Lupin
III: The Castle of Cagliostro (Lupin
the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro) (1979)
***/****
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Adapted from a Monkey Punch manga that was itself based on Maurice
LeBlanc’s popular super-spy Lupin, Hayao Miyazaki’s first
feature-length film The Castle of Cagliostro came
about as an offshoot of his experiences producing television episodes
of a popular Lupin series (1977-1981). As such, the animation and
backgrounds are more simplistic, the story is more cartoonish (though
the very basic Miyazaki hallmarks of a girl in transition, flight, and
gadgetry are already in place) and one-dimensional, and the pace is
more relentlessly breakneck than occasionally meditative. Beginning as
a heist comedy and continuing as an impenetrable fortress/princess in a
tower action adventure film, The Castle of Cagliostro
is a light, irreverent slapstick exercise with a healthy share of nifty
gadgets and derring-do. Missing is a sense of completion and the deeper
examination of themes that one will come to associate with the
director’s work, but The Castle of Cagliostro
stands on its own merits; despite being shackled somewhat by the
artistic and thematic requirements of an in-place franchise, the
picture reveals the burgeoning promise of a filmmaker who would become
the most important voice of the new anime medium. 100 minutes
Nausicaä
of the Valley of the Wind (1984)
***/****
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A dry-run in many ways for Miyazaki’s later works, particularly Princess
Mononoke, which the picture resembles most, Nausicaä
of the Valley of the Wind is marred by a painfully-dated
soundtrack and politics strained to the edge of hysterical, but it
remains a powerful piece and a showcase for nearly every element of
what would become recurring themes in Miyazaki’s work. See in
conservationist and warrior (Princess Mononoke)
Princess Nausicaä a young girl with an animal familiar and powers of
flight (Kiki’s Delivery Service) at odds with a
militaristic airborne oppressor (Porco Rosso) who
makes a habit of kidnapping princesses (Laputa: Castle in the
Sky), all the while maintaining an innocent flirtation with
a heroic boy (a trope discernible in all of Miyazaki’s subsequent
output). The leader of the industrialized state is a woman, and the
conflict of the piece involves the struggle between civilization and
the fury of the natural (Princess Mononoke again,
with insects and poisonous spores in place of forest spirits and elder
gods). Not immune at this point to his culture’s general obsession with
nuclear war (the poisonous spores of the film’s ancient forest
“wasteland” remind of the ashes of fallout), Nausicaä of the
Valley of the Wind is probably more interesting as a source
material for the student of Miyazaki’s tendencies and nascent concerns
than, perhaps, as an entertainment unto itself. The picture was
unavailable for so long that many have come to it only after sampling
the filmmaker’s late production; a perspective
uncoloured by hindsight is a luxury reserved only for the lucky,
prescient few. 118
minutes
Laputa:
Castle in the Sky (Castle
in the Sky) (1986)
***/****
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Often hailed as Miyazaki’s most accessible work, Laputa:
Castle in the Sky is a somewhat one-note “boy’s adventure”
with an unusually weak female protagonist and an overreliance on
set-pieces. Inspired by a reference in Gulliver’s Travels
to a floating city above Balnibarbi, the film is ultimately less Swift
than Conan Doyle–an archaeological adventure that eventually involves
itself in the exploration of a lost and dead civilization. It appears
to be a straight cliffhanger serial, in other words (complete with a
sly Victorianism), at least until its final third, when the picture
begins to take on the cause of the filmmaker’s ecological concerns.
Sheeta is an heir to the floating Kingdom Laputa. Earthbound for
generations as the island drifts undiscovered in a storm cloud, Sheeta
discovers her legacy with the help of a much-coveted heirloom: a blue
“levistone” that points the way to her ancestral home. Joining forces
with brave boy Pazu, Sheeta’s quest to reclaim her legacy leads the
pair on a series of adventures, sometimes in the company of a bumbling
crew of pirates, always just ahead of a greedy army seeking to loot the
gilded Laputa. The first hint of Spirited Away‘s
cautionary stance on the dangers of materialism (along with the first
look at a character design echoed in Spirited Away‘s
boiler-room keeper), Laputa: Castle in the Sky is
interesting for the Miyazaki scholar for sure but still feeling its way
in terms of the connectivity and brilliance of Miyazaki’s later plots.
A superior children’s entertainment regardless, Miyazaki refines his
dedication to younger viewers with his next film–abandoning his broad
politicizing until 1992’s Porco Rosso. 125 minutes
My
Neighbor Totoro (1988)
****/****
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The Cheshire Cat recast as a twelve-legged feline bus, the White Rabbit
a blue acorn-stealing blob with a little white assistant, and the
caterpillar and his mushroom fashioned into the grey, heavy-lidded
demeanour (and drum belly) of wood spirit Totoro, Miyazaki’s My
Neighbor Totoro recasts Lewis Carroll as something at once
more based in functionality and more useful to the developing psyche.
An enchantment that suffers only for a mildly dated “blip” score, the
film carries the evolving hallmarks of Miyazaki’s auteurist questions:
little girls displaced by a move or a trauma; surrogate parents;
magical modes of transportation; the freedom of flight; and the terror
and the exhilaration of the possible. Note one magical scene that
encompasses all as nuts planted by young Satsuke (voiced by Noriko
Hidaka) and her toddler sister Mei (Chika Sakamoto) grow at the urging
of a midnight dance while their father (Shigesato Itoi) toils in his
study, oblivious. Too damn short at 86 minutes, My Neighbor
Totoro is a wondrous picture by an artist hitting his prime
as an animator and fable-maker–a dry run in many ways for the master’s
late work (see the soot spirits resurrected in Spirited Away,
the crone Granny (Tanie Kitabayashi) in one of the airplane workers in Porco
Rosso, and the old hermit of Princess Mononoke),
My Neighbor Totoro on its own is one of the most
accomplished and important children’s films ever made. 86 minutes
Kiki’s
Delivery Service (1989)
***/****
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Betraying a new maturity in not only animation but also score, Kiki’s
Delivery Service is a puberty fable whose conceit, if taken
far enough, eventually suggests that the magic of childhood lost in
adolescence can be regained through faith, courage, and love. Kiki, as
tradition dictates, leaves home at the age of thirteen to find her
fortune as “town witch” to a town without one. Her only learned skill
that of flight, she begins the titular courier service while living
with what appears to be an interracial couple in an island amalgamation
of several western cities. With her black cat Jiji the only nod to any
sort of Disney convention (he talks, but only to her and only when
she’s magical, at that), the picture is marked by a delicious
bittersweet quality as the story moves from parents losing a child to
adolescence through to that child finding–and losing–first love in a
strange city. Between this and My Neighbor Totoro,
Miyazaki’s hallmarks emerge with a clear intentionality–he evolved
into an auteur with a lovely fable cycle about overcoming the
uncertainties of growing up in particular and life in general. Though
not nearly so adept or consistently enthralling as My
Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service
is a children’s film that gives lie, again, to the western belief that
stories for kids need to be insipid, trite, and unwatchable. 103 minutes
Porco
Rosso (1992)
**½/****
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The only misstep in Miyazaki’s later career (and a minor one at that), Porco
Rosso tells the peculiar allegory of a WWI-era Italian
pilot’s rejection of fascism in his native land and subsequent curse to
live his life as an upright talking pig. The Crimson Pig, in fact (an
obvious take on Germany’s Red Baron), fighting for good against evil
air pirates in a souped-up bi-plane. His former partner and coy love
interest is the benevolent Mata Hari Gina, who runs a pilot’s club in a
sun-baked inlet. With animation that is simply astonishing in its
detail (the highlight coming in an early scene as Porco moves a small
table closer to him, jostling a radio and a bottle of wine), Porco
Rosso marks both strides in technical achievement and
Miyazaki’s latent politicism swimming to the surface. Where his
previous two films were invested in personal tales of little girls
finding their way in the world, this picture announces (somewhat
obliquely and clumsily) the return to the auteur’s stumbling
proselytizing (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds).
Though Princess Mononoke deals with green
philosophy and Spirited Away can be read as an
allegory of child prostitution in Asia, the images of noble pigs and
pre-bellum fascism are too broad and obvious to be taken without a
certain cynicism. 94
minutes
Princess
Mononoke (1997)
****/****
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An endless delight, Princess
Mononoke is a film as beautiful
as it is poignant. Prince Ashitaka is cursed to death when his arm is
infected by a strange pestilence from the deep forest. Journeying on a
final quest out of his homeland with a steel musket ball his only clue,
Ashitaka traces the source of his contagion’s fury to an industrialized
city-state run by the Lady Eboshi, steadily encroaching on the pristine
forest. Princess
Mononoke respects character ambiguity and nuance,
reminding a great deal of Inagaki’s Miyamoto Musashi Samurai trilogy in
that regard. Though she’s a spoiler, for instance, Lady Eboshi is the
protector of literal and social lepers–diseased men working alongside
“fallen” women. The titular feral child and her retinue of ancient wolf
gods form the final third of the picture’s central trio: she the wild,
Eboshi the civilized, and Ashitaka the (doomed) bridge between the two.
That Princess Mononoke
is an Industrial Revolution allegory is
inescapable (the images of marauding boars cutting through the forest
remind of Faulkner’s description of “The Bear” and, as it follows, of
the locomotive’s role in Britain), but it’s also a wonderful
fantasy, a bracing action movie, and an animation of uncommon beauty
and
detail. Princess
Mononoke is the first film that successfully marries
Miyazaki’s politics with his humanism, and it’s a masterpiece. 133 minutes
Spirited
Away (2001)
****/****
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An extraordinary film blessed with a wealth of critical possibilities,
Spirited Away
places high among the most beautiful animated films ever
made. It is a culmination of Miyazaki’s auteur motifs (displaced
children, surrogate parents, magical modes of transportation, the
freedom of flight, etc.), which are at ease now with the filmmaker’s
political inclinations–comfortably buried in the subtext, all. It’s
another
marriage of tradition with the modern sensibility, another meditation
on the encroaching of civilization on the natural, and. at its most
basic level, another brilliant fable about dealing with the pitfalls of
growing up, though a strong case could be made for Spirited Away as a
discussion of the evils of bathhouses and their link to prostitution
(young girls at the beck of beasts), the film at its heart is a thing
of bracing genius. En route to her new home, young Chihiro (soon
ritually rechristened Sen) is separated from her gluttonous parents
(more pigs and their
appetites, à la Porco
Rosso) and forced to work in a bathhouse
frequented nightly by Japan’s pantheon of house and nature spirits; Spirited Away is an
adventure, a thriller, a comedy, and a
romance at once and both political and personal, but at its heart
and most importantly, it concerns a little girl honouring her friends
and her family by learning to value herself. 125 minutes
Originally published: September 20, 2002.
