| My neighbours the Yamadas review (spoiler warning) |       |
So today I was fortunate to see Isao Takahata's My neighbours the Yamadas on the big screen for the first time, thanks to the film festival Love and anarchy, that shows movies that usually aren't comercially distributed here in Finland. There were some technical issues at the beginning (because the copy was probably a dvd, they had problems getting the picture the right size and the the english text didn't show for the first few minutes) but after that, it was magic. More so, because it's really rare that you get the chance to see a film by Isao Takahata in a movie theatre here. Pompoko was shown comerially last autumn, but frankly, I wasn't too impressed by it. The movies of Hayao Miyazaki are much more popular here in Scandinavia, but Studio Ghibli isn't just Miyazaki. Takahata's films are different, and maybe a bit more difficault to understand for a western audience, but they are just as well made, perhaps sometimes even more well made, than Miyazaki's.What I love about Takahata's work is how his characters aren't the "heroes" but regular persons having to deal with more or less normal situations. Because the characters have flaws, you can identify with them and truly care about what happens to them.
The Yamadas are really a normal family, Granmother Shige, her daughter Matsuko and Matsuko's husband Takashi and the pair's two children, Noboru and Nonoko. Normal except for the fact that everything the Yamadas do somehow seems to epically fail. The whole movie is a collection of snippets of the Yamada's everyday life. Some of these snippets are shorter, some longer, some are serious and some are funny. Most of the laugh seems to be on workshy housewife Matsuko, who seems to do everything she can to spend as little time as possible doing housework, while still staying in her housewife role, like tricking her son to make her noodles and serving shabu shabu (a meal that's cooked by the partisipants at the table) for dinner. Businessman Takashi is a more pathetic figure, a man working hard, but getting very little and not even being respected by his family. Noboru is a typical teenager and little Nonoko actually seems to be the only sane person in the family. These little snippets of the life of the Yamadas at first seem to be totally unrelated to each other, but they are all crucial to the movie, in that each segment shows something new about the Yamada family.
Technically the movie is different from all other Ghibli films.
The washed-out watercolours gives the film a special sort of feeling. It kind of reminds me of newspaper cartoons (which the movie first was). This technique of washed out colors fading into another maybe wouldn't work for a movie with just one story, but because of the segments it doesn't matter. And the drawing is beautifully done. The Yamadas are drawn in a humorous way, while most other people in the movie are unidentified from another.
The segment that made me laugh the most is the one with the ginger. This segment also shows the special type of humor in My neighbours the Yamadas really well. First, Matsuko and Shige talk about how good ginger is, but how it is said to make people more forgetful. Then both children forget something home on the way to school. From there the scene just gets crazier and crazier, with everyone forgetting something. The humor in the Yamadas is often like this, starting from a pretty small thing (a boy forgetting his briefcase at home), then just adding up and adding up until the whole situation is totally absurd. The segments often end with the Yamadas laughing at their own misstakes.
My neighbours the Yamadas isn't just a funny movie. There is plenty of serious stuff in it too, like granmother Shige's visit to her sick friend at the hospital. But even the serious segments don't get too depressing. The best segments are the ones that are both funny and serious at the same time, like the father's wedding speech at the end. The scene starts with Matsuko giving Takashi the wrong papers to his speech at a young couple's wedding. This might become another epic fail-situation, but Takashi improvises a beautiful speech about the importance of family and of overseeing your partner's faults. What he really does is in a weird way express his love for his wife. Yes, Matsuko is not perfect, but she doesn't mean anything harm,so her laziness should be forgiven. The Yamadas are not a perfect family, but they are a family that love each other and can laugh at their misstakes. I actually think Takashi's speech is one of the most beautiful endings in any ghibli movie.
So was the movie any different on the big screen? It depends on how you see it. Because most of the scenes are pretty simple, My neighbours the Yamadas can as easily be enjoyed on dvd. What made the experience different was seeing it with other people. I think most other people in the theater had, like me, seen the movie before, because people started laughing before the situations became funny. It was very liberating laughing hysterically with a roomfull of stranger. There was some kind of connection within the audience, that I very seldom notice in cinemas. So yes, the movie was funnier with other people around. But other people aren't essential for enjoying this funny, beautiful, simple and yet very wise masterpiece. The only thing I can wish for right now is for Rakkautta ja anarkiaa to be brave enough to show Takahata's biggest masterpiece, Grave of the fireflies, next year. That would be a heartbreaking experience.
Post last edited by Heidi80 on 09.19.2011, 09:41 AM.
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09.19.2011, 08:39 AM
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