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[Taka]

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.

[Wiper]

Pag, pag. Cik atceros Ebertam maksimaalais veerteejums bija **** (4 zvaigzniites).

[edg]

Beidzot ir paraadiijies taada garuma posts, uz kuru paskatoties, edg nopuushas un nesaak pat lasiit.

[Taka]

Eberts dod arī ***** bet nu ļoooooooooti reti, tā kā **** var uzskatīt par superlabu vērtējumu. Principā viņš jau nekad arī nav zākājis animi, ja nu vienīgais Pokemonu filmas

[ShinChan]

Nee, Taka, Ebert nevienai filmai līdz šim nav iešķiebis 5 zvaigžņus. Būšu priecīgs ja tu man pierādīsi pretējo.
Te būs vēl daži apskati no godātā kritiķa puses, kurš ir viens no retajiem sava amta brāļiem, kas anime neuzskata par tikai un vienīgi multenēm (šur tur jau arī Rodžers grēko, taču tie ir sīkumi).

Grave of the Fireflies
Roger Ebert / Jan 1, 1988
In the waning days of World War II, American bombers drop napalm canisters on Japanese cities, creating fire storms. These bombs, longer than a tin can but about as big around, fall to earth trailing cloth tails that flutter behind them; they are almost a beautiful sight. After they hit, there is a moment's silence, and then they detonate, spraying their surroundings with flames. In a Japanese residential neighborhood, made of flimsy wood and paper houses, there is no way to fight the fires.
"Grave of the Fireflies" (1988) is an animated film telling the story of two children from the port city of Kobe, made homeless by the bombs. Seita is a young teenager, and his sister Setsuko is about 5. Their father is serving in the Japanese navy, and their mother is a bomb victim; Seita kneels beside her body, covered with burns, in an emergency hospital. Their home, neighbors, schools are all gone. For a time an aunt takes them in, but she's cruel about the need to feed them, and eventually Seita finds a hillside cave where they can live. He does what he can to find food, and to answer Setsuko's questions about their parents. The first shot of the film shows Seita dead in a subway station, and so we can guess Setsuko's fate; we are accompanied through flashbacks by the boy's spirit.
"Grave of the Fireflies" is an emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation. Since the earliest days, most animated films have been "cartoons" for children and families. Recent animated features such as "The Lion King," "Princess Mononoke" and "The Iron Giant" have touched on more serious themes, and the "Toy Story" movies and classics like "Bambi" have had moments that moved some audience members to tears. But these films exist within safe confines; they inspire tears, but not grief. "Grave of the Fireflies" is a powerful dramatic film that happens to be animated, and I know what the critic Ernest Rister means when he compares it to "Schindler's List" and says, "It is the most profoundly human animated film I've ever seen."
It tells a simple story of survival. The boy and his sister must find a place to stay, and food to eat. In wartime their relatives are not kind or generous, and after their aunt sells their mother's kimonos for rice, she keeps a lot of the rice for herself. Eventually, Seita realizes it is time to leave. He has some money and can buy food--but soon there is no food to buy. His sister grows weaker. Their story is told not as melodrama, but simply, directly, in the neorealist tradition. And there is time for silence in it. One of the film's greatest gifts is its patience; shots are held so we can think about them, characters are glimpsed in private moments, atmosphere and nature are given time to establish themselves.
Japanese poets use "pillow words" that are halfway between pauses and punctuation, and the great director Yasujiro Ozu uses "pillow shots"--a detail from nature, say, to separate two scenes. "Grave of the Fireflies" uses them, too. Its visuals create a kind of poetry. There are moments of quick action, as when the bombs rain down and terrified people fill the streets, but this film doesn't exploit action; it meditates on its consequences.
The film was directed by Isao Takahata, who is associated with the famous Ghibli Studio, source of the greatest Japanese animation. His colleague there is Hayao Miyazaki ("Princess Mononoke," "Kiki's Delivery Service," "My Neighbor Totoro"). His films are not usually this serious, but "Grave of the Fireflies" is in a category by itself. It's based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Nosaka Akiyuki--who was a boy at the time of the firebombs, whose sister did die of hunger and whose life has been shadowed by guilt.
The book is well-known in Japan, and might easily have inspired a live-action film. It isn't the typical material of animation. But for "Grave of the Fireflies," I think animation was the right choice. Live action would have been burdened by the weight of special effects, violence and action. Animation allows Takahata to concentrate on the essence of the story, and the lack of visual realism in his animated characters allows our imagination more play; freed from the literal fact of real actors, we can more easily merge the characters with our own associations.
Hollywood animation has been pursuing the ideal of "realistic animation" for decades, even though that's an oxymoron. People who are drawn do not look like people who are photographed. They're more stylized, more obviously symbolic, and (as Disney discovered in painstaking experiments) their movements can be exaggerated to communicate mood through body language. "Grave of the Fireflies" doesn't attempt even the realism of "The Lion King" or "Princess Mononoke," but paradoxically it is the most realistic animated film I've ever seen--in feeling.
The locations and backgrounds are drawn in a style owing something to the 18th century Japanese artist Hiroshige and his modern disciple Herge (the creator of Tin Tin). There is great beauty in them--not cartoon beauty, but evocative landscape drawing, put through the filter of animated style. The characters are typical of much modern Japanese animation, with their enormous eyes, childlike bodies and features of great plasticity (mouths are tiny when closed, but enormous when opened in a child's cry--we even see Setsuko's tonsils). This film proves, if it needs proving, that animation produces emotional effects not by reproducing reality, but by heightening and simplifying it, so that many of the sequences are about ideas, not experiences.
There are individual moments of great beauty. One involves a night when the children catch fireflies and use them to illuminate their cave. The next day, Seita finds his little sister carefully burying the dead insects--as she imagines her mother was buried. There is another sequence in which the girl prepares "dinner" for her brother by using mud to make "rice balls" and other imaginary delicacies. And note the timing and the use of silence in a sequence where they find a dead body on the beach, and then more bombers appear far away in the sky.
Rister singles out another shot: "There's a moment where the boy Seita traps an air bubble with a wash rag, submerges it, and then releases it into his sister Setsuko's delighted face--and that's when I knew I was watching something special."
There are ancient Japanese cultural currents flowing beneath the surface of "Grave of the Fireflies," and they're explained by critic Dennis H. Fukushima Jr., who finds the story's origins in the tradition of double-suicide plays. It is not that Seita and Setsuko commit suicide overtly, but that life wears away their will to live. He also draws a parallel between their sheltering cave and hillside tombs.
Fukushima cites an interview with the author, Akiyuki: "Having been the sole survivor, he felt guilty for the death of his sister. While scrounging for food, he had often fed himself first, and his sister second. Her undeniable cause of death was hunger, and it was a sad fact that would haunt Nosaka for years. It prompted him to write about the experience, in hopes of purging the demons tormenting him."
Because it is animated and from Japan, "Grave of the Fireflies" has been little seen. When anime fans say how good the film is, nobody takes them seriously. Now that it's available on DVD with a choice of subtitles or English dubbing, maybe it will find the attention it deserves. Yes, it's a cartoon, and the kids have eyes like saucers, but it belongs on any list of the greatest war films ever made.

My Neighbor Totoro
Roger Ebert / Jan 1, 1993
Here is a children's film made for the world we should live in, rather than the one we occupy. A film with no villains. No fight scenes. No evil adults. No fighting between the two kids. No scary monsters. No darkness before the dawn. A world that is benign. A world where if you meet a strange towering creature in the forest, you curl up on its tummy and have a nap.
''My Neighbor Totoro'' has become one of the most beloved of all family films without ever having been much promoted or advertised. It's a perennial best seller on video. On the Internet Movie Database, it's voted the fifth best family film of all time, right behind ''Toy Story 2'' and ahead of ''Shrek.'' The new Anime Encyclopedia calls it the best Japanese animated film ever made. Whenever I watch it, I smile, and smile, and smile.
This is one of the lovingly hand-crafted works of Hayao Miyazaki, often called the greatest of the Japanese animators, although his colleague at the Ghibli Studios, Isao Takahata, may be his equal. Remarkable that ''Totoro'' and Takahata's ''The Grave of the Fireflies,'' now both in my Great Movies selection, were released on the same double bill in 1988. Miyazaki has not until very recently used computers to help animate his films; they are drawn a frame at a time, the classic way, with the master himself contributing tens of thousands of the frames.
Animation is big business in Japan, commanding up to a quarter of the box office some years. Miyazaki is the ''Japanese Disney,'' it's said, although that is a little unfair, since Walt Disney was more producer and visionary than animator, and Miyazaki rolls up his sleeves and draws his films himself. His ''Princess Mononoke'' (1999) outgrossed ''Titanic'' in Japan, and his newest film, ''Spirited Away,'' outgrossed ''Mononoke'' when it was released in July 2001. Of his nine other major films, those best known in the U.S. are ''Kiki's Delivery Service'' (1989), ''Castle in the Sky'' (1986), ''Warriors of the Wind'' (1984) and ''The Castle of Cagliostro'' (1979).
Miyazaki's films are above all visually enchanting, using a watercolor look for the backgrounds and working within the distinctive Japanese anime tradition of characters with big round eyes and mouths that can be as small as a dot or as big as a cavern. They also have an unforced realism in the way they notice details; early in ''Totoro,'' for example, the children look at a little waterfall near their home, and there on the bottom, unremarked, is a bottle someone threw into the stream.
The movie tells the story of two young sisters, Satsuki and Mei Kusakabe. As the story opens, their father is driving them to their new house, near a vast forest. Their mother, who is sick, has been moved to a hospital in this district. Now think about that. The film is about two girls, not two boys or a boy and a girl, as all American animated films would be. It has a strong and loving father, in contrast to the recent Hollywood fondness for bad or absent fathers. Their mother is ill; does illness exist in American animation?
When they ask a neighbor boy how to find their new house, we see, but they don't, that he makes a face. Later he tells them it is haunted. But not haunted in the American sense, with ghosts or fearsome creatures. When Mei and Satsuki let light into the gloom, they get just a glimpse of little black fuzzy dots scurrying to safety. ''Probably just dust bunnies,'' says their father, but there is an old nanny who has been hired to look after them, and she confides that they are ''soot sprites,'' which like abandoned houses, and will pack up and leave when they hear the sound of laughter.
Consider the way the children first approach the house. It has a pillar on its porch that is almost rotted through, and they gingerly push it a little, back and forth, showing how precariously it holds up the roof. But it does hold up the roof, and we avoid the American cliche of a loud and sensational collapse, with everyone scurrying to safety. When they peek into the house and explore the attic, it's with a certain scariness--but they disperse it by throwing open windows and waving to their father from the upper floor.
And consider that the father calmly accepts their report of mysterious creatures. Do sprites and totoros exist? They certainly do in the minds of the girls. So do other wonderful creatures, such as the Cat Bus, which scurries through the forest on eight quick paws, its big eyes working as headlights.
''While it's a little hard to tell whether the adults really believe in them,'' writes the critic Robert Plamondon, ''not once does Miyazaki trot out the hoary children's literature chestnut of 'the adults think I'm a liar, so I'm going to have to save the world by myself.' This accepting attitude towards traditional Japanese spirit-creatures may well represent an interesting difference between our two cultures.''
''My Neighbor Totoro'' is based on experience, situation and exploration--not on conflict and threat. This becomes clear in the lovely extended sequences involving totoros--which are not mythological Japanese forest creatures, but were actually invented by Miyazaki just for this movie.
Little Mei finds the first baby totoro, which looks like a bunny, scurrying around their yard, and follows it into the forest. Her father, home alone and absorbed in his work, doesn't notice her absence. The baby leads her down a leafy green tunnel and then there's a soft landing on the stomach of a vast slumbering creature. Miyazaki doesn't exploit cliches about the dark and fearsome forest; when Setsuki and her father go looking for Mei, they find her without much trouble--sleeping on the ground, for the totoro has disappeared.
Later, the girls go to meet their father's bus. But the hour grows late and the woods grow dark. Silently, casually, the giant totoro joins them at the bus stop, standing protectively to one side like an imaginary friend. It begins to rain. The girls have umbrellas, and give one to the totoro, who is delighted by the raindrops on the umbrella, and jumps up and down to shake loose a cascade of drops from the trees. Then the bus arrives. Notice how calmly and positively the scene has been handled, with the night and the forest treated as a situation, not a threat. The movie requires no villains. I am reminded that ''Winnie the Pooh'' also originally had no evil characters--but that in its new American version evil weasels have been written into A. A. Milne's benign world.
There are two family emergencies: A visit to the hospital to visit their mother, who wants to hear all about their new house, and another occasion when Setsuki gets a call from the doctor and needs to contact her father in the city. In both scenes, the mother's illness is treated as a fact of life, not as a tragedy sure to lead to doom.
There is none of the kids-against-adults plotting of American films. The family is seen as a safe, comforting haven. The father is reasonable, insightful and tactful, accepts stories of strange creatures, trusts his girls, listens to explanations with an open mind. It lacks those dreary scenes where a parent misinterprets a well-meaning action and punishes it unfairly.
I'm afraid that in praising the virtues of ''My Neighbor Totoro'' I have made it sound merely good for you, but it would never have won its worldwide audience just because of its warm heart. It is also rich with human comedy in the way it observes the two remarkably convincing, lifelike little girls (I speak of their personalities, not their appearance). It is awe-inspiring in the scenes involving the totoro, and enchanting in the scenes with the Cat Bus. It is a little sad, a little scary, a little surprising and a little informative, just like life itself. It depends on a situation instead of a plot, and suggests that the wonder of life and the resources of imagination supply all the adventure you need.

Tokyo Godfathers
Release Date: 2004
Ebert Rating: ***
By Roger Ebert / Jan 30, 2004
Samuel Goldwyn Films presents a film directed by Satoshi Kon. Written by Kon and Keiko Nobumotu. Running time: 92 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for thematic elements, violent images, language and some sexual material). In Japanese with English subtitles.

In Japan animation is not seen as the exclusive realm of children's and family films, but is often used for adult, science fiction and action stories, where it allows a kind of freedom impossible in real life. Some Hollywood films strain so desperately against the constraints of the possible that you wish they'd just caved in and gone with animation ("Torque" is an example).

Now here is "Tokyo Godfathers," an animated film both harrowing and heartwarming, about a story that will never, ever, be remade by Disney. It's about three homeless people -- an alcoholic, a drag queen and a girl of about 11 -- who find an abandoned baby in the trash on a cold Christmas Eve, and try for a few days to give it a home. The title makes a nod to John Ford's "3 Godfathers" (1948), where three desperados (led by John Wayne) rescue a baby from its dying mother on Christmas Eve and try to raise it, at one point substituting axle grease for baby oil.

The three urban drifters live in a Tokyo of ice and snow, where they have fashioned a temporary shelter of cardboard and plywood, and outfitted it with all the comforts of home, like a portable stove. Here they've formed a family of sorts, but each has a story to tell, and during the movie, they all tell them.

Gin, the alcoholic, claims to have been a bicycle racer who abandoned his family after losing everything by gambling. Hana, the transvestite, has felt like an outsider since birth. Miyuki, the little girl, ran away from home after a fight with her father. The others tell her she should return, but she's afraid to. And then the cries of the infant alert them, and their rescue of the little girl is a catalyst that inspires each of them to find what's good and resilient within themselves.

The movie was co-written and directed by Satoshi Kon, whose "Perfect Blue" and "Millennium Actress" have been among the best-received and most popular anime titles. Unlike Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away," "My Neighbor Totoro"), his style doesn't approach full-motion animation, but uses the simplified approach of a lot of anime, with simple backgrounds and characters who move and talk in a stylized way that doesn't approach realism. If you see this style for 30 seconds, you're likely to think it's constrained, but in a feature film, it grows on you and you accept it, and your imagination makes it expand into an acceptable version of the world.

The movie's story is melodrama crossed with pathos, sometimes startling hard-boiled action, and enormous coincidence. The streets of Tokyo seem empty and grim as the three godparents protect the child and eventually begin a search for its true parents. And the story involving those parents is more complicated than we imagine. There are scenes in an abandoned house, in an alley of homeless dwellings, in a drugstore, that seem forlorn and hopeless, and then other scenes of surprising warmth, leading up to a sensational ending and a quite remarkable development in which two lives are saved in a way possible only in animation.

"Tokyo Godfathers" is not appropriate for younger viewers, and I know there are older ones who don't fancy themselves sitting through feature-length adult animation from Japan. But there's a world there to be discovered. And sometimes, as with this film and the great "Grave of the Fireflies," the themes are so harrowing that only animation makes them possible. I don't think I'd want to see a movie in which a real baby had the adventures this one has.

P.s. Pirmaas divas Ebert ir ievietojis savaa sadaljaa "Great movies"


Papildinaashu ar veel vienas anime apskatu:

Metropolis

Release Date: 2002

Ebert Rating: ****

By Roger Ebert / Jan 25, 2002

There's something about vast futuristic cities that stirs me. Perhaps they awaken memories of my 12th year, when I sat in the basement on hot summer days and read through the lower reaches of science-fiction magazines: "Imagination," "Other Worlds," "Amazing." On the covers, towering cities were linked by skybridges, and buses were cigar-shaped rockets. In the foreground a bug-eyed monster was attacking a screaming heroine in an aluminum brassiere. Even now, the image of a dirigible tethered to the top of the Empire State Building is more thrilling to me than the space shuttle, which is merely real.

Those visions are goofy and yet at the same time exhilarating. What I like about Tokyo is that it looks like a 1940s notion of a future city. I placed "Dark City" first on my list of the best films of 1998, loved "Blade Runner's" visuals more than its story, liked the taxicabs in the sky in "The Fifth Element." Now here is "Metropolis," one of the best animated films I have ever seen, and the city in this movie is not simply a backdrop or a location, but one of those movie places that colonize our memory.

The Japanese anime is named after the 1926 Fritz Lang silent classic, and is based on a 1949 manga (comic book) by the late Osamu Tezuka, which incorporated Lang's images. The movie was directed by Taro Rin and written by the anime legend Katsuhiro Otomo, who directed "Akira" and wrote "Roujin-Z." It uses the Lang film as a springboard into a surprisingly thoughtful, ceaselessly exciting sci-fi story about a plot to use humanoids to take over the city. In the romance between Tima, the half-human heroine, and Kenichi, the detective's nephew who falls in love with her, the movie asks whether a machine can love. The answer is an interesting spin on "A.I." and "Blade Runner" because the debate goes on within Tima herself, between her human and robotic natures.

The film opens with astonishing visuals of the great city, which, like Lang's Metropolis, exists on several levels above and below ground. We see the skyscraping Ziggurat, a complex of towers linked by bridges and braces. The building seems to be a symbol of progress, but actually masks a scheme by the evil Duke Red to wrest control of the city from elected officials. Deep inside Ziggurat is a throne suspended in a hall filled with giant computer chips; it is intended for Tima, a humanoid in the image of Duke Red's dead daughter, built for him by the insane Dr. Lawton. Tima's role will be to merge the power of computers and the imagination of the human brain into a force that will possess the city.

Rock, the adopted son of Duke Red, hates this plan and wants to destroy Tima. He is jealous that his father prefers this artificial girl to his son, and believes Duke Red himself should sit on the throne. Other characters include an elderly detective who arrives in the city to explore the mystery of the Ziggurat; his nephew Kenichi becomes the hero.

The story is told with enormous energy; animation is more versatile than live action in making cataclysmic events comprehensible. Mob scenes at the beginning and explosions and destruction throughout have a clarity and force that live action would necessarily dissipate. The animation owes less to mainstream American animation than to the comic book or "manga" tradition of Japan, where both comics and animation are considered art forms worthy of adult attention.

In the figures of Tima and Kenichi, the movie follows the anime tradition of heroes who are childlike, have enormous eyes, seem innocent and threatened. The other characters have more realistic faces and proportions, and indeed resemble Marvel superheroes (the contrast between these character looks is unusual: Imagine Nancy visiting Spiderman). The backgrounds and action sequences look like the anime version of big-budget Hollywood f/x thrillers.

The music, too, is Western. The introduction to the city is scored with Dixieland, Joe Primrose sings "St. James Infirmary" at one point, and the climactic scene is accompanied by Ray Charles singing "I Can't Stop Loving You" (the effect is a little like "We'll Meet Again" at the end of "Dr. Strangelove").

The movie is so visually rich I want to see it again to look in the corners and appreciate the details. Like all the best Japanese anime, it pays attention to little things. There is a scene where an old man consults a book of occult lore. He opens it and starts to read. A page flips over. He flips it back in place. Considering that every action in an animated film requires thousands of drawings, a moment like the page flip might seem unnecessary, but all through the movie we get little touches like that. The filmmakers are not content with ordinary locations. Consider the Hotel Coconut, which seems to be a lobby with a desk clerk who checks guests into ancient luxury railway carriages.

"Metropolis" is not a simple-minded animated cartoon, but a surprisingly thoughtful and challenging adventure that looks into the nature of life and love, the role of workers, the rights (if any) of machines, the pain of a father's rejection, and the fascist zeal that lies behind Ziggurat. This is not a remake of the 1926 classic, but a wild elaboration. If you have never seen a Japanese anime, start here. If you love them, "Metropolis" proves you are right.

This post has been edited by ShinChan: Dec 30 2004, 12:28

[Ramiel]

hmm man piemeeram ir stipri pie kaajas ko kaads "visslavenais" kritikis sak pa anime, kaada tam noziime vispaar, jo mazaak vinus skatiisies jo labaak tas buus