|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Charles Jannuzi
|| Although often ironic and satirical in
|| attitude, he seems
|| to have an almost old-fashioned sense of warmth and humanity
|| usually lacking
|| in Lynch or Greenaway (these two make good people to compare Miyazaki to
|| because all three are primarily 'painterly' artists transferring their
|| visions into narrative film; yet it's arguable whether or not Lynch or
|| Greenaway really have much of a narrative gift).
Japanese animation is a repository of astounding visual talent put to the service of usually feeble scripts. Not very much different from Hollywood, except that the labor-intensive sweatshop animation studios in Japan have to work so much harder and longer, thus multiplying the saddening waste of human resources. Miyazaki himself had given up making features after Mononoke, he was so exhausted. He's commendable in that he doesn't give in to cheap sure-sell clichés and proves that the best talent available can, with great time and effort, produce 2D animation which has the same continuity as real footage or 3D animation. It's a visual treat to see obviously hand-painted characters and backgrounds moving like real footage but the whole thing could also have been produced with motion-capture 3D and run through a cel shader and various "painterly" filters. You'd get the same result with a lot less sweat. So it isn't just his narration that's old fashioned (_and_ the score, which is impossibly syrupy).You really can't compare Miyazaki's narration with Greenaway bec Greenaway is not a narrator. He makes a point of the fact that meaningful relationships between events is teleological. The numbering that is a Greenaway leitmotif emphasizes the arbitrariness of the serial character of a narration. When he combines this deconstruction of narration with the deconstruction of the image, you get an unequalled masterpiece like Prospero's Books.
Hakki