>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.
Well most everywhere don't get to be auteurs. Most don't even get the chance to direct.
>Miyazaki himself had given up making features after
>Mononoke, he was so exhausted.
Well, that's because he is now over 60 and is so involved in the actual work and not just the storyboards. He said that he did give up doing so much of the continuity for this latest. One can only hope he is truly teaching the next generation of animators at Ghibli.
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.
A couple observations:
1. Miyazaki is at pains to point out that he does not do 'anime'. No doubt he wants to avoid the cliche' you are talking about. I thought Mononoke came dangerously close at times, and I much prefer Totoro (get the Warner video release if you can, not the damned Disney one) and Kiki's Delivery Service for the whimsy and the latest, Spirited Away.
2. In his last two films, his studio does use computers, but please, please, don't tell me Antz or Bug's Life rivals Miyazaki's animation. I think Wallace and Gromit or Chicken Run are better than any of that computer stuff (and you want to talk about doing things the old fashioned way, Chicken Run is a tour de force of animation using painstaking techniques with the latest filming techniques as well). Watch the 'making of' documentary on the DVD and you will be amazed!
3. All film takes on a 'cartoon' effect--especially noticeable with the technicolor of the 40s-60s . I love these films because they look like nothing from real life. They are live action cartoons. Any of those Gene Kelly concoctions with Stanley Donen, for example. Even Gone with the Wind is an awesome special effects film enhanced with painted cells and color film, as much so as it contemporary Wizard of Oz.
>So it isn't just his narration that's old
>fashioned (_and_ the score, which is impossibly >syrupy).
But in a fine post-modern sense. Like it or not, it always brings ironic distance. BTW, I really hate the scores to Greenaway films for the most part. But the film with the most obnoxious use of the score would have to be that damned film Magnolia. Or anything with a soundtrack written by Danny Elfman!
>You really can't
>compare Miyazaki's narration with Greenaway bec >Greenaway is not a
narrator.
Who wrote the script for 'Draughtsman's Contract'? The man himself I do believe. Here he goes for a pretty traditional narrative, though leaves the ending ambiguous (though the more recent Serpent's Kiss is a pretty good parody of Greenaway and ultimately more satisfying when it goes for an old-fashioned, romantic ending, something the critics didn't get).
The Thief, the Cook... is pretty straightforward narrative, though the images and sets and cinematography are what make it work.
I wished to compare and contrast Greenaway, Lynch (Greenaway is openly an admirer of Lynch by the way, something that doesn't surprise me actually), and Miyazaki because it's obvious they all start with images and visions and then translate it into film. This is a tendency in many 'complete' directors (Spielberg storyboards, but , for example, relied on Douglas Trumball and even Alfred Hitchcock to give him a vision for Close Encounters), but most pronounced in these three. Miyazaki strays away from straight narrative quite a lot in order to parade his images which we might read as symbols--especially in Totoro and the recent film, Spirited Away.
>He [Greenaway] makes a point of the fact that meaningful >relationships
between events is
>teleological.
Yes, but his characters are so flat. He doesn't even create the possibility of an actor taking over the role and transcending his own creation (a couple actors beat him at his own game--Brian Dennehy in Architect's Belly).
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.
I don't think we could even make sense of our own lives if we didn't constantly revert to the fiction of a narrative.
In censorious Japan, we called that thing 'Prospero's Blobs' (digital mosaics of all genitalia).Which made me never want to see a naked body on film again. At least David Lynch seems to have warmed up a bit. I mean, if your life is all artifice and illusion, you might at least give us the illusion that we should care about the characters and what happens to them some. Finally, I thought 'Pillow Book' was orientalist dreck at its worst, but I'm always willing to give Greenaway one last chance with each new film, so there must be something about his stuff that I find compelling.
Charles Jannuzi