Yes, that's right. That was the last movie in our Ghibli watch. We watched 23 movies in 23 days (we skipped a day, but then did the Fireflies/Totoro double feature on another, so it evens out), and now that we're done, here's my ranking, as promised.
I really love and/or enjoy the top half of this list, numbers 1 through 11. Everyone should make an effort to watch those 11 films at least once in their lives.
12 through 15 were still fun, but had their issues. I would still safely recommend them, but with that caveat.
16 through 22 were fine, and by no means terrible. If you're a completionist, then give them a whirl, but there are better things you could be doing with your lives.
And Ocean Waves is the only one I truly dislike. Only watch this one if, like us, you decide it's time to watch every Studio Ghibli film.
But your mileage may vary, of course, so don't listen to me at all, and go make up your own mind instead 😃
Today we watched Porco Rosso, a film neither of us had watched before, and it was delightful!
Marco is an ace pilot who takes bounties to fight air pirates. Also, he's an anthropomorphized pig, known by most as Porco Rosso ('Crimson Pig' in Italian). There's a lot of really cool dogfighting scenes throughout the film, and an extended plane design sequence because Miyazaki loves his planes. But I don't even mind because it introduces the super great Fio, the mechanic who completely redesigns Marco's plane after the American hotshot Curtis shoots it down, and then goes with Marco to help him defeat Curtis.
The final dogfight between Marco and Curtis is awesome. It starts out as a normal one-on-one dogfight (after all the pirates take bets and make a sporting event out of the whole thing), then when their guns jam and/or they run out of bullets, they start throwing stuff at each other, while still flying their planes. When they finally run out of stuff to throw at each other, they land their planes and box it out. It's a really funny sequence of events.
There is an undercurrent of anti-fascism in the film. It takes place during the 1930s in and around Italy. Marco is a bounty hunter because he does not want to join the Italian air force under Mussolini (he's never named, but Marco repeatedly calls the government fascist). The pirates are pirates for the same reason. Only Marco's friend Ferrarin joined up, and he's constantly warning Marco whenever the air force or any other government agency goes looking for him.
When Marco is waiting for his plane to be repaired/re-designed, he spends his time in Milan, walking around in a trenchcoat and hat. The dude still sticks out like a sore thumb, and I have to believe Miyazaki was aping Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four comics where he has Ben Grimm aka The Thing do the same thing when he's undercover. You ain't fooling nobody, but since you're living in a fantastical world, everyone pretends like they don't recognize you 😛
That's all I really got. This movie was just super fun and charming (and the hostage schoolgirls at the very beginning were friggin' adorable!), and I'm really happy we ended our Ghibli watch with this movie.
Today we watched The Wind Rises, Miyazaki's final film before his retirement (and then his un-retirement). It is a fictionalized biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, the chief designer of the Zero, Japan's fighter plane during World War II. Neither of us had seen it before.
First, the value judgement: it's a pretty good biopic. The main character is interesting, and the time period he lived in was definitely compelling. So yeah, it's good, and I enjoyed it.
But this film is full of contradictions. The main contradiction is of course that Miyazaki would choose to make a movie about a warplane engineer when he himself is a pacifist (he opposed changing Japan's Constitution to allow a standing army). He's been quoted as saying he has "very complex feelings" about World War II. He said Japan had acted out of "foolish arrogance," but also said the Zero "represented one of the few things we Japanese could be proud of – they were a truly formidable presence, and so were the pilots who flew them".
The Jiro Miyazaki presents also has some jarring contradictions. From his youth he is shown as being extremely passionate about flying. He will never be able to fly himself because he has severe nearsightedness, so, after a dream featuring some pretty odd plane designs and Italian aircraft designer Gianni Caproni, he decides he's going to design them instead. This passion carries Jiro throughout the film, but it also seems to leave almost no room for anything else. The three times we see his sister, he is late to meet her because he stayed at work and forgot she was coming, or ignores her completely because he has a new aviation magazine. He leaves his sick and dying wife Naoko alone the whole day so he can go design. He comes back late every day, if he comes back at all. He professes to love her, but then ignores her for his work. Even when he's home, he takes a table and works on a design instead of talking to her.
(It's hard not to see Miyazaki in this. His passion for his work also kept him away from home, and harmed his relationships with his family.)
In the original Japanese, Jiro's voice actor is none other than Hideaki Anno, of Neon Genesis Evangelion fame. When we started the film, I joked that Anno should stick to staying "behind" the camera because his line delivery was flat as hell. There was almost no emotion in his voice, regardless of the situation. As the film progressed, I started thinking maybe that was on purpose. Jiro had a drive that he was passionate about, but maybe that passion wasn't borne out of emotion. Maybe the Jiro in this film was a sociopath, only mimicking the emotion he saw in others.
Or maybe Anno is just a bad voice actor. One or the other.
Jiro's dreams permeate the film. From the opening scene to the last, Jiro dreams of airplanes and Gianni Caproni. His dreams are always about flight, never about anything else. Even as he is forever grounded, his dreams take him to the air. Except his final dream, which starts with him walking out of the wreckage of multiple Zero fighters. In this dream he stays on the ground and finally dreams of something other than flying: his dead wife Naoko. She tells him to live, right before she disappears. Had he not been living before, engrossed in his work as he was? I think it also says something that, after being told to live not just by Naoko but also by Caproni, he instead continues the dream, and follows Caproni to his house for a drink.
My favorite character in the film is Jiro's supervisor Kurokawa. He's a short man with the most expressive hair (it bounces and flaps all the time!). He's constantly grumpy and critical of Jiro even as he protects him from the secret police (for befriending a German who was anti-Hitler). When Jiro and Naoko marry, Kurokawa is the only person who cries.
I guess my feelings for this film are contradictory as well. It's a good, well-made movie, and I do like it, but it kind of nags at me too. It feels almost like I just watched some well-made propaganda. And even though I know it's propaganda, and the thing it's propagandizing for is maybe not the best, I still like it. It's a weird feeling.
Today we watched The Secret World of Arriety, based on The Borrowers by Mary Norton, a book I have a vague recollection of reading once a long time ago. We'd not seen this movie before, but we liked it!
Arriety is a tiny person, a Borrower, living under a human house in the Japanese countryside. She lives with her mom and dad, and they're the only Borrowers living in this human house.
Sho is a sick boy sent to the country to rest at his aunt's house before his heart surgery (also, he looks a lot like Shinji Ikari). Sho knows the Borrowers exist because his mother told him about it once, and he sees Arriety on his first day.
The movie is about the burgeoning friendship between Arriety and Sho, even as Arriety's family distrusts humans, and Haru, the housekeeper at Sho's aunt's house, wants to capture them... for reasons. The Borrowers' distrust of humans makes complete sense. They are much bigger than they are, and could easily hurt them, even without meaning to. It is a dangerous world for Borrowers, and they take great pains not to be seen when out doing their borrowing.
What's less clear is why Haru wants to capture them. Sho's aunt talks about how her grandfather had this elaborate dollhouse built so the Borrowers could live in it after seeing one when he was young, but he never saw another one. This love for the Borrowers is passed down through the generations. I understand Haru is not part of the family, but she knows they don't want to hurt the Borrowers. Neither her intentions nor her motivations are ever made clear, and at the end she's almost made to feel crazy (which made me pity her).
When it becomes obvious that Sho knows about Arriety and her parents, her father decides they have to move. Sho's rather rude and terrifying intrusion into their home to give them a new kitchen (he was trying to be nice, but maybe ask permission next time you want to remodel somebody's house), and Haru's kidnapping of Arriety's mother only exacerbates things (even though Sho helps to rescue her later). We never find out what happens to Sho, but it's suggested that, after meeting Arriety, he now has a reason to live. But I was mostly like, whatever. That other Borrower named Spiller has a crush on her and it's adorable.
Arriety is a really good character, and she is most of the reason I enjoyed this movie. It's a pretty small story with pretty small stakes (no pun intended), and sometimes, that's all I need.
Today we watched Laputa: Castle in the Sky. I had seen it before, but the girl hadn't (she thinks; she's not actually 100% sure). Before Nausicaä was grandfathered in, Laputa was the first official Studio Ghibli production, and while it is a well-made film, showcasing Miyazaki's greatness, it doesn't really do it for me. I don't hate it or anything, but I also don't think it's up there with the better Ghibli films either. It's very firmly entrenched in the middle.
Pazu and Sheeta are plucky kids who go on an adventure, running from pirates and the military, and then joining the pirates, and then finding an ancient, almost mythic castle in the sky. It's exciting, it's funny, and it's cartoony (making my assertion yesterday that Cagliostro was Miyazaki's cartooniest work a lie almost immediately), but it's also not particularly revolutionary. It feels too much like a Disney animated feature, and cementing this belief is Muska, the only outright villainous villain in any Ghibli movie (I sure hope I don't watch anything tomorrow that proves this a lie as well).
There are bad people in Ghibli films: Kushana in Nausicaä, Lady Eboshi in Mononoke, Yubaba in Spirited Away, the kids' aunt in Grave of the Fireflies, etc. But none of them are as irredeemably evil as Muska is. We may not agree with any of them, but we can kind of see their point of view, and they ultimately do some good stuff along with the bad. Muska spends most of his time hurting kids. He doesn't ever show a single shred of remorse, nor does he have any redeeming or exculpatory qualities. Dude just wants power, and he doesn't care how many people he has to kill to get it, their age be damned. He hits them, shoots at them, pulls them by their pigtails, and terrorizes them every chance he gets. And at the end, he forces the kids to use a spell of destruction to destroy the castle, blinding him and causing him to either be crushed by masonry, fall to his death thousands of feet below, or be cursed to blindly wander the halls of what remains of the castle as it ascends into orbit and he slowly freezes and/or asphyxiates. Whatever the outcome, his death is not pretty, but it is richly deserved.
(And before anyone starts yelling at me about Lord Cob, yeah, I know. But he's not a Ghibli villain as much as he is an Earthsea villain, so I stand by my statement.)
The pirates are pretty great, though, so it has that going for it 😃
