Howl's Moving Castle

I have to admit I was not very pleased with this movie as a whole. A lot of my dissatisfaction has to do with the film’s ending. The beginning of the film is awesome. I loved the kind of domestic environment that was created in Howl’s castle. The cleaning, the door that opens to different places, talking fire- it all made me think of a beautiful fairy tale that just started happening. I was enjoying the movie a lot and even though I don’t usually like the war sequences, I liked them in Howl’s Moving Castle since they were kind of discreet and there were different creatures fighting and not only guns and bombs. It was very interesting how Howl transforms to a bird. Not only Howl transforms but also Sophie is transforming the whole movie. In my opinion she transforms to an older lady when she is unhappy or thinks that she doesn’t control her own life, and she becomes younger when she is happy and influences her life for the better. When she has control she becomes younger. I thought the ending was very unpleasing because it just ended kind of quickly. I felt like Miyazaki was in a hurry to finish the movie and just decided to end it with ought much explanation. Sophie’s kisses just solve everything, save Howl and the fire demon; turn the scarecrow back to a prince who promises to end the war. And that is it. That is the ending. We saw Howl as a little boy eating the demon and that was supposed to explain everything. But it just didn’t explain a lot. I wanted more from the movie and even if it was so well made I was not happy when I walked out of the screening. I can understand how the children would love this film. It has a lot of cute creatures (the fire, the dog, scarecrow) and special effects. It is very colorful and the kids don’t demand a more detailed explanation so they are not dissatisfied with the ending. Miyazaki will always be Miyazaki, though, and his films will be classics no matter if they are satisfying to all individuals or not. I still admire his imagination of creating a world different from our own and telling us a story about it.

Spirited Away

I have always loved this movie. I think it is really wonderful how a little girl is made a hero in her selflessness. She loves the spiritual values and knows that what is on the inside counts more than what is on the outside. The spa in the film is all about the material values, people go there to get pampered on the outside, but that doesn’t help their inside selves. The people who work there are pampering and washing the customers, not to make them feel better but to get the money from them. It is really interesting how Miyazaki used the same kind of object as in Princess Mononoke, the small black curse stone. It makes his films connected, like they are happening in the same world, but only different time periods or maybe different places. I think the main point of the film is that people should respect spiritual values, but unfortunately most of the people in the world nowadays concentrate on the material values.

Princess Mononoke

I remember watching Princess Mononoke when I as a little girl. I thought it was going to be another animated cartoon, because I didn’t have a lot of contact with anime at that time. I did not expect such beautiful, deep animation and such a mind-striking story. This movie is different from earlier Miyazaki’s films in an animation technique. I thought it had more details, especially the characters and the forest look. The forest is of course very much like the one in Nausicaa, so powerful and mysterious. The difference is that this forest is good, filled with wild spirits. I am so astonished by the world Miyazaki created here. He made up so many characters and animals and the connections between them are so complex. It is amazing to me how Miyazaki creates a whole new world with every each one of his movies. In this film, just like in most of the Miyazaki’s films there is a battle between the nature and the technology. The animals are portrayed as ghosts of the forest and the humans are the ones ruining the nature by their selfishness and the will to destroy the forest for the fuel. I don’t think it is explained of why the fuel and iron is needed, or it is explained briefly. There is not even the need to explain it because the main point here is that, again just like in most of Miyazaki’s movies, there is a fight between the humans and the nature. The ending of the film is very similar to a lot of previous Miyazaki’s films. The nature wins and destroys the evil human products and the humans regret their destruction of the nature. As in Castle of the Sky, the surviving humans promise they are not going to harm the nature any more and they will live in symbiosis with it.

My Neighbor Totoro

Coming in to see My Neighbor Totoro for the first time, I really didn’t know what to expect. I know a lot of Americans that have seen the movie when they were younger and I thought that maybe Totoro would be only for children. I thought it would be very mainstream and commercial without a lot of important meaning. I was wrong. Although the film looks very cute and innocent at first (with cute imaginary characters and little girls constantly running and laughing) it is clear that it has a sad undertone and feeling of the postwar Japan. For children watching this movie it might be fun to see the animation and the discovery of the new world of Totoro, but to the adults watching the film it is clear that Totoro is only found in the imagination of the two girls. Every time one of the girls (or both) sleep or wish for happiness, Totoro shows up. With the exception of Totoro and his little friends, the movie looks too ‘real’ to be all cute. The family lives in poverty, in an old, rusty house without money to for example send the kids to expensive boarding schools, but the kids need to stay in the country. The dad is busy every day at work and if he is not at work he deals with papers. The mom is very sick and in the hospital and presumably in the end she dies. At the end of the movie, though, we don’t see her death because the kids imagine her getting better. The cat bus shows up and takes the kids to the hospital. Obviously the cat bus doesn’t exist in real life so there is a good reason to believe that the hospital trip is made up by the kids. They see the mom get better, but the viewers know that the mother didn’t get better and that the hospital wouldn’t give out a telegram if the mom just had a cold. Telegrams get in service when a person dies or something else bad happens. I think of Totoro as happiness for the kids and also the hope. Maybe Miyazaki’s hope that Japan will grow fast from the post- war situation into a beautiful blooming tree, just like it did in the little girl’s dream. In my opinion, Miyazaki knows that that kind of a big recovery is not possible and that the only thing that is left is hope. The film reminded me of the play Waiting for Godot, with Totoro being the Godot, but in a little girl’s mind, Godot comes sooner than a grown person’s does because the children have bigger imagination and more hope that things will just somehow change.

Castle in the Sky

This was my second time watching this movie and I concentrated a little more on the parallelism between Sheeta and the Mama character. I think they are both portrayed similarly although at first the Mama character looks tough and non-appealing. A lot of times in the film even the characters state the similarity or say that Sheeta will grow up to become like Mama. I don’t think that is the wrong assumption (although I don’t think she will become a pirate) because I think Sheeta has Mama’s adventures spirit. When she grows up she can indeed become similar to Mama and have a lot of adventures with Pazu. At the beginning of the movie the parallelism is drawn in the cut where Sheeta is about to hit a man with the bottle and then it cuts to Mama firing a gun. The scene indicates that Sheeta hit the man and when we go back to the room where Sheeta was, we see that indeed she hit him. When Pazu and Sheeta go to the pirate ship Mama is not mean to them at al, but seems to be happy that she has them on the boat. She is entertained by the children’s relationship and looks a little nostalgic about them. In her room on the ship we can indeed see a picture of her when she was young and she resembles Sheeta a little.

Nausicaa- 2nd week

The second viewing of Nausicaa made me think that this movie is all about nature and humans and their interaction. If the humans are good to the nature, the nature will be good to them. In the movie, Nausicaa discovers that the poison forest is just poisonous because the humans are polluting the water and then the trees use the polluted water to grow. If the humans weren’t polluting the water with their new technologies and inventions, the forest wouldn’t be poisonous. The movie also tells us that there is always another chance to make things better. Nausicaa kills some people in the movie but then in the end she is redeemed when she shows unselfishness in saving the little Ohmu and her village. Even though she had killed those people in the end she made it better. I think that Miyazaki wanted to show the viewers that we could always make things better if we want and try.

Nausicaa- 1st week

This was my first time watching this movie and I was so delighted with it. It was beautiful. It was nicely made, especially the poisonous jungle (speaking about James Cameron ripping off the Jungle look :-/) and the nature in general. Just like Napier said in her book, anime is a run away from reality, to some different imaginary world. Miyazaki did exactly that. The viewer was put into a new world with a lot of mysterious animals and plants, but what was very striking was that the world could actually happen. Just like in the film, humans have polluted the earth and the film's post- apocalypse atmosphere might actually happen in reality. Miyazaki definitely wanted to show the nature and how pollution is bad. He wanted the viewers to ask themselves is it really worth it to be polluting the earth and then live in the garbage and poisonous atmosphere how ours is becoming with more and more human made dirt and smoke. Also Miyazaki is pointing out that the humans are just fighting and think that it will solve everything, but instead they should be working to save the earth and it's natural resources. In the film, just like in real life, the humans are obsessed with leadership, but wars will not help anyone. Everyone should be like Nausicaa, kind leaders that care about other people and living creatures n earth and not care for the material goods. This was such a beautiful inspiring story and I am looking forward to seeing it again. I will be concentrating more on the animation this time and the music, and not so much on the story, because I want to be able to analyze the film's atmosphere and character's looks with their personalities, and colors they are portrayed in.