![]() Since they finished work on The Boy and the Heron, a staff member tells me, all the animators are either on extended leave or have taken other jobs. The place is antiseptically clean but also strangely quiet. On the staircase are framed, hand-drawn tributes from the staff of Pixar and Aardman (creators of Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run) animation studios. A giant wooden Totoro greets us in the lobby, alongside an old-fashioned telephone booth. We are speaking in the dining room of the hallowed Studio Ghibli itself: an ivy-covered, three-storey complex with a roof garden, tucked away in a quiet Tokyo suburb. We’ve been talking ever since.” If someone like Miyazaki tells you he doesn’t have much time and he knows this will be his last film, you can’t say no Toshio Suzuki “It was on the third day that he talked to me. “When he stood up the next time, it was 4am.” Suzuki came back the next day and Miyazaki still ignored him. “He said: ‘I don’t have time for you.’” So he just sat down on the desk next to Miyazaki and waited in silence. “Miyazaki said something very mean to me,” Suzuki recalls. He was then an anime reporter, trying to interview Miyazaki while he was working on his first feature, a franchise movie called Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro. Suzuki first met Miyazaki in the late 1970s. Western admirers range from Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro to James Cameron (who acknowledged that his Avatar series was influenced by Princess Mononoke), not to mention a generation of Disney and Pixar animators. Spirited Away, in particular, cemented his status as one of cinema’s great auteurs, winning the top prize at the Berlin film festival, the Golden Bear, and the 2003 best animation Oscar. Miyazaki’s work has found favour not just with families and animation fans but also cinephiles around the world. Like most of his films it is a rich, complex story, grappling with themes of ecological destruction, technological progress, women’s rights, capital and labour – all within an action-packed fantasy adventure. In his 1997 epic Princess Mononoke, for example, the princess of the title is a feral warrior, first seen sucking the wound of her pet wolf and spitting out the blood. They are rarely straightforward tales of good v evil – their end goal is usually restoring harmony or achieving a deeper understanding, rather than slaying the monster or rescuing the princess. In terms of content, though, Miyazaki’s films could hardly be more different to Disney’s. In Japan, Miyazaki is practically considered a living god, and with his snow-white hair and beard and twinkling grin, he even looks the part – although, like Walt Disney, he is an incorrigible chain-smoker. His movies are some of the highest-grossing ever made in Japan, and his characters are household names – especially Totoro, the cuddly monster at the heart of his 1988 favourite My Neighbour Totoro. ![]() Like Disney, he has produced a string of much-loved, and much-merchandised, animated classics, bursting with colour and artistry. I watched the 2014 movie a week ago and, frankly, I think that the movie was better, moving the story in a different but good direction, while being clearly more carefully created.Miyazaki is often compared to Walt Disney, which is both helpful and unhelpful. However the story itself, while predictable and simple, was clearly meant to be more and the anime failed to capture it. Bottom line: the atmosphere was great and the sense of desperation and dark foreboding was clearly why so many people liked this. There are also a lot of sex scenes, bordering on rape, but they are kind of pointless after a while. Then you find yourself wondering why they didn't use that from the start. They often end in the assassin almost failing and managing to survive by using some prop. The violence scenes are really complicated, but also amateurish. The story is about young assassins, trained by people with no scruples. It is difficult to empathize with any of them and the rushed nature of the script doesn't help. The same issue can extend to the characters themselves, though. The problem was with the depiction of emotions on the characters faces, they all looked a little off. The animation was a little strange, although I couldn't say it was bad.
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