Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)
Adapted from a Monkey Punch manga that was itself based on Maurice LeBlanc's popular super-spy Lupin, Hayao Miyazaki's first feature-length film The Castle of Cagliostro came about as an offshoot of his experiences producing television episodes of a popular Lupin series (1977-1981). As such, the animation and backgrounds are more simplistic, the story more cartoonish (though the very basic Miyazaki hallmarks of girl in transition, flight, and gadgetry are already in place) and one-dimensional, and the pace more relentlessly breakneck than occasionally meditative. Beginning as a heist comedy and continuing as an impenetrable fortress/princess in a tower action adventure film, The Castle of Cagliostro is a light, irreverent slapstick exercise with a healthy share of nifty gadgets and derring-do. Missing is a sense of completion and the deeper examination of themes that one will come to associate with the director's work, but The Castle of Cagliostro stands on its own merits; despite being shackled somewhat by the artistic and thematic requirements of an in-place franchise, the picture reveals the burgeoning promise of a filmmaker who would become the most important voice of the new animé medium. *** (OUT OF FOUR) |
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Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds (1984)
A dry-run in many ways for Miyazaki's later works, particularly Princess Mononoke, which the picture resembles most, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds is marred by a painfully dated soundtrack and politics strained to the edge of hysterical, but it remains a powerful piece and a showcase for nearly every element of what would become recurring themes in Miyazaki's work. See in conservationist and warrior (Princess Mononoke) Princess Nausicaä a young girl with an animal familiar and powers of flight (Kiki's Delivery Service) at odds with a militaristic airborne oppressor (Porco Rosso) who makes a habit of kidnapping princesses (Laputa: Castle in the Sky), all the while maintaining an innocent flirtation with a heroic boy (a trope discernable in all of Miyazaki's subsequent output). The leader of the industrialized state is a woman, and the conflict of the piece involves the struggle between civilization and the fury of the natural (Princess Mononoke again, with insects and poisonous spores in place of forest spirits and elder gods). Not immune at this point to his culture's general obsession with nuclear war (the poisonous spores of the film's ancient forest "wasteland" remind of the ashes of fallout), Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds is probably more interesting as a source material for the student of Miyazaki's tendencies and nascent concerns than, perhaps, as an entertainment unto itself. As most will be coming to this film only after sampling the filmmaker's late production (it is difficult to find--prior to Studio Ghibli's magnificent box set it was available in the United States only as a fan dub), a perspective uncoloured by hindsight is a luxury reserved only for the lucky, prescient few. *** (OUT OF FOUR) OOP ON HOME VIDEO |
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Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986)
Often hailed as Miyazaki's most accessible work, Laputa: Castle in the Sky is a somewhat one-note "boy's adventure" with an unusually weak female protagonist and an overreliance on set-pieces. Inspired by a reference in Gulliver's Travels to a floating city above Balnibarbi, the film is ultimately less Swift than Conan Doyle--an archaeological adventure that eventually involves itself in the exploration of a lost and dead civilization. It appears to be a straight cliffhanger serial, in other words (complete with a sly Victorianism), at least until its final third, when the picture begins to take on the cause of the filmmaker's ecological concerns. Sheeta is an heir to the floating Kingdom Laputa. Earthbound for generations as the island drifts undiscovered in a storm cloud, Sheeta discovers her legacy with the help of a much-coveted heirloom: a blue "levistone" that points the way to her ancestral home. Joining forces with brave boy Pazu, Sheeta's quest to reclaim her legacy leads the pair on a series of adventures, sometimes in the company of a bumbling crew of pirates, always just ahead of a greedy army seeking to loot the gilded Laputa. The first hint of Spirited Away's cautionary stance on the dangers of materialism (along with the first look at a character design echoed in Spirited Away's boiler room keeper), Laputa: Castle in the Sky is interesting for the Miyazaki scholar for sure but still feeling its way in terms of the connectivity and brilliance of Miyazaki's later plots. A superior children's entertainment regardless, Miyazaki refines his dedication to younger viewers with his next film--abandoning his broad politicizing until 1992's Porco Rosso. *** (OUT OF FOUR) NOT YET AVAILABLE ON HOME VIDEO |
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My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
The Cheshire Cat recast as a twelve-legged feline bus, the White Rabbit a blue acorn-stealing blob with a little white assistant, and the caterpillar and his mushroom fashioned into the grey, heavy-lidded demeanour (and drum belly) of wood spirit Totoro, Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro recasts Lewis Carroll as something at once more based in functionality and more useful to the developing psyche. An enchantment that suffers only for a mildly dated "blip" score, the film carries the evolving hallmarks of Miyazaki's auteurist questions: little girls displaced by a move or a trauma, surrogate parents, magical modes of transportation, the freedom of flight, and the terror and the exhilaration of the possible. Note one magical scene that encompasses all as nuts planted by young Satsuke (voiced by Noriko Hidaka) and her toddler sister Mei (Chika Sakamoto) grow at the urging of a midnight dance while their father (Shigesato Itoi) toils in his study, oblivious. Too short at 85 minutes, My Neighbor Totoro is a wondrous picture by an artist hitting his prime as an animator and fable-maker--a dry run in many ways for the master's late work (see the soot spirits resurrected in Spirited Away, the crone Granny (Tanie Kitabayashi) in one of the airplane workers in Porco Rosso, and the old hermit of Princess Mononoke), My Neighbor Totoro on its own is one of the most accomplished and important children's films ever made. **** (OUT OF FOUR) |
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Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)
Betraying a new maturity in not only animation but also score, Kiki's Delivery Service is a puberty fable whose conceit, if taken far enough, eventually suggests that the magic of childhood lost in adolescence can be regained through faith, courage, and love. Kiki, as tradition dictates, leaves home at the age of thirteen to find her fortune as "town witch" to a town without one. Her only learned skill that of flight, she begins the titular courier service while living with what appears to be an interracial couple in an island amalgamation of several western cities. Her black cat Jiji the only nod to any sort of Disney convention (he talks, but only to her and only when she's magical, at that), the picture is marked by a delicious bittersweet quality as the story moves from parents losing a child to adolescence through to that child finding--and losing--first love in a strange city. Between this and My Neighbor Totoro, Miyazaki's hallmarks emerge with a clear intentionality--he evolved into an auteur with a lovely fable cycle about overcoming the uncertainties of growing up in particular and life in general. Though not nearly so adept and consistently enthralling as My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service is a children's film that gives lie, again, to the western belief that stories for kids need to be insipid, trite, and unwatchable. *** (OUT OF FOUR) |
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Porco Rosso (1992)
The only misstep in Miyazaki's later career (and a minor one at that), Porco Rosso tells the peculiar allegory of a WWI-era Italian pilot's rejection of fascism in his native land and subsequent curse to live his life as an upright talking pig. The Crimson Pig, in fact (an obvious take on Germany's Red Baron), fighting for good against evil air pirates in a souped-up bi-plane. His former partner and coy love interest is the benevolent Mata Hari Gina, who runs a pilot's club in a sun-baked inlet. With animation that is simply astonishing in its detail (the highlight coming in an early scene as Porco moves a small table closer to him, jostling a radio and a bottle of wine), Porco Rosso marks both strides in technical achievement and Miyazaki's latent politicism swimming to the surface. Where his previous two films were invested in personal tales of little girls finding their way in the world, this picture announces (somewhat obliquely and clumsily) the return to the auteur's stumbling proselytizing (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds). Though Princess Mononoke deals with green philosophy and Spirited Away can be read as an allegory of child prostitution in Asia, the images of noble pigs and pre-bellum fascism are too broad and obvious to be taken without a certain cynicism. **1/2 (OUT OF FOUR) OOP ON HOME VIDEO |
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Princess Mononoke (1997)
An endless delight, Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke is a film as beautiful as it is poignant. Prince Ashitaka is cursed to death when his arm is infected by a strange pestilence from the deep forest. Journeying on a final quest out of his homeland with a steel musket ball his only clue, Ashitaka traces the source of his contagion's fury to an industrialized city-state run by the Lady Eboshi, steadily encroaching on the pristine forest. Princess Mononoke respects character ambiguity and nuance, reminding a great deal of Inagaki's Miyamoto Musashi Samurai trilogy in that regard. Though she's a spoiler, for instance, Lady Eboshi is the protector of literal and social lepers--diseased men working alongside "fallen" women. The titular feral child and her retinue of ancient wolf gods forms the final third of the picture's central trio: she the wild, Eboshi the civilized, and Ashitaka the (doomed) bridge between the two. That Princess Mononoke is an industrial revolution allegory is inescapable (the images of marauding boars cutting through the forest remind of Faulkner's description of "The Bear" and, as it follows, of the locomotive's role in Britain), but the picture is also a wonderful fantasy, a bracing action film, and an animation of uncommon beauty and detail. Princess Mononoke is the first film that successfully marries Miyazaki's politics with his humanism, and it's a masterpiece. **** (OUT OF FOUR) |
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Spirited Away (2002)
An extraordinary film blessed with a wealth of critical possibilities, Spirited Away places high among the most beautiful animated films ever made. It is a culmination of Miyazaki's auteur motifs (displaced children, surrogate parents, magical modes of transportation, the freedom of flight, etc.), which are at ease now with the filmmaker's political inclinations--comfortably buried in the subtext, all. Another marriage of tradition with the modern sensibility, another meditation on the encroaching of civilization on the natural, and on its most basic level, another brilliant fable about dealing with the pitfalls of growing up, though a strong case could be made for Spirited Away as a discussion of the evils of bathhouses and their link to prostitution (young girls at the beck of beasts), the film at its heart is a thing of bracing genius. The narrative involved with a young girl Sen as she's separated from her gluttonous parents (more pigs and their appetites à la Porco Rosso) and forced to work in a bathhouse frequented nightly by Japan's pantheon of house and nature spirits, the latest from Miyazaki is an adventure, a thriller, a comedy, and a romance at once and at once political and personal, but at its heart and most importantly, Spirited Away concerns a little girl learning to honour her friends and her family by valuing herself. **** (OUT OF FOUR) SEE DVD DETAILS
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