. But I enjoyed its visuals, its evocative soundtrack (including a suite for percussion and heavy breathing), and its ideas.

Rating: 3 out of 5



Spirited Away
****

BY ROGER EBERT

Cast & CreditsWith The Voices Of:
Chihiro: Daveigh Chase
Yubaba, Zeniba: Suzanne Pleshette
Haku: Jason Marsden
Kamaji: David Ogden Stiers
Chirhiro's Mother: Lauren Holly
Assistant Manager: John Ratzenberger

Walt Disney Studios Presents A Film Written And Directed By Hayao Miyazaki. U.S. Production Directed By Kirk Wise. Running Time: 124 Minutes. Rated PG.(For Some Scary Moments).


"Miyazaki's Spirited Away" has been compared to "Alice in Wonderland," and indeed it tells of a 10-year-old girl who wanders into a world of strange creatures and illogical rules. But it's enchanting and delightful in its own way, and has a good heart. It is the best animated film of recent years, the latest work by Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese master who is a god to the Disney animators.

Because many adults have an irrational reluctance to see an animated film from Japan (or anywhere else), I begin with reassurances: It has been flawlessly dubbed into English by John Lasseter ("Toy Story"), it was co-winner of this year's Berlin Film Festival against "regular" movies, it passed "Titanic" to become the top-grossing film in Japanese history, and it is the first film ever to make more than $200 million before opening in America.

I feel like I'm giving a pitch on an infomercial, but I make these points because I come bearing news: This is a wonderful film. Don't avoid it because of what you think you know about animation from Japan. And if you only go to Disney animation--well, this is being released by Disney.

Miyazaki's works ("My Neighbor Totoro," "Kiki's Delivery Service," "Princess Mononoke") have a depth and complexity often missing in American animation. Not fond of computers, he draws thousand of frames himself, and there is a painterly richness in his work. He's famous for throwaway details at the edges of the screen (animation is so painstaking that few animators draw more than is necessary). And he permits himself silences and contemplation, providing punctuation for the exuberant action and the lovable or sometimes grotesque characters.

"Spirited Away" is told through the eyes of Chihiro (voice by Daveigh Chase), a 10-year-old girl, and is more personal, less epic, than "Princess Mononoke." As the story opens, she's on a trip with her parents, and her father unwisely takes the family to explore a mysterious tunnel in the woods. On the other side is what he speculates is an old theme park; but the food stalls still seem to be functioning, and as Chihiro's parents settle down for a free meal, she wanders away and comes upon the film's version of wonderland, which is a towering bathhouse.

A boy named Haku appears as her guide, and warns her that the sorceress who runs the bathhouse, named Yubaba, will try to steal her name and thus her identity. Yubaba (Suzanne Pleshette) is an old crone with a huge face; she looks a little like a Toby mug, and dotes on a grotesquely huge baby named Boh. Ominously, she renames Chihiro, who wanders through the structure, which is populated, like "Totoro," with little balls of dust that scurry and scamper underfoot.

In the innards of the structure, Chihiro comes upon the boiler room, operated by a man named Kamaji (David Ogden Stiers), who is dressed in a formal coat and has eight limbs, which he employs in a bewildering variety of ways. At first he seems as fearsome as the world he occupies, but he has a good side, is no friend of Yubaba, and perceives Chihiro's goodness.

If Yubaba is the scariest of the characters and Kamaji the most intriguing, Okutaresama is the one with the most urgent message. He is the spirit of the river, and his body has absorbed the junk, waste and sludge that has been thrown into it over the years. At one point, he actually yields up a discarded bicycle. I was reminded of a throwaway detail in "My Neighbor Totoro," where a child looks into a bubbling brook, and there is a discarded bottle at the bottom. No point is made; none needs to be made.

Japanese myths often use shape-shifting, in which bodies reveal themselves as facades concealing a deeper reality. It's as if animation was invented for shape-shifting, and Miyazaki does wondrous things with the characters here. Most alarming for Chihiro, she finds that her parents have turned into pigs after gobbling up the free lunch. Okutaresama reveals its true nature after being freed of decades of sludge and discarded household items. Haku is much more than he seems. Indeed the entire bathhouse seems to be under spells affected the appearance and nature of its inhabitants.

Miyazaki's drawing style, which descends from the classical Japanese graphic artists, is a pleasure to regard, with its subtle use of colors, clear lines, rich detail and its realistic depiction of fantastical elements. He suggests not just the appearances of his characters, but their natures. Apart from the stories and dialogue, "Spirited Away" is a pleasure to regard just for itself. This is one of the year's best films.

[edg]

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