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Mush
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http://ajw.asahi.com/article/cool_japan/.../AJ201307160068" Miyazaki reaches new heights with...ove story" from the Asahi Shimbun is a very interesting article, although not exactly a review.
Watching the trailer, it looked like Studio Ghibli has really outdone themselves with the animation. The train scene in particular was very smooth. I wonder which earthquake was the one portrayed in the trailer? There were a few that would fit the time period.
From the Asia Pacific Journal article that Leonbloy posted, it sounds like Miyazaki has a very nuanced view. I can't imagine that Kaze Tachinu will in any way portray war or nationalism in a favourable light. I think it should be very interesting to see.
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 07.24.2013, 08:58 PM |
  
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Orphic Okapi
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Yeah, I find it hard to believe, reading everything Miyazaki's said on the matter, that he would make a revisionist history or an unambiguous glorification of Jiro Hirokoshi's war involvement. He did say somewhere that he didn't want the film to focus too much on WWII, since he feels the media is already saturated with images of war. That might be the reason some people feel uncomfortable with the movie; I can see how making a film about a fighter plane designer, and then shying away from the actual destruction caused by his creations, might be seen as an immoral evasion. But obviously I can't really comment until I've seen the movie.
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| 07.24.2013, 09:15 PM |
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saviour2012
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quote:
Originally posted by Orphic Okapi
Yeah, I find it hard to believe, reading everything Miyazaki's said on the matter, that he would make a revisionist history or an unambiguous glorification of Jiro Hirokoshi's war involvement. He did say somewhere that he didn't want the film to focus too much on WWII, since he feels the media is already saturated with images of war. That might be the reason some people feel uncomfortable with the movie; I can see how making a film about a fighter plane designer, and then shying away from the actual destruction caused by his creations, might be seen as an immoral evasion. But obviously I can't really comment until I've seen the movie.
well i am seeing that different passive nationalist self is coming out of you guys . it is understandable. i would have said same thing if a movie was made glorifying Pakistani army.
oh one thing is needed to be said Einstein was not happy that atomic bomb was invented by his energy conversion theory but he WAS passive accountable for it
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its a uniquely Miyazaki film, one only he could make and its uniqueness places it beyond being easily critiqued.[About Porco Rosso]
taken from a quote of Saddletank and Orphic Okapi
Post last edited by saviour2012 on 07.25.2013, 02:18 AM.
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| 07.25.2013, 02:16 AM |
 
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saviour2012
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| 07.25.2013, 02:36 AM |
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Saddletank
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Mush - The earthquake depicted is the Kanto region earthquake of 1923.
I don't think its co-incidence that he's showing an earthquake in one of his films either, since he's made some strong socio-cultural remarks about post-tsunami reconstruction in recent years as well.
On a technical note is that use of CGI in the zoomed perspective view down the tracks to of the front of the electric train?
I am unclear on whether Miyaaki uses CGI at all. I know a few years back he said he never would use it and would continue to use hand-painted cels but it has that CGI look to me.
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Post last edited by Saddletank on 07.25.2013, 01:54 PM.
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| 07.25.2013, 01:54 PM |
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saviour2012
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quote:
Originally posted by Saddletank
Mush - The earthquake depicted is the Kanto region earthquake of 1923.
I don't think its co-incidence that he's showing an earthquake in one of his films either, since he's made some strong socio-cultural remarks about post-tsunami reconstruction in recent years as well.
On a technical note is that use of CGI in the zoomed perspective view down the tracks to of the front of the electric train?
I am unclear on whether Miyaaki uses CGI at all. I know a few years back he said he never would use it and would continue to use hand-painted cels but it has that CGI look to me.
miyazaki do not want to but ghibli stuff often use cgi in his or anyones film to speed up the process.
the technique is even cooler than using only cgi.
i think as there were two films and back to back ghibli stuff definitely needed to do that cause animation is not cheap as it was in 1997 even then they used cgi. ponyo is the only modern film which did not use cgi cause as far as i know there was less pressure and miyazaki insisted.
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Watch everything but only take the good things from it
Ask, think and learn. Because the more we know the more we grow.
Watching the wrong to happen is the same as commiting the wrong.
If it looks like things are forcing you to be creative, Then be creative.
its a uniquely Miyazaki film, one only he could make and its uniqueness places it beyond being easily critiqued.[About Porco Rosso]
taken from a quote of Saddletank and Orphic Okapi
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| 07.25.2013, 02:27 PM |
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Orphic Okapi
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Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Howl's Moving Castle all definitely employed CGI. Those might be the only three, though.
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| 07.25.2013, 05:15 PM |
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Orphic Okapi
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Okay here's a quick review I threw together. It'll show up on my blog eventually after I fix it up and maybe add some more, but I didn't want to make you guys wait that long.
I've always wondered if Miyazaki could make a movie like this, and now he has. Kaze Tachinu is a slow-moving, dialogue-driven, highly fictionalized account of the life of Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed the Zero Fighter during WWII. The story contains almost no children, no scenes of fantasy that happen outside the protagonist's head, and very few action scenes. In many ways it is unprecedented in Miyazaki's career. More so than any movie he has made, this is one for adults—not because the content is especially unsuitable for children, but because there is little that will appeal to them in the story.
The story follows Jiro from adolescence to adulthood as he works to fulfill his dream of designing a beautiful airplane. Miyazaki clearly thinks of Jiro as more of an artist than an engineer, and possibly identifies with him a great deal. Parallels can be drawn between Jiro's career and Miyazaki's as an animator: both men are driven, almost to the point of obsession, to create things of beauty. Perhaps out of sympathy (one hopes not out of blindness to his own faults), Miyazaki celebrates this impulse more than he criticizes it. The movie's main subplot, about Jiro's courtship of an artist dying of tuberculosis, contains subtle hints that Jiro may be squandering the time they have left together, but his lover Naoko is never less than supportive of his work, and their relationship experiences almost no conflict.
The movie is masterful as an evocation of time and place. In that sense it is comparable to My Neighbor Totoro, which recreated the Japanese countryside of 1958 in loving detail. Kaze Tachinu paints a much broader picture of life in Japan in the '20s and '30s, with cities, train car interiors, mountain retreats, tatami rooms, restaurants, and factories all rendered exquisitely, painstakingly; I imagine the movie will be interesting to many Western audiences simply for its depiction of a time in Japanese history when the roots of tradition were not buried so deep, and a man might wear a suit to work but change into a kimono at home. The movie's meticulously rendered images of aircraft, real and imagined, reminded me of Porco Rosso, another movie in which Miyazaki allowed himself to revel in his obsession with planes. But the Ghibli film I recalled most while watching Kaze Tachinu was not even directed by Miyazaki. I was reminded of Grave of the Fireflies, directed by the co-founder of Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki's mentor, Isao Takahata. That movie, also set during WWII, is a tragic examination of the effects of war on civilians, which Kaze Tachinu is decidedly not. But both films evoke the same time in Japanese history so vividly it is impossible not to feel a kind of connection between them.
Miyazaki's directorial approach here owes a great deal to Takahata, who specializes in using animation to tell stories that are highly realistic—stories that might not, on the surface, appear to benefit from being animated—and lending them a hyperreal quality through expressionistic touches that would be impossible to achieve in live action. (In his film Only Yesterday, for example, first love is illustrated in a scene where the protagonist runs up into the clouds and floats all the way home.) Similarly, Miyazaki at several points in Kaze Tachinu brings Jiro's dreams and fantasies to life, visualizing what could be captured no other way. The dream sequences make Jiro a richer character, but a curious omission from these dreams is guilt—or even an acknowledgement that the planes he builds will be used to kill people. I say "curious" because I honestly haven't decided whether it was wrong of Miyazaki to make the movie the way he did. The rest of my review will probably be concerned with this question.
Kaze Tachinu is not a movie about World War II. It is a movie that happens to be set in WWII. Nor is it a movie about fighter planes. It is a movie about a man's passion and his pursuit of that passion, which happens to be fighter planes. Not specifically fighter planes; that is unfair. He is a man who wants to design planes, who happens to have been born at a time when his primary option to pursue that passion is to design planes that will kill people. He didn't start WWII, and if he doesn't design the planes, no doubt somebody else will. That's probably what Miyazaki was thinking when he said in a recent interview, "If we are to pursue Horikoshi’s war responsibility, we should rather condemn modernism, which laid the foundation for developing the airplane."
And sure enough, Miyazaki's movie does not condemn Horikoshi. It wants to celebrate Horikoshi's design as an aesthetic achievement, a work of art separate from the context in which it was created. But can a work of art really be appreciated devoid of its context?
In order to avoid condemnation, Miyazaki avoids the issue of guilt altogether. This might befit a biographical film, since it is basically impossible to say whether the real Horikoshi experienced guilt or not—except Miyazaki takes enormous liberties with the details of his life elsewhere. Could he not have invented guilt for Horikoshi? But then, how likely is it that Horikoshi would have actually experienced guilt? Wouldn't he have kept himself ignorant of the atrocities ocurring elsewhere, just like everyone does during wartime?
Perhaps that's what Miyazaki means when he criticizes those who debate over Horikoshi's war responsibility, saying "both sides don’t seem to be making an effort to capture the prevailing mood of the period." It's certainly possible that this "prevailing mood" he hoped to capture was one in which everyone passively accepted the war as a fact, went on living, and never stopped for a moment to examine their complicity. If that's so, then he captures an uncomfortable truth so well, it made me uncomfortable. Jiro Horikoshi probably wasn't a bad guy. In fact, he may have been the nicest guy in the world. He was certainly very smart and ambitious, and did exactly what everyone says you're supposed to do: found a passion, worked hard at it, improved, produced something great. If he had lived in a different time and done the exact same thing, he would have been an unquestionably good man. But he lived during WWII, and indirectly caused the deaths of many people. Did he feel guilty? Should he have?
Miyazaki doesn't answer these questions for you. Maybe his movie is evasive for refusing to provide answers. Maybe the movie is his way of asking the same questions. I do know that I will be thinking about Kaze Tachinu for a long time.
TL;DR:
There was lots of dialogue, but apparently my comprehension has gotten loads better lately, because I didn't find it hard to follow. It's Miyazaki's most fully-realized effort since Spirited Away, I think. Hopefully it's not his last, but if it is, not a bad way to go out. In some ways it feels more like a Takahata film than a Miyazaki. My feelings on the war stuff: ambiguous, sorry, there's no way to really abbreviate my thoughts on that.
Also I saw a preview for Takahata's new movie. Oh my GOD I am so excited for that one now. The animation is incredible, utterly unlike anything Ghibli's done before.
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Post last edited by Orphic Okapi on 07.27.2013, 11:03 AM.
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| 07.27.2013, 10:47 AM |
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Saddletank
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Great review Orphic, thank you. Please load it up to IMBD.
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| 07.27.2013, 11:19 AM |
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arren18
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Thanks Orphic! I'd always thought this sounded more like Takahata's type of story, so it's interesting that you got a similar impression when watching it. Thanks for clarifying when it takes place too - I know there were various clues but I wasn't quite sure before. Anyway, hopefully I'll be able to see it myself some time!
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| 07.27.2013, 01:13 PM |
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Orphic Okapi
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I finally managed to find an acceptable version of the theme song, Hikoukigumo, on Youtube. It is absolutely a wonderful song and somehow fits the movie perfectly, despite being from 1973.
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Post last edited by Orphic Okapi on 07.27.2013, 01:20 PM.
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| 07.27.2013, 01:19 PM |
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leonbloy
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Nice review, thanks. Looking forward to see it -which will not be soon, I'm afraid.
My concerns about the movie are not on the ... let's say moral side (Miyazaki is sort of a saint to me, in the sense true artists are), rather on two things: one, how does Miyazaki develops and round-up the plot, say the last third of the script (he sometimes seems to not be sure about what to do with his material, and feels imprecedible; sometimes he is lucky and finds a nice track, sometimes not so much). Second: empathy with the characters, how lovable and human they feel; this is usually a strong point with Miyazaki - but in this case, I wonder...
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| 07.27.2013, 01:45 PM |
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saviour2012
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what a wonderful review orphic. really loved it.it flows really well but i needed a little bit patience as it was long. it needs to be a little short. long reviews dont tend catch great attention in IMDb. Now please dont say you did not write it on that purpose and ignore to post it there.we are doing a little ghibli advertisement here right.
one thing you have to declare any spoilers or they will ban you
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Watch everything but only take the good things from it
Ask, think and learn. Because the more we know the more we grow.
Watching the wrong to happen is the same as commiting the wrong.
If it looks like things are forcing you to be creative, Then be creative.
its a uniquely Miyazaki film, one only he could make and its uniqueness places it beyond being easily critiqued.[About Porco Rosso]
taken from a quote of Saddletank and Orphic Okapi
Post last edited by saviour2012 on 07.27.2013, 02:04 PM.
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| 07.27.2013, 02:00 PM |
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San Toelle Ul Shichikokuyama-g
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| 07.27.2013, 04:39 PM |
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Orphic Okapi
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Actually the reason I did not post that version is that it's live, not the studio recording. So it's not the version you hear in the movie. Still a great song, though.
quote:
My concerns about the movie are not on the ... let's say moral side (Miyazaki is sort of a saint to me, in the sense true artists are), rather on two things: one, how does Miyazaki develops and round-up the plot, say the last third of the script (he sometimes seems to not be sure about what to do with his material, and feels imprecedible; sometimes he is lucky and finds a nice track, sometimes not so much). Second: empathy with the characters, how lovable and human they feel; this is usually a strong point with Miyazaki - but in this case, I wonder...
You needn't worry about point two, I don't think. As for point one: I did feel that the ending was slightly weak. It did not really have the impact I was expecting. I don't know if this is Miyazaki's fault so much as a direct consequence of the material itself; the type of story he's telling does not lend itself to climax, really. It's not that he doesn't know what to do with the story, it's that there's really only one thing to do with the story (have Jiro finish his Zero Fighter) and it happens, and that's that. Everything reaches its logical conclusion, but it did not feel entirely satisfying to me, maybe due to the rather matter-of-fact way in which it concludes.
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Post last edited by Orphic Okapi on 07.27.2013, 06:01 PM.
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| 07.27.2013, 05:59 PM |
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Koda
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I can't wait to see this, it will be some time though until it is realised here in England.
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| 07.28.2013, 05:40 AM |
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arren18
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And I imagine I'll be too late when I get to Japan... Orphic, I don't suppose you have any idea of how quickly things tend to go to DVD in Japan?
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| 07.28.2013, 07:41 PM |
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saviour2012
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roar know about it. bluray is just amazingly better for anime specially ghibli movies. dvd is old now still many of us do not have a bluray player. i wanted to buy one but it is so pricey
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Watch everything but only take the good things from it
Ask, think and learn. Because the more we know the more we grow.
Watching the wrong to happen is the same as commiting the wrong.
If it looks like things are forcing you to be creative, Then be creative.
its a uniquely Miyazaki film, one only he could make and its uniqueness places it beyond being easily critiqued.[About Porco Rosso]
taken from a quote of Saddletank and Orphic Okapi
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| 07.29.2013, 12:50 AM |
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Roarkiller
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quote:
Originally posted by arren18
And I imagine I'll be too late when I get to Japan... Orphic, I don't suppose you have any idea of how quickly things tend to go to DVD in Japan?
Six months, usually.
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quote:
Originally posted by fenkashi
Screw your opinions, they are not relevant ^^.
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| 07.29.2013, 10:59 PM |
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Orphic Okapi
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Yeah, the research I've done points to anywhere between three and nine months, with six being the average. With a high profile release like this, I highly doubt it would take any longer than six.
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Post last edited by Orphic Okapi on 07.29.2013, 11:25 PM.
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| 07.29.2013, 11:25 PM |
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