Redcoffin
11-28-2007, 02:47 PM
I just had a chance to watch the Japanese release of Gedo Senki (Goro Miyazaki's Earthsea film) and I must say I was both pleased and charmed by it. I understand that it didn't do exceptionally well at theaters in Japan and a lot of people who have seen it had kind of a 'meh' attitude about it. But it is not by any means a bad film.
What it IS, (IMHO) is a pre-Hayao Miyazaki film. To go into a lot of details would be tedious but I believe it's safe to say that despite having many of the same staff and many of the stereotypical Studio Ghibli visual cues, Gedo Senki is what anime would be like if Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind had never happened.
It's hard to believe now, but there had actually been quite a lot of anime before Nausicaa. What blew people away was the novelty, the eccentricity and the intensely cinematic nature of H. Miyazaki's vision. This was environmentalism with blood and guts spilling all over, in which the bad guys were just as interesting as the good guys. When Nausicaa came out in 1984, a whole generation of viewers basically felt that the top of their head had been taken off. It was that kind of experience.
By comparison, Gedo Senki 'reads' like an anime from the 1960s. It's hard to explain what I mean except that to say that the story moves without being 'driven.' It's the exact polar opposite of something like Death Note, where the story is a shallow tour-de-force and the whole point is for the audience to be dragged from incredible cliffhanger to cliffhanger.
Despite the fact that in one scene somebody actually does hang from a cliff, Gedo Senki isn't that kind of work. It seems to me like a lush, rather moralistic 19th century novel: one of those novels about the decadence of ancient Rome written by an upright British Anglican priest. Despite a number of lavish city scenes (somewhat embarrassingly cribbed from the older Miyazaki's manga Shuna no Tabi), the story plays out on a small canvass. The cinematography is stable and capable. The scenery is often of the undramatic sort that possesses a soft beauty so difficult to render on film. Much of the action takes place on a small farm, and perhaps 2/3 of the film showcases the interactions of maybe a half dozen characters. There were long passages where I felt eerily that I was watching an animated Thomas Hardy novel.
But it was a really good animated Thomas Hardy novel. I liked it. It seemed like one of those films that champions the virtues of normality, courage, forbearance, politeness and day-to-day heroism. Bad people are bad, and good people have to work really hard to stay that way. The painting and coloring of the scenes is beautiful beyond praise, with the small exception of a few scenes with ships, where the ships just don't move quite right.
I think it's a shame that a well-made, family-friendly film has received such a lukewarm response, simply because it didn't rock people's world.
What it IS, (IMHO) is a pre-Hayao Miyazaki film. To go into a lot of details would be tedious but I believe it's safe to say that despite having many of the same staff and many of the stereotypical Studio Ghibli visual cues, Gedo Senki is what anime would be like if Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind had never happened.
It's hard to believe now, but there had actually been quite a lot of anime before Nausicaa. What blew people away was the novelty, the eccentricity and the intensely cinematic nature of H. Miyazaki's vision. This was environmentalism with blood and guts spilling all over, in which the bad guys were just as interesting as the good guys. When Nausicaa came out in 1984, a whole generation of viewers basically felt that the top of their head had been taken off. It was that kind of experience.
By comparison, Gedo Senki 'reads' like an anime from the 1960s. It's hard to explain what I mean except that to say that the story moves without being 'driven.' It's the exact polar opposite of something like Death Note, where the story is a shallow tour-de-force and the whole point is for the audience to be dragged from incredible cliffhanger to cliffhanger.
Despite the fact that in one scene somebody actually does hang from a cliff, Gedo Senki isn't that kind of work. It seems to me like a lush, rather moralistic 19th century novel: one of those novels about the decadence of ancient Rome written by an upright British Anglican priest. Despite a number of lavish city scenes (somewhat embarrassingly cribbed from the older Miyazaki's manga Shuna no Tabi), the story plays out on a small canvass. The cinematography is stable and capable. The scenery is often of the undramatic sort that possesses a soft beauty so difficult to render on film. Much of the action takes place on a small farm, and perhaps 2/3 of the film showcases the interactions of maybe a half dozen characters. There were long passages where I felt eerily that I was watching an animated Thomas Hardy novel.
But it was a really good animated Thomas Hardy novel. I liked it. It seemed like one of those films that champions the virtues of normality, courage, forbearance, politeness and day-to-day heroism. Bad people are bad, and good people have to work really hard to stay that way. The painting and coloring of the scenes is beautiful beyond praise, with the small exception of a few scenes with ships, where the ships just don't move quite right.
I think it's a shame that a well-made, family-friendly film has received such a lukewarm response, simply because it didn't rock people's world.