After completing Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki Hayao issued one of those threats that directors sometimes do: having found the experience of making that film so grueling, he’d elected to abandon filmmaking altogether, dedicating his time instead to the planned Ghibli Museum, and to the studio itself, where he would stay on as an executive. It never […]
For the second time this year (Shutter Island was the first), we come across a film with a twist ending that’s so terrifically obvious that you almost can’t help but assume the filmmakers meant for us to figure it out beforehand; and at the same time, it’s rather difficult to actually discuss how the film […]
We’re ten films into this Miyazaki Hayao retrospective now, and so far I’ve said barely a word about how they’ve been made; and it’s worth discussing, because it’s fairly special, and explains why thus far I’ve made so freely with “Miyazaki did this” and “Miyazaki did that”, despite the fact that one usually doesn’t treat […]
The following link is current as of November 2023: https://vimeo.com/394801904) In 1995, during the first real lull in Miyazaki Hayao’s filmmaking career since the beginning of the 1980s, he was approached by the pop duo Chage & Aska, who wanted him to make a music video. With nothing else to do at the moment, Miyazaki […]
Did you enjoy Blade Runner? What about Oldboy, did you like that one? If you said “yes” to either or both of those questions, then you are exactly the kind of person who is both the target audience for Repo Men, and exactly the kind of person who is going to be most turned-off by […]
Miyazaki Hayao’s sixth feature film grew out of an idea pitched by Japan Airlines, who were looking for a short in-flight movie: “a fun movie for middle-aged businessmen whose brains became tofu from overwork”, in the translation provided by the excellent Miyazaki fansite Nausicaa.net. But by the time Porco Rosso was completed, it had far […]
There are a number of things The Runaways does right, and virtually none that it does wrong; yet at the same time, there are very few things it does exceptionally well. Thus it falls into that set of movies that are good, altogether good, and quite perfectly enjoyable for the time that you’re watching them, […]
In 1987, Studio Ghibli acquired the rights to a children’s novel written by Kadono Eiko, titled Witch’s Delivery Service: the story of Kiki, a 13-year-old girl, and the last year of her training as a witch, as she set off for a new town away from her family and had to learn independence and self-sufficiency. […]
O marketing gurus with your fixation on playing keep-away with spoilers take note: I had no intention whatsoever of seeing Remember Me. It didn’t hit #1 at the box office, and otherwise, the only thing that seemed remotely interesting was the promise of a grim spectacle as Twilight star Robert Pattinson fought a mighty, losing […]
When I first had the idea of a Miyazaki Hayao retrospective, one of my biggest reasons for wanting to do it was that it would give me a plausible reason to see his 1988 feature My Neighbor Totoro, which I had, unthinkably, never watched until two days ago. Not that I should have needed a […]
Were I to say that Paul Greengrass’s Green Zone is the best movie yet made about the Iraq War, virtually nobody would agree with me, and I’m okay with that. But it’s much harder to disagree that it’s probably the most outraged movie about Iraq (Kimberly Pierce’s Stop-Loss is the other candidate), and if I’m […]
Following the success of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, one of that film’s producers, Suzuki Toshio, teamed up with Miyazaki Hayao to create a new animation studio, one that would release films boasting the opulence and epic scope of Nausicaä on a more or less regular basis. 24 years and 16 films later, […]
