Hayao Miyazaki

[pistolwink]

I remember being shocked that The Wind Rises was apparently subject to lots of criticism (much of it before the film was actually released IIRC) from the Japanese right for not being sufficiently nationalistic or, frankly, revisionist — since it felt to me like a gorgeous but basically toothless parable which indulged in quite a bit of historical evasion itself. It may say something about the Japanese right that even such an innocuous bit of "anti-war" sentimentalism could cause such a freak-out. Or maybe, like the American right, they're just good at ginning up ephemeral culture-war battles.

The Wind Rises could make a good whiplash double-bill with Men Behind the Sun....

[Mr Sausage]

It speaks to the fundamental confusion of the movie that it's about how an artist ought to ignore the demands and preoccupations of his time and dedicate himself instead to the purity of his own art as a good in itself...but chooses to do so in a historical situation where that's not possible. Jiro is ethically compromised no matter how he chooses to pursue his art. Even in the most charitable reading, where his decision to focus only on the pursuit of artistic purity is a form of protest against the ugly enthusiasms of the age, even in that charitable reading he is still unavoidably compromised by the fact he is helping an imperialist, war-mongering government to wage a colonialist war. It's a situation where defiance of the non-political variety isn't possible. The situation Miyazaki chose is the worst place in which to explore his theme. There's no easy answer to that situation, but the film, I think, does need to grapple honestly with that fact--and it never does. The pressing question is elided while an ivory-tower idealism at odds with the situation is offered in its place.

Adding to the confusion is that Miyazaki brings in Thomas Mann to vocalize the anti-war sentiments and (gentle) criticisms of the Empire of Japan. And yet the movie's vision of the role of the artist comes not out of Mann's great works dissecting European war-mongering, but out of his embarrassing, confused, and eventually repudiated early essays like Reflections of a Non-Political Man. Essays written out of his support for the first World War. Mann was only able to write masterpieces like The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus because he'd come to see his own grave error and could look clearly on the social and political climate that led to both WWI and the rise of Nazism after it. Miyazaki may admire Mann, but he has not bothered to understand him.

I'm surprised this movie has fans. What do you guys get out of it? To me, the movie is plainly trying to make something simple and beautiful in a situation where that's inappropriate. Surely if anything counts as an artistic failure, it's that, the joint misunderstanding and mishandling of one's own material.

[Michael Kerpan]

I think Miyazaki picked the period he did because it had the sort of aircraft (real and potentially realizable) that he liked best. And then he had to build a framework around this -- one way or another. There doesn't seem to be a single coherent socio-political thought in the film.

[Mr Sausage]

There doesn't seem to be a single coherent socio-political thought in the film.

Nor a coherent artistic thought! There's no way to figure out what Miyazaki thinks about the role of the artist. "I despise war in all forms" and "I'm just going to ignore the war and focus on my own little thing" just do not go together.

[togg]

I should watch it again since the criticism here are so strong. I don't think the main character should find a solution to major social problems, and I don't remember it to have an indulgent and out of touch with reality vibe.

[Mr Sausage]

I don't think the main character should find a solution to major social problems

Yeah, It would be unreasonable to expect that. I don't think there is any solution to Jiro's problem. Either pursue your calling and compromise yourself, or refuse your calling and live a sad, unfulfilled life--that's an impossible situation. I'm not sure if there's a right choice.

What is reasonable to expect is for the film to grapple with the situation squarely and honestly, and I think it falls short of that. WWII is a bad place to argue for the non-political artist. And it's just daft to bring in Thomas Mann as your moral centre and then repeat arguments about non-political artistry that Mann had long since repudiated, and rightly so. If the movie had idolized Jiro less, maybe it could've grappled honestly with his flaws.

[togg]

I honestly don't remember the wind rises well enough, is it that rethoric about the stance of the protagonist? I think that in Mononoke in the end there was this kind of movement that pushed characters away of the main political-economical conflict, like if they weren't enough to deal with it.
But I do remember the magic mountain from Mann. I found it spot on how the main characters of the novel discuss political affair in theory, live their human passions in the mountain, and then get reckted by war in the end. I don't know if WWII has a special place among wars. In the end it was a conflict like any other and I can understand people that just fleed.

[Mr Sausage]

I don't know if WWII has a special place among wars. In the end it was a conflict like any other and I can understand people that just fleed.

This is a curious pair of statements.

[togg]

It isn't, and I think that is what you are missing about Miyazaki point maybe. He was always interested to see how normal humans related to the complexity of political conflicts. People experienced wars after war. At a certain point it's hard to believe that this specific one is always the justified one. That's why his characters can be found on the side. Still I didn't remember it to be rethorically pacifist, more like well embodied in a character that cannot provide more than that engagement.

[Mr Sausage]

It isn't, and I think that is what you are missing about Miyazaki point maybe. He was always interested to see how normal humans related to the complexity of political conflicts. People experienced wars after war. At a certain point it's hard to believe that this specific one is always the justified one. That's why his characters can be found on the side. Still I didn't remember it to be rethorically pacifist, more like well embodied in a character that cannot provide more than that engagement.

I'm missing that Miyazaki thought WWII was nothing special? Somehow I don't think so.

The trouble is not that Jiro is a pacifist (if he is one), but that he's a pacifist who collaborates in the war effort, and this fraught issue is not properly handled by the movie. Jiro is compromised, yet the movie lionizes him as a paragon of artistic purity. Miyazaki's position is...who knows. On the one hand, he uses Thomas Mann to voice anti-WWII statements, on the other, he's erecting a non-political ivory-tower for artists that Thomas Mann had rejected, that Mann had only believed in back in his pro-WWI days, much to his later embarrassment. Does Miyazaki side with Mann's pro-war ideas, or his anti-war ones? Who knows. And what's really bizarre: Miyazaki is a staunchly anti-war artist, indeed one of the most consistently anti-war artists of the last thirty years. He uses the apocalyptic imagery of WWII time and again to make this point. And yet here he is making a movie that seems to urge artists to carry on with their art and not trouble themselves with what's going on with the world, including if it's at war. It's hard not to feel that Miyazaki had no idea what he was doing.

I don't think you're understanding my arguments. You keep circling back to whether or not the characters made the right choices. That's irrelevant. I'm not making an ethical argument. I'm saying the film is a confusing mess whose themes are at cross purposes and whose material is handled inadequately.

[togg]

Well then I'll have to watch it again to be able to have a more coherent idea! I always thought the antiwar sentiments were light hearted in his movies, I agree with you on this, how else could it be without touching political economy. I found them more full of sense of adventure than else.
I have the film ready so maybe I'll be able to give it another shot in the next few weeks.

[feihong]

Lots of the later Miyazaki movies feel to me more insistent, more confident with their sequences, and less certain about their effects––not that it lets Miyazaki off from intellectualizing what he's doing. It bothered me just as much that the film purports to be biography when the wife in the film is taken from a work of fiction and grafted onto the movie (Jiro's real wife wasn't sickly, and they had 6 kids together--she was an entirely different person than the one we meet in these long, poetic passages of the film). It makes me think that Miyazaki's version of Jiro is potentially heavily fictionalized, based on his desire to say that it's all right if Jiro focuses only on his pursuit of art, even if the results are, you know, catastrophe for the world at large. Would he make a biography in the same tone for the chemist who synthesized Agent Orange? Are we meant to sympathize with Jiro because he has glasses (implying his myopic fixation on plane design and flight), and because he sometimes seems to be on the spectrum in his sense of fixation? Are we supposed to feel he is helpless to be other than an artist of planes, even when those planes will only be used for war? I think all the points on Thomas Mann are well-taken, and I think it sort of works into a matrix of these later Miyazaki movies that he kind of wants to get into edgy territory of some kind, but once he's there he always tries to hold himself back, or just to back out of the room. I remember after Princess Mononoke Shinji Aoyama said something very interesting; he said that, watching it, he realized Miyazaki would only be satisfied when he made a truly violent, gruesome movie, full of pain that he could show us, right in front of our eyes. I think he was pointing out this kind of edginess in the films from Mononoke onward, which frequently fails to find satisfactory expression. The Wind Rises comes with its own edginess; I had the feeling Miyazaki was daring people to refuse him this extreme statement, that the obligation of the artist was only to the art, regardless of its purpose. I'm not even sure Miyazaki believes it, really; it seems so implausible on the face of the extreme position he situates it within. So the movie's premise felt very facile and slippery to me.

However, it was very nearly the last new movie I've seen in a theater that moved me based on scenecraft alone. There were so many details of environment, of weather, of light, which added to the experience. How many movies since Kurosawa die have such a sense of purpose in choosing when to place rain, or what sequence should make us feel a warm breeze––how many movies make us feel this is so momentous? Sequences were constructed with a subtle, musical rhythm to them, and changing that rhythm from sequence to sequence was what made the drama feel alive. So many movies I see now seem far less tactile in their handling of ambience––if they deign to notice it at all. I think the first-run theatrical experiences I've had since that felt comparable in that regard have only been A Bride for Rip Van Winkle and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, each to a certain, somewhat lesser degree. So that feeling did do something for me, and it made the movie harder to dismiss, even though I sat in my seat after the film, fumbling for almost 30 minutes to articulate my problems with the movie to my friend who had recommended we see it.

I suppose of the later Miyazaki films––the ones from Mononoke until now (basically the ones he's been doing since he started saying he was going to retire every time), the ones I like most are Ponyo, and then Spirited Away. Ponyo, I just enjoyed, for all its energetic, childish chaos--it felt like a film a child would have liked to have made, and in that sense I think it is fairly unique. Spirited Away I really liked, until the fourth act, when things just started falling apart for no real reason I could pick out––almost like they had no clue how they were going to pay anything off in the movie. I like Mononoke, but it feels so exhausting in its apocalypse by the end, and to my eyes it's a more polished and coherent--but less interesting--retake of Nausicaa. And I got nothing out of Howl's Moving Castle––though again there, the central male figure seems rigged and refuses to come to life, quite, just as in The Wind Rises.

An interesting double-bill with The Wind Rises might be Seijun Suzuki's Capone Cries Hard, which showed up in an HD version on the internet just recently. That film is a comedy about America, shot by the director when he had never been there, in a disused "America-town" amusement park in Tokyo. It's about a total failure of a naniwa-bushi story-singer, who is sent to America to––he believes––popularize naniwa-bushi singing there (in fact, he's had an affair with his master's wife, and the master sends them both packing for the North American continent to be rid of them). He wants to sing for the president of the U.S., and he's told on the boat over that it's Al Capone. So he makes for Chicago, and gets embroiled in a bootlegging war, looking for his chance to dazzle Capone with a song. The hero drifts through American history for a couple of decades, eventually ending up interned at Manzanar. He escapes and commits seppuku––only to realize, midway through, that it's actually very painful, and maybe not his best idea. His American flapper girlfriend runs from being conscripted to be his second, and as he dies, he sees his master's wife once more, in his mind's eye. The flapper wants to know if she is as pretty as the master's wife, and the singer insists that she could never be, the master's wife was so much more beautiful than her.

The comparison between the films runs a little deeper, because Capone Cries Hard is very obviously for Suzuki a statement about the kind of artist he believes himself to be. Suzuki frequently said that, as an artist, he would never really change his style––rather, the tastes and audiences changed to either meet or reject what he had to offer. Throughout the movie, the naniwa-bushi singer's fortunes rise and fall with various trends and special moments (he does get to sing for Al Capone, though in a way he ends up giving his most important performance in very casual auspices, on a dock with a group of jazz musicians)––but he never changes how he does his thing. He can't cater to the masses, who have never heard of this singing style, and who get very little out of it. When the style clicks with people, Suzuki makes it very clear it's due to external circumstances. The perseverance of the singer is both the demand of art upon the artist, and it is also his curse; whether successful or not, he has no control. He is helpless as an artist to change the world around him; the world must change in order to accept him––and eventually the world changes again, and he falls from grace, doing nothing differently than he had been.

I don't think Suzuki is a very politically-engaged filmmaker at all––though his war movies have a peculiar ambivalence towards war which it's hard to shake off. And Suzuki was old enough that he was actually in World War II, unlike Miyazaki. Neither filmmaker would ever have been allowed to make a movie for their own country which was deeply critical of Japan's role in WWII. Even Obayashi, who is absolutely shrill in his pacifism in later movies like Casting Blossoms Into the Sky and Labyrinth of Cinema, seems to feel he can't express Japanese culpability for the war in bald terms. The closest he gets is to show that the Japanese military and government did some bad things to Japanese people at home during the war (the bloody, failed conscription at the end of Bound for the Fields, the Mountains, & the Coastline, or the brutal and strangely comic-ified rape in Labyrinth of Cinema). Otherwise, the only option he has seems to be showing Japanese soldiers or civilians witnessing the horror of war. Suzuki, though, was part of the generation of students where the Japanese army took away all the contemporary books in their classrooms, and forced them to read only classics––a way of controlling and conditioning them for war (part of why when Suzuki was given the chance to direct anything he wanted, finally, he chose the writing of early modernists--Uchida Hyakken and Kyoka Izumi––they were part of his reading as a high school student, before he was drafted). Still, Suzuki was literally press-ganged into the conflict, and the arbitrary nature of war haunts all of Suzuki's crime films––I especially enjoyed the gangster's apartment in Youth fo the Beast, filled with models of famous bombers and fighter jets, spinning on fishing line, with nowhere to go, while the gangsters shoot it out below them. Suzuki's attitude isn't exactly favorable to the American victors, nor condemning of the Japanese imperialist project––no commercial film in Japan could have gotten away with something so direct as that at the time. Rather, I think with every film, Suzuki is saying to us that everyone, in war--before it, or afterwards––is ultimately on their own––and that that conflict continues and transmutes itself during peacetime––into the wars for property in Tokyo Drifter, or the war for Carmen's vulnerable heart in Carmen from Kawachi, or the war for control of a top lady golfer's succulent-looking but slowly rotting body in Story of Sorrow and Sadness. I guess what I'm saying is that it all seems to come from a very consistent world-view with Suzuki; he views humans as doomed to failure––regardless of their ambitions. All he cares about is watching how particular figures spend their energies. And I think he admires some forms of that expenditure more than others. Yumiko Nogawa frequently plays a character holding out for ideals of love in the midst of a vicious warzone. As for artists, there are two principle movies where Suzuki dwells on artists (discounting the parodies in Carmen from Kawachi)––Capone and Yumeji (both late-stage movies––and you could make a claim for Story of Sorrow and Sadness and Pistol Opera being included in this group as well––since the "pro athletes" in each film are sort of at the top of their game, essentially artists in their fields, and Suzuki spends a lot of time on what makes them work that way [in both cases it's a warped, frustrated sexuality]). Yumeji treats the artist as a failing, would-be libertine, who paints only when he can't screw his model, but whose mind is roiling with ideas for paintings, which never get realized. "What was I waiting for?" he asks us at the end of the film, staring into the camera––and we wonder if he means a woman, or a painting? Yumeji is a loser, but only because he demands so much of every experience--he needs aesthetic gratification as well as sexual gratification, and he needs each experience to have a fresh poetry to it––and he needs to be the star of each experience, which he finds he is frequently not. At the same time, the film never shies away from showing the damage he continues to do to his painting subjects––the way he ruins a woman's wedding, purposefully catching the sleeve of her wedding kimono in his paintbox so that it tears when she approaches the altar, or the way he demands his sickly fiance join him, all the while planning debauch with other women––which he knows will hurt her. One of Suzuki's points seems to be how little Yumeji produces, for all the pain and upset he causes; for all of life he consumes around him. Another artist shows up––far more prim and controlled in his own demeanor, far less given to abandon, and far more well-liked and admired––but in the end he leaves without doing much of anything, finally admitting that Yumeji has created something daring, which he never could (a painted kimono of a woman giving fellatio to a bull, I believe). So the figure of the artist is made complex in Suzuki's mind, but not blameless, in any event. And yet, the pursuit of art leaves palpable results, even when it creates pain, and Suzuki seems aware of the contradiction--the film ends on the great masterwork––the one we know Yumeji painted in his time in Kanazawa, "Princess Tatsuta." It stands alone, and challenges us to say much against its author. In Capone, the artist is a genuine idiot, and Suzuki seems to be operating in a nakedly autobiographical vein here, as much as admitting "I only do this one thing; I don't know why people like it or hate it." The artist's paralysis in the face of history––he has no way to influence or change it--seems to be Suzuki's own. I find it more credible an assertion of helplessness than Miyazaki's, because it's without the moral element, which Miyazaki seems to so doggedly insist upon. It's almost like Miyazaki is trying to say, "the artist has no obligation to history and you, the viewer, shouldn't expect otherwise." Whereas, I think Suzuki––who generally doesn't recognize any moral order to the universe in his films, only a chaos that it's foolish to expect to marshall in your favor––might agree with the premise that the artist is helpless in front of history––but he might also feel that that helplessness is part of our guaranteed arc towards doom, and not the subject of any moral judgement in the first place.

Incidentally, Miyazaki and Suzuki worked together briefly, on the Lupin series. But Suzuki claimed all he did was change Lupin's jacket color back to the red of the manga, and that it was otherwise mostly done just as a favor to him to make it seem like he had a job at the time (following the failure of his ambitious Mirage Theater).

I don't know if any of this rambling makes any sense. I would not choose to die on that hill, defending The Wind Rises. If it were the only movie Miyazaki had made, I doubt he'd enjoy the kind of acclaim he does. It felt to me like a movie in which he tried to stretch things very far, and he failed, especially in terms of how he handled his themes. Incidentally, the myopia with which Jiro pursues his dreams is a kind of cultural value for artists, which is perpetuated in lots of Japanese films. Capone Cries Hard offers the same sense of myopia (Suzuki mocks it––he may hate America, but he's also a severe critic of his own society's values, as well), and so many films and anime laud artist characters for committing to their work, to the ignorance of everything else around them––indeed, commitment is valorized in Japanese popular art, far above notions of morality. But I think it tracks very consistently with other movies Miyazaki made at the time. All of the post-retirement films have a sense in them of trying to push an idea farther than might be prudent––and then an accompanying pull-back which is as awkward as the advance was confident on Miyazaki's part. I think it works better when Miyazaki's dealing with children, and dreams, than it does when he's dealing with WWII.

[Lemmy Caution]

Spirited Away to Miyazaki Land
What happens when the surreal imagination of the world’s greatest living animator, Hayao Miyazaki, is turned into a theme park?
A very Japanese minimalist anti-theme park.

[Michael Kerpan]

I hear that getting tickets to this park is quite difficult....

[Wigs by Leonard]

I happened to catch Spirited Away earlier this week at the Music Box in Chicago, I think for the first time since I was a kid and I saw Disney's English dub in theaters in 2002. It was a pretty good-looking 35mm print, in the original Japanese with burned-in English subtitles, the kind where you can see the path of whatever "stylus" burned them in. (I haven't seen a ton of subtitled films on 35mm, but to my memory, a vintage 80s print of Fanny and Alexander had this style, whereas a print of Certified Copy had subtitling identical to that on Criterion's disc release -- i.e. a font applied digitally.)

I can't parse anything from the release section of the film's wikipedia page about the contemporaneous distribution of the subtitled version (and was kind of surprised to learn that the dub premiered at TIFF). Can anyone remember seeing this theatrically in the original Japanese in the US back in 2002, or soon after? Just curious about the provenance of the print. If I recall, when The Wind Rises came to Boston when I was in college, it was playing at different cinemas in either subbed or dubbed versions, but then that was both 11 years later, in a major city as opposed to its suburbs, and for a movie marketed less to kids (and, I'm sure by then, on digital).

[beamish14]

I happened to catch Spirited Away earlier this week at the Music Box in Chicago, I think for the first time since I was a kid and I saw Disney's English dub in theaters in 2002. It was a pretty good-looking 35mm print, in the original Japanese with burned-in English subtitles, the kind where you can see the path of whatever "stylus" burned them in. (I haven't seen a ton of subtitled films on 35mm, but to my memory, a vintage 80s print of Fanny and Alexander had this style, whereas a print of Certified Copy had subtitling identical to that on Criterion's disc release -- i.e. a font applied digitally.)

I can't parse anything from the release section of the film's wikipedia page about the contemporaneous distribution of the subtitled version (and was kind of surprised to learn that the dub premiered at TIFF). Can anyone remember seeing this theatrically in the original Japanese in the US back in 2002, or soon after? Just curious about the provenance of the print. If I recall, when The Wind Rises came to Boston when I was in college, it was playing at different cinemas in either subbed or dubbed versions, but then that was both 11 years later, in a major city as opposed to its suburbs, and for a movie marketed less to kids (and, I'm sure by then, on digital).

I don’t think any of his films received subtitled theatrical prints in North America until GKids acquired the rights and struck new prints. I saw Totoro dubbed in 1993, and Miramax only released the dubbed version of Mononoke in 1999

[Michael Kerpan]

Princess Mononoke definitely had both subbed and dubbed prints -- as we saw both screened.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

I happened to catch Spirited Away earlier this week at the Music Box in Chicago, I think for the first time since I was a kid and I saw Disney's English dub in theaters in 2002. It was a pretty good-looking 35mm print, in the original Japanese with burned-in English subtitles, the kind where you can see the path of whatever "stylus" burned them in. (I haven't seen a ton of subtitled films on 35mm, but to my memory, a vintage 80s print of Fanny and Alexander had this style, whereas a print of Certified Copy had subtitling identical to that on Criterion's disc release -- i.e. a font applied digitally.)

I can't parse anything from the release section of the film's wikipedia page about the contemporaneous distribution of the subtitled version (and was kind of surprised to learn that the dub premiered at TIFF). Can anyone remember seeing this theatrically in the original Japanese in the US back in 2002, or soon after? Just curious about the provenance of the print. If I recall, when The Wind Rises came to Boston when I was in college, it was playing at different cinemas in either subbed or dubbed versions, but then that was both 11 years later, in a major city as opposed to its suburbs, and for a movie marketed less to kids (and, I'm sure by then, on digital).

I don’t think any of his films received subtitled theatrical prints in North America until GKids acquired the rights and struck new prints. I saw Totoro dubbed in 1993, and Miramax only released the dubbed version of Mononoke in 1999

All the Miyazaki films are available in both versions on 35mm. I was working at a cinematheque in 2012 that put together a retro of all his films, and they ordered prints in both formats in order to do dubbed weekend screenings aimed toward children, and night time screenings for adults. I for sure saw Totoro, Kiki, Spirited Away, Nausicaa, and Princess Mononoke subtitled at this time along with a few subtitled Isao Takahata films.

Wigs: I assume you’re on the younger side? The type of subtitling was laser subtitling. The digital subtitles you saw in Certified Copy arrived as films went fully digital in post-production. I still have a soft spot for that laser font style that reminds me of catching Janus restorations when I was a teen.

[beamish14]

I happened to catch Spirited Away earlier this week at the Music Box in Chicago, I think for the first time since I was a kid and I saw Disney's English dub in theaters in 2002. It was a pretty good-looking 35mm print, in the original Japanese with burned-in English subtitles, the kind where you can see the path of whatever "stylus" burned them in. (I haven't seen a ton of subtitled films on 35mm, but to my memory, a vintage 80s print of Fanny and Alexander had this style, whereas a print of Certified Copy had subtitling identical to that on Criterion's disc release -- i.e. a font applied digitally.)

I can't parse anything from the release section of the film's wikipedia page about the contemporaneous distribution of the subtitled version (and was kind of surprised to learn that the dub premiered at TIFF). Can anyone remember seeing this theatrically in the original Japanese in the US back in 2002, or soon after? Just curious about the provenance of the print. If I recall, when The Wind Rises came to Boston when I was in college, it was playing at different cinemas in either subbed or dubbed versions, but then that was both 11 years later, in a major city as opposed to its suburbs, and for a movie marketed less to kids (and, I'm sure by then, on digital).

I don’t think any of his films received subtitled theatrical prints in North America until GKids acquired the rights and struck new prints. I saw Totoro dubbed in 1993, and Miramax only released the dubbed version of Mononoke in 1999

All the Miyazaki films are available in both versions on 35mm. I was working at a cinematheque in 2012 that put together a retro of all his films, and they ordered prints in both formats in order to do dubbed weekend screenings aimed toward children, and night time screenings for adults. I for sure saw Totoro, Kiki, Spirited Away, Nausicaa, and Princess Mononoke subtitled at this time along with a few subtitled Isao Takahata films.

Wigs: I assume you’re on the younger side? The type of subtitling was laser subtitling. The digital subtitles you saw in Certified Copy arrived as films went fully digital in post-production. I still have a soft spot for that laser font style that reminds me of catching Janus restorations when I was a teen.

I was present for those Cinematheque screenings. It’s incredible how titles like Only Yesterday, Porco Rosso, and My Neighbors the Yamadas had never really been screened stateside before

[togg]

Can't wait to watch the new one.

I finally managed to watch The Wind Rises again.
It's a very good depiction of an obsessed character with a strong personal passion. The protagonist surelly doesn't care about the war that much, he wants to see things fly and that's all. The movie chooses to depict this passion, not the war or a critique of it. It works pretty well on that. I would have personally liked that obsession to go a bit more full bloom on the second part. The love story scenes reduce the virulence of the protagonist psyche, but they still manage to add their own gruesomeness.
Miyazaki never fully confronted himself with adulthood narrative complexity. In documentaries about the films you can see how he wasn't even sure how to depict the couple meeting at the train station. He was also stressed and well aware of the need to confront the protagonist obsession. Why he wants to see things fly? For me he tried his best to portray this obsession. Prototipes that fall, travels to discover new techs, working inside a war machine with head low on your numbers full of tear and blood.

In my opinion he did his best and succeeded. I do hope that his next movie will have a more than glimpses of adulthood complexity, but these things are not easy to write, having wrote his whole life about children and marginal lives.

[therewillbeblus]

Oh yeah, Ponyo. It’s insufferably cutesy, a collection of Miyazaki’s worst sentimental fixations: animals, children, and the elderly. The thing’s a mess. It never really bothers to explain its world and it can’t seem to figure out who its characters are. Take the kid’s mother. I thought she was his sister at first for her juvenile reaction to her husband being unable to get shore leave. But then later she’s shown to be a responsible, loving caregiver. But then even later she’s shown to be irrational and reckless when driving her son home, risking both their lives for no apparent reason. But after that, she’s suddenly a noble hero, going off into the storm because the old people might need her (tho’ the film seems unaware this involves abandoning two young children to their own devices during an ecological disaster). But then at the end, she’s stoic and wise while discussing the fate of her kid with an all-powerful Nereid. The movie’s a mess. Pretty looking, but a mess.

Revisiting this, it's definitely my least favorite Miyazaki, and I primarily cued into the erratic shifts in portrayal of the mother as well. The scene where she rushes to drive through the tidal wave is insane, and had both my wife and I jumping out of our seats in disbelief. The father asking the boy to break the news to the mother more than hints at a problematic family dynamic, parentifying the child, and I wish that was explored more. The frustrating aspect is that Miyazaki is capable of delving into these dynamics with introspection and care, but doesn't bother here. Every narrative possibility oriented at mature development or life lessons is excised in favor of the cute material, and it's annoying because both can happen, as seen in basically every other Miyazaki movie

[beamish14]

Oh yeah, Ponyo. It’s insufferably cutesy, a collection of Miyazaki’s worst sentimental fixations: animals, children, and the elderly. The thing’s a mess. It never really bothers to explain its world and it can’t seem to figure out who its characters are. Take the kid’s mother. I thought she was his sister at first for her juvenile reaction to her husband being unable to get shore leave. But then later she’s shown to be a responsible, loving caregiver. But then even later she’s shown to be irrational and reckless when driving her son home, risking both their lives for no apparent reason. But after that, she’s suddenly a noble hero, going off into the storm because the old people might need her (tho’ the film seems unaware this involves abandoning two young children to their own devices during an ecological disaster). But then at the end, she’s stoic and wise while discussing the fate of her kid with an all-powerful Nereid. The movie’s a mess. Pretty looking, but a mess.

Revisiting this, it's definitely my least favorite Miyazaki, and I primarily cued into the erratic shifts in portrayal of the mother as well. The scene where she rushes to drive through the tidal wave is insane, and had both my wife and I jumping out of our seats in disbelief. The father asking the boy to break the news to the mother more than hints at a problematic family dynamic, parentifying the child, and I wish that was explored more. The frustrating aspect is that Miyazaki is capable of delving into these dynamics with introspection and care, but doesn't bother here. Every narrative possibility oriented at mature development or life lessons is excised in favor of the cute material, and it's annoying because both can happen, as seen in basically every other Miyazaki movie

The Initial D-style driving sequence is incredible. More than any of his features, Ponyo really is aimed very explicitly at children, and I’m not sure if it’s incredibly rewarding on rewatches.

Him and the Ghibli crew really went all-out on utilizing celluloid acetate, which completely died off by 1994 in North America, and were virtually extinct in Japan by the time this film went into production.