The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Kaguyahime no monogatari)

THE TALE OF THE PRINCESS KAGUYA (Kaguyahime no monogatari)   B             
aka:  The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter

Japan  (137 mi)  2013  d:  Isao Takahata          Disney [Japan]

Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki are the co-founders of the Japanese animation production company, Studio Ghibli, in June 1985, where eight of Studio Ghibli’s films are among the 15 highest-grossing anime films made in Japan.  Unlike Miyazaki who is an extraordinary manga artist and anime illustrator, Takahata does not draw and never worked as an animator before becoming a full-fledged director, though both worked together and had long careers in Japanese film and television animation.  The studio is known for a strict “no-edits” policy, where rumor has it a Studio Ghibli producer sent an authentic Japanese sword to Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein after contemplating edits to PRINCESS MONONOKE (1997), reportedly with the simple message “No cuts.”  Anime art styles range from wild, exaggerated stylization to subtle, more realistic approaches where the use of lines are prevalent, though more influenced by a brush than by a pen, where Miyazaki’s lush colorization filling every inch of the frame contrasts with Takahata’s more minimalist, pastel watercolor technique that leaves plenty of empty space unfilled, especially around the edges of the frame, creating more abstract imagery.  Miyazaki’s extraordinary musical composer, Joe Hisaishi, provides the gorgeous soundtrack for the film, which is based upon a 10th century Japanese folktale called The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, which is Japan’s oldest recorded story, predating the world’s first novel, Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji by at least a century.  At age 79, Takahata has been trying to make this film for more than 50 years, best known as the maker of GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES (1988), where film critic Roger Ebert, Grave of the Fireflies Movie Review (1988) | Roger Ebert, claims it “belongs on any list of the greatest war films ever made,” but also his more subtly distinctive films, known for being quiet and humane, ONLY YESTERDAY (1991), POM POKO (1994), and MY NEIGHBORS THE YAMADAS (1999), where the director has returned from semi-retirement after a 14-year absence. 

After the announced retirement of Hayao Miyazaki on September 6, 2013 after nearly three decades at the helm, his departure leaves the future of Studio Ghibli very much in doubt, as the secret to the studio’s popular longevity has been their insistence on producing hand-drawn animated films for decades, sticking to the painstakingly slow process of drawing images frame by frame long after other studios have embraced computer-aided animation and special CGI effects.  Every one of Studio Ghibli’s successes has adhered to the hand-drawn tradition, from MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (1988) to Miyazaki’s final film The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu) (2014) released earlier this year, though POM POKO (1994) was the first to use computer graphics, while PRINCESS MONONOKE (1997) was Miyazaki’s first mix of digital drawing and coloring onto the 2D hand-drawn imagery, the latter being a more delicate artform that has been able to sustain itself because it has employed the same animators throughout their careers, as opposed to other studios that rely upon short-term piecework.  According to Tokyo-based Polygon Pictures president and CEO Shuzo John Shiota, the leaders of the hand-drawn style are becoming fewer, “In Japan not many young people are coming in (to the 2D animation scene) anymore.  The master animators are not easy to replace.”  Shiota concludes that today’s animators simply don’t have the patience and can’t draw as well as their predecessors did, where it’s inevitable that computer generated imagery is the wave of the future.  The Japanese market, however, loves their hand-drawn anime, where according to the top-earning domestic Japanese films in 2013, 2013 Japan Yearly Box Office Results - Box Office Mojo, six of the top ten are hand-drawn animation, despite a digital wave steadily encroaching on the industry.  If you watch a movie from Studio Ghibli, part of the brilliance is being able to see the spectacular, where it is not out of the ordinary to see a deer morph into a monstrous god in PRINCESS MONONOKE (1997), a boy turn into a flying dragon in SPIRITED AWAY (2001), or a fish transform into a young girl in PONYO (2008). 

Like MY NEIGHBORS THE YAMADAS (1999), Takahata in this picture prefers to use the simplistic art style of watercolor pictures, creating a ravishingly beautiful opening in the middle of a bamboo forest where Okina (old man) is drawn to the light emanating from a particular stalk.  Investigating further, he is shocked to discover a palm-sized baby nestled inside, which he believes is a heavenly offering, bringing the baby home to his equally astounded wife Ouna (old woman), calling the child “Princess.”  While he hesitates to share his prize, believing it was his own destiny to discover this princess, they are both further amazed to discover their child grow, roll over, and walk in a matter of days, where they are both literally able to see growth spurts before their startled eyes, quickly realizing this was no ordinary baby.  As the child grows old enough to play with local kids in the fields, nicknamed “Little Bamboo,” which is an utter delight to watch as everything is discovered for the first time, the film interestingly takes on a dual perspective, one from the curiously developing point of view of the child, and another throughout from the more protective view of the adoptive parents.  This device allows the audience to comprehend the split personality that develops, as her unique childhood is expressed through joyous liberation and exploration with forest creatures and friends, while the responsibilities of parenthood is something else altogether.  Okina discovers more glowing bamboo stalks in the forest which are filled with gold, leading him to the conclusion that he was expected to provide an appropriate environment for a true princess, eventually moving from the edge of the forest into a palace in the city, along with many hired assistants to provide for her every need, including a teacher of etiquette named Lady Sagami that would transform her from a liberated young tomboy into an obedient princess whose beauty and reputation is worthy of her title, attracting the interest of rich suitors who would come from great distances to ask for her hand in marriage.  Anyone familiar with Homer’s Odysseus, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, or Puccini’s exotic final opera Turandot will recognize the line of suitors vying for the hand of a beautiful maiden, not to mention Siegfried having to overcome a curse of the gods and battle through a ring of fire to reach the imprisoned Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen.   

There’s even a naming ceremony where a venerated royal priest gives her the formal name of Princess Kaguya, for the scattering light that radiates from within her, where they hold a celebratory party that goes on for days but turns into a disaster, where she hears rumors that she’s not a real princess at all, that her family purchased her title.  In a fit of disgust, she bolts from the castle racing as fast as she can, where she’s seen as a blur in black and white charcoal drawings where her whizzing form is the only touch of color in an otherwise empty landscape.  The abstract spaciousness of the unfinished drawings project her restless state of mind as she anxiously returns to her former home in the forest, hoping to find the simpler and happier times of her childhood, but all her friends have moved away, leaving her stuck in a visually empty netherworld that resembles a desert of snow, only to awaken in her bed with the party still raging and no one has missed her at all.  Unfortunately the suitor story grows unnecessarily repetitive, as it duplicates itself, each initially given an impossible task, where the Princess believes she’s gotten rid of them all, but they eventually return years later reporting miraculous successes, which prove to be hoaxes.  Nonetheless, the attention even draws the interest of the Emperor, but when he attempts to possess her, she uncannily discovers the power to disappear.  While it all remains cloaked in beauty and innocence, nonetheless the parents controlling interests vie with her own unyielding spirit, which is essentially the centerpiece of the film, but then more mysteries unravel, where we discover she is a child of destiny, a daughter of the moon, and that it’s only a matter of time before she must return.  This narrative wrinkle thrown in at the end feels like it comes from another story, as it’s a supernatural element at odds with the discovery of her own innate humanness.  Takahata never finds a way to successfully blend this unfathomable revelation into the film without resorting to naked manipulation, where the extended tearful anguish from being ripped from her earthly family at the end feels forced and excessively traumatizing (one should question the tagline suitable for all ages).  Had the Princess liberated herself from what was expected of her by her parents (and society) as well as her ultimate fate, perhaps this would have been perceived as overly modern, where perhaps it might have lost some essential Japanese component, where it is her duty to follow her destiny.  After all, this was originally conceived in the 10th century, when women had no conceivable place in society except to follow behind and obey the dictates of men.  But seen today, there’s something cruelly uncomfortable about the magical celebratory nature of the finale, where the Princess is so close to achieving the unthinkable, imagining a different life for herself, but instead ends up doing what’s traditionally expected of her, seemingly with no free will whatsoever.  Despite the joyful feel of the transporting music, the horror is she is a fading light, a distant memory, a shell of the person she might have become.   

The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu)

THE WIND RISES (Kaze Tachinu)           B+     
Japan  (126 mi)  2014  d:  Hayao Miyazaki       Official site [United States]

Le vent se lève!                       The wind is rising!
il faut tenter de vivre!             We must try to live!

—Le cimetière marin (The Graveyard By The Sea), excerpt by Paul Valéry, 1920

While much has been written about how this is Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki’s final film, his swan song, the last of the hand-drawn animators who painstakingly draws each shot in a world otherwise filled with CGI computer effects, it should also be mentioned that the Studio Ghibli creator, now age 73, has previously announced his retirement seven times, Miyazaki “Not Retiring After All Again”, only to return with an idea for another film.  Through a career that has spanned six decades, enjoying huge commercial and critical success in Japan, PRINCESS MONONOKE (1997) was the highest grossing film in Japanese history until it was eclipsed by TITANIC (1997) that same year, while SPIRITED AWAY (2001) then became the all-time Japanese box office winner while also, along with MONONOKE, winning Best Picture at the Japanese Academy Awards, and was the first film to win an American Academy Award for Best Animated Film.  Part of Miyazaki’s appeal is the personal warmth of his characters, where his protagonists are often strong-willed and independent girls or young women possessing an intelligent curiosity about the world around them, advocating pro-feminist themes, while young male characters may be explorers who are ahead of their time, often showing an intricate relationship with nature and technology.  What’s unique about this film is that the lead character is for the first time an adult, where it doesn’t feature a magical, child fantasy world, but instead is one of the most fiercely provocative, real life dramas to come out of Studio Ghibli, a film set during the prelude to war, yet contains no villains and no bloodshed, where Miyazaki has written a biopic that resembles the life of Jiro Hirokoshi, the Mitsubishi engineer who designed the prototype for the Zero fighter planes, recognizable to World War II veterans as the planes used at Pearl Harbor, but eventually became negatively associated with kamikaze missions.  Like his delightful earlier films CASTLE IN THE SKY (1986) or Porco Rosso (Kurenai no buta) (1992), this film is obsessed with aeronautics, one of Miyazaki’s favorite recurring themes, a constant that reappears throughout his work much like Ozu’s attraction to trains.  This film is constantly expressing various modes of travel, including multiple train sequences, ships seen off in the distance at sea, or airplanes decorating the sky. 

The story begins with Jiro as a young boy who dreams of flying airplanes, who fantasizes having a life interacting with great Italian plane designer Giovanni Battista Caproni, who persuades him to become a designer, not a flyer, becoming close imaginary friends, another recurring theme that continues throughout adulthood, where these dream sequences offer a more playful change of pace.  But the scenic beauty of his imagination turns tragic when the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake causes a firestorm, with much of the city seen ominously burning to the ground, but also causing train derailments, creating mass chaos on the streets of Tokyo, where Jiro heroically saves a young woman (Nahoko) who breaks her leg, making quite an impression on her by carrying her to the safety of her family’s home, but loses contact afterwards when he discovers her entire burnt out neighborhood has been turned to little more than ash and rubble.  This incident parallels the 2011 disaster from Japan’s March 11 Tōhoku earthquake, the most powerful earthquake to ever hit Japan, causing a massive tsunami with 130 foot waves that dangerously wiped out the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, resulting in a meltdown in three of the six nuclear reactors, causing radioactive spillage throughout the region.  The crisis was so humanly devastating, causing nearly 16,000 deaths, more if you include the missing, with structural damage to over a million buildings, that in the aftermath, Miyazaki publicly announced that Studio Ghibli would no longer make fantasy films, but would only consider more realistic stories reflective of our modern times.  This emphasis on realism within a fictional setting allows Miyazaki to develop many of his overriding themes, as Jiro becomes a talented aeronautical engineer, something of a whiz kid, showing the most promise of anyone in his graduating class, where he is welcomed as a budding genius at his new job where the focus is on designing planes that are lighter and stronger.  In this endeavor, which is largely trial and error, he is sent to Germany to examine their metal planes, which are seen as technologically advanced marvels of engineering that are literally light years ahead of the wooden Japanese planes that still fall apart in high winds or high speeds.  The film adds a sinister racial element where Japanese engineers, though paid to visit the aeronautical plant in Germany, are continually forbidden from viewing the latest designs, which are seen as exclusively for Germans only. 

There is an interesting cast of secondary characters, none more eccentric than a strange German man visiting Japan played by the legendary voice of Werner Herzog in the American dubbed version, who among other things confides to Jiro that “Nazi’s are hoodlums,” appropriately named Castorp from Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, while also singing a German cabaret song, “This happens only once, it doesn’t come again,” Das gibts nur einmal, das kommt nicht wieder - YouTube (3:31) from the film THE CONGRESS DANCES (1931) Der Kongreß tanzt produced by the Weimer Ufa Studios, before eventually being chased out of the country at the end by the Japanese secret service.  What strikes one about Jiro is the way he passionately throws himself into his work, offering quite a bit of mechanical detail about rivets and aircraft design, where he’s almost always seen with slide rule in hand, off to the side somewhere crunching the numbers, where his meticulous obsession with work mirrors Miyazaki’s own rigorous work ethic at Studio Ghibli, and where the aircraft designers are portrayed more as serious artists than mere engineers.  The autobiographical nature of the work is perhaps its most endearing attribute (Miyazaki’s father owned an airplane factory), becoming a modernist aeronautical tale of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  The sheer number of different airplane designs on display in this film is like a joyful trip through an aviation fantasyland, often elevated with uplifting Vivaldi-like classical music from Joe Hisaishi as they soar across the skies, where it feels like being in the presence of Da Vinci’s art studio.  Perhaps the most memorable flying sequence is Jiro’s playful fun with a simple paper airplane that he throws through the air to connect with the rediscovered love of his life, Nahoko, who is seriously afflicted with tuberculosis, so remains confined to her room and out of reach. While this developing romance is an essential part of the film, wonderfully established early on with a windblown parasol, culminating with an impromptu wedding sequence late in the film that is beautifully conceived in its utter simplicity, yet it also sets the stage for tragic loss to come, perhaps foreshadowed earlier during Jiro’s trip to Germany when he hears the sad and achingly sorrowful sounds of Schubert’s Winterreise (Winter Journey) coming from an apartment window.  

One of the major conflicts expressed throughout is how the innocence of creation and the marvel of invention are often at odds with how these inventions are used.  Jiro is driven by a deep love for flying, where throughout his life he’s driven to create the most brilliantly designed flying machine that is utter grace and beauty in the sky, but there’s also a tragic element attached to it when the Japanese Imperial Army uses his invention to bomb Pearl Harbor.  In one of the most poignantly disturbing images of the film, after experiencing such joy at his successful creation, he’s also forced to react in horror and anguish when he sees a sky filled with literally hundreds of airplanes, “Not a single plane came back.  That’s what it means to lose a war.”  The eloquence of this complex moral quandary is not lost on the viewer, as it’s a chilling reminder of the inevitable intersection between the inspired passion of creative art and the heartless nature of exploitive commercialism, where it’s not the product, but the crass corporate use of a product that often leads to regret and personal tragedy.  Hirokoshi’s passion for flight was abducted by the megalomaniacal forces of militarism, where this beautifully realized and thought-provoking picture of an unspoiled, prewar Japan places front and center the difficulty and enormous sadness associated with maintaining Miyazaki’s own pacifist beliefs, where the Edenesque utopian beauty expressed in his glorious creations can be shattered in an instant by chaos and annihilation, including natural disasters, where there is an impermanence in all things, and a deeply felt understanding that behind every life lies death.

Miyazaki’s view of this significant era in Japanese history has apparently aroused the attention of the left for Miyazaki’s apparent whitewash of history, claiming the director ignores the impact of Hirokoshi’s creation which was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, while also drawing the wrath of conservative Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, an ultra nationalist whose avowed intentions include revisionist history, expanding the role of the military for the first time since WWII, and even rewriting the Japanese Constitution, from J. Dana Stuster in a July 23, 2013 article from Foreign Policy magazine, Japanese Nationalists Attack Animation Master's New Film - Passport:

[Since] earlier this year, Abe has tried to reframe Japan’s role in World War II: He’s questioned “whether it is proper to say that Japan ‘invaded’ its neighbors” and questioned the 1995 official apology to “comfort women,” the conscription prostitutes provided to Japanese troops during the war. Abe is currently pushing for a revision of the Japanese constitution that would not only ease the country’s prohibition on military aggression, but would also enshrine the Emperor as the head of state and compel “respect” for symbols of Japan’s pre-war heyday.

In interviews for the release of the film, Miyazaki sought to explain why this isn’t a nationalistic piece of flag waving along the lines favored by Abe’s supporters, some of whom favor banning the film and have called Miyazaki “unpatriotic” and “anti-Japanese,” and has instead shifted the focus of Studio Ghibli from producing fantasies to a new direction where animé has an opportunity to challenge existing policies of social change:

“If I had been born a bit earlier, I would have been a gunkoku shonen (Militarist Youth),” Miyazaki writes… But instead, he grew up in a family in which his father went from building airplane components during the war to opening a jazz club to cater to American soldiers during the postwar occupation. Removed from the “hysteria” of the war years, Miyazaki writes, he “had a strong feeling in my childhood that we had ‘fought a truly stupid war’.”

Growing up in the shadow of Japan’s defeat, Miyazaki strongly opposes Abe’s plans to rewrite the Japanese Constitution in order to revive a drumbeat for militarism and a devotion to the Emperor, claiming:

It goes without saying that I am opposed to revising the Constitution. That is something that should never be done.

The Taste of Tea (Cha no aji)

THE TASTE OF TEA (Cha no aji)       A                    

Japan  (143 mi)  2004  d:  Katsuhito Ishii                    Official site

It's more cool than weird, and it stays in your head.

In something of a gentle homage to Japanese master Yasuhirô Ozu, Ishii has concocted one of the most original family dramas ever conceived on celluloid, though the story is simplicity itself.  Offering more a series of vignettes than a narrative, all this film does is follow a Japanese family around for awhile in their small mountain village surrounded by rice fields, allowing each one to explore their own individuality.  Style-wise, this is a brilliant screenplay and a hilariously inventive film, not afraid to use surreal, out of body experiences, or subtitled sections when no one is saying anything, films within the film, or brilliant animé imagery side by side with other kinds of colorful animation.  What works here is that these techniques are not just used for show, but they are essential in revealing character.  This film is such a joy to watch that you don’t even realize, until the end of the film, how well you have come to know each of the members of the Haruno family, something of an astonishing surprise.  Mood is essential, and each of the characters has their own carefully defined world, where collectively, through them, we are fascinated to learn about ourselves in the process, as it taps into places in our own subconscious where we’re not used to looking, where perhaps unintentionally, a prominent theme of the film is revealed when a character makes an off-the-cuff remark about the music they’re listening to, “It's more cool than weird, and it stays in your head.”

What’s perhaps most remarkable is the transformative use of the imagination that is nothing less than revitalizing, using surrealistic flourishes where a train comes out of Hajime’s (Takahiro Sato) forehead and flies off into the sky, expressed as a real train is taking his secret crush off into the distance without him, a high school girl he longs for but is terrified to speak to, where Hajime is seen pedaling his bike furiously through the rice fields, often shouting out to the heavens, or the hilarious use of 8-year old Sachiko’s (Maya Banno) growing annoyance at constantly seeing giant images of her head wherever she goes, often floating outside her classroom, hovering just outside the window, continuously interrupting her “real” life.  The pace of the film is perfect, as each sequence flows so effortlessly into the next, weaving in and out of everyone’s lives.  It’s a quiet yet jubilant evolution balancing comical moments with the meditative imagery of a river or of mountains or of a still moment.  While we might have some quibbles, and some may think perhaps this film is too cute, but this is how the film explores the interior worlds, with an unusually poignant visual flair, and we are never disappointed, where despite the length, the film is constantly reinventing itself.  Oddly, it would probably be appreciated just as much by children aged 8 and above, as there’s certainly something in it for everyone.  Ishii is known for the animation sequence in Tarantino’s KILL BILL VOL 1 (2003), but here he’s allowed the freedom to develop his own story, to just let it go and air out his imagination.

To its credit, the film doesn't have a "target" audience, as there isn't even a hint of commercialism, yet it's nationalistic to the core, where praising the small quirks or the individuality of the family is in the Ozu school of Japanese cinema, yet where Ozu simply observes ordinary life objectively, often without an ounce of sentimentality, this film focuses on the internal worlds of the rather eccentric (not dysfunctional) characters by allowing them to open up and soar through highly inventive animated techniques, to explore the limits of their imaginations without being condescending to the characters.  Ishii offers a wonderful perspective on aging while also celebrating the worth of elders to their families, such as the elderly grandpa (Tatsuya Gashuin), by recognizing their memories in a highly personal, yet uncustomary fashion, while at the same time celebrating the isolation of youth, where they feel left out and misunderstood, being the youngest (Sachiko), or from the first crush to adolescent detachment (Hajime).  The director also explores the mid-life crisis, where an absent uncle Ayano (Tadanobu Asano) returns after being away for years and searches for a lost love, while the mother (Satomi Tezuka) is stuck as a career professional, deciding instead to branch out on her own and attempt something artistic with her life, which may only be understood and appreciated by a small community of other artists.  In this family, through rich character development, everyone's point of view is explored and is equally valid, where the ultimately transcendent film becomes an expression of love by demonstrating that a tolerance of others is as significant as celebrating your own unique individuality, which is given such an unusual visual flourish that it is only minimally used, so as not to dominate the overall mood of the film, which focuses on the meditations of a quiet life in the country.