But it does hold up the roof, and we avoid the American cliche of a loud and sensational collapse, with everyone scurrying to safety. It has a pillar on its porch that is almost rotted through, and they gingerly push it a little, back and forth, showing how precariously it holds up the roof. ''Probably just dust bunnies,'' says their father, but there is an old nanny who has been hired to look after them, and she confides that they are ''soot sprites,'' which like abandoned houses, and will pack up and leave when they hear the sound of laughter.Ĭonsider the way the children first approach the house. When Mei and Satsuki let light into the gloom, they get just a glimpse of little black fuzzy dots scurrying to safety. But not haunted in the American sense, with ghosts or fearsome creatures. When they ask a neighbor boy how to find their new house, we see, but they don't, that he makes a face. Their mother is ill does illness exist in American animation? It has a strong and loving father, in contrast to the recent Hollywood fondness for bad or absent fathers. The film is about two girls, not two boys or a boy and a girl, as all American animated films would be. Their mother, who is sick, has been moved to a hospital in this district. As the story opens, their father is driving them to their new house, near a vast forest. The movie tells the story of two young sisters, Satsuki and Mei Kusakabe. They also have an unforced realism in the way they notice details early in ''Totoro,'' for example, the children look at a little waterfall near their home, and there on the bottom, unremarked, is a bottle someone threw into the stream. Miyazaki's films are above all visually enchanting, using a watercolor look for the backgrounds and working within the distinctive Japanese anime tradition of characters with big round eyes and mouths that can be as small as a dot or as big as a cavern. Of his nine other major films, those best known in the U.S. His ''Princess Mononoke'' (1999) outgrossed ''Titanic'' in Japan, and his newest film, ''Spirited Away'' (2002), outgrossed ''Mononoke'' when it was released in July 2001. Miyazaki is the ''Japanese Disney,'' it's said, although that is a little unfair, since Walt Disney was more producer and visionary than animator, and Miyazaki rolls up his sleeves and draws his films himself. Miyazaki has not until very recently used computers to help animate his films they are drawn a frame at a time, the classic way, with the master himself contributing tens of thousands of the frames.Īnimation is big business in Japan, commanding up to a quarter of the box office some years. Remarkable that ''Totoro'' and Takahata's ''Grave of the Fireflies,'' now both in my Great Movies selection, were released on the same double bill in 1988. This is one of the lovingly hand-crafted works of Hayao Miyazaki, often called the greatest of the Japanese animators, although his colleague at the Ghibli Studios, Isao Takahata, may be his equal.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |