![]() Howl's imagines a fully realized world of magic, demons, and whimsy, but also the horrors of violence and war. The movie is based on the kids book by Diana Wynne Jones, but when you think of Howl's Moving Castle, you think of Miyazaki. Nevertheless, it remains one of the filmmaker's most enthralling, inventive pieces. The 2004 film, about a young woman cursed with old age who finds herself keeping house for a wizard in a roaming fortress, got a lot of love at the time, but there are those who find it doesn't quite match up with Miyazaki's other works. When the topic of Studio Ghibli comes up, Howl's Moving Castle tends to be a polarizing. While some militaristic factions seek to resurrect an ancient superweapon in order to reinforce mankind's dominance over the planet, Nausicaä is desperate to convince her enemies, her friends, and the audience watching the film of a different idea: It still might not be too late for humans to learn how to live with nature rather than against it. Most notably, the characters are often wearing COVID-ready face masks to protect themselves from the poison atmosphere of the so-called "toxic jungle" that has been spreading across the world ever since a long-ago armageddon known as the Seven Days of Fire (glimpsed briefly and horrifically in the opening credits). She also loves flying, as you probably could have guessed.įor a movie released in 1984, Nausicaä has a lot to say about the modern world. ![]() Nausicaä herself is practically the primal Ghibli protagonist, a young woman whose kindness, curiosity, and joie de vivre bring light to her valley-one of the last refuges of humanity in a post-apocalyptic future. The movie that made Studio Ghibli was technically produced before its founding, but since Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind inspired almost everything that came after, it is usually included in this body of work. So, he embraced a watercolor aesthetic, one that he hoped would allow viewers to "vividly imagine or recall the reality deep within the drawings." The result is a dreamy, evocative saga of a young heroine experiencing the world. He wanted them to empathize with the princess, which is something he couldn't get from the book on first reading. Takahata didn't want audiences to be distracted by a more realistic art style. Kaguya is based on The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, a book he read as a child about a bamboo cutter who discovers a miniature girl within a stalk of bamboo who grows to become a woman of great beauty. "However, they'd be forced to for an anime feature because anime captures things we do and reflects more solid reality than how they actually are." This was his goal for what became his final film and speaks to the legacy he left behind at Studio Ghibli. "I don't think audiences really 'watch' live-action features carefully," he once said. Takahata believed animation could reach certain depths of reality that live-action could not. ![]() The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is also the tale of Isao Takahata, one of the three co-founders of Studio Ghibli who passed away in 2018. These days, fans of Ged and Arren's sea journey in The Farthest Shore will find a more satisfying adaptation in Moana. Still, it's a shame that aside from a brief opening scene, an Earthsea movie spends so little time on the ocean. To its credit, it does nail the most important themes of the Earthsea series (namely, that mankind should use its power in concert with the natural order rather than try to oppress it, and that death is what makes life beautiful in the first place) and there are some delightful mash-ups of Le Guin's style with Ghibli's aesthetic. Named after the fifth Earthsea book but based on plot elements and character moments from the first, third, and fourth novels, Tales From Earthsea gets a little too tripped up mixing and matching disparate references to tell a completely coherent story. which makes it a slight bummer that the legendary animator passed this project off to his son Gorō Miyazaki instead. Le Guin's one-of-a-kind fantasy series for the screen, it was probably Hayao Miyazaki. If anyone was capable of adapting Ursula K.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |