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My Neighbor Totoro and Ebert
peter_gzowski writes "Well known film critic and closet otaku, Roger Ebert, has a bi-weekly segment on his website where he reminisces about the greatest films of all time (in his opinion, anyway). The most recent installment covers My Neighbor Totoro. This is the second anime to make the list, joining Grave of the Fireflies. For those unfamiliar, Totoro is a film by anime master Hayao Miyazaki, the man behind Princess Mononoke, amoung many other great films (Castle of Cagliostro being my favorite)."
Always pleased to see anime get more mainsream cred. And Miyazaki always deserves it.
Ahem.
So you think panty flashes of little girls in ADULT movies is ok, and in kids movies its perverse. Hmmmm...me thinks you got this one backwards. And why in hell did soeone uptick your comment? Sheez
How about Princess Mononoke? It's a great example of the genre and I enjoyed watching it very much. It has many of the tried and true anime cliches along with a rather unique and warm hearted storyline. It's almost worth seeing for the forest spirits, or 'maraca headed guys' like my friends and I who've seen it call them. I would go so far as to say that Princess Mononuke is to most anime what Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is to most kung foo movies. So, for what it's worth, I highly recommend Princess Mononuke because it stands on it's own as a great animated film.
I dont' know what flamebait is, and what it is not. I always feel a good debate is relevant, and that flaming can be artistic, as when William Buckley and Gore Vidal go at it, or Alex Cockburn and Chris Hitchens.
Let me instead address a couple of small points here, in hopes the poster really wanted some insights, rather than merely rhetorical venting only (which is their right, of course).
1. "Then I grew up." Well, being what I consider a sorcerer (in the Alan Moore/Grant Morrison sense of the term, or if you like, the Evrett/Wheeler/Graham model, grin), I think it is crucial to make distinction between childish and child-like behaviours. I would hope to lose the former, and never, even at teh advanced age of 48 here, ever, lose the child-like wonder and magick I still find when I visit the worlds of Kiki and Totoro and yeah, even Pooh. Those are nice worlds, utopian, and we maybe ought to try to make OUR world more like them. As to showing these things, as Goedel says, when we show things as they ARE, we make them LEss than they are.
2. AS to the xenophobic views, and the hideous work till you drop culture, i am in accord with disagreement with those values. However, and this puzzles me, the anime I speak of, Kiki's Delivery Service and Totoro, say, seem to me to teach toleration, tolerance, and the value of dolce fa niente, to mix cultural metaphors.
3. Use that energy to create? Yes...and no. By all means anyone who ONLY consumes and does not create is not doing all they could be doing to make our world better and more aesthetic. However, what good is a gift with no recipient, as my sifu would say? We must each be both creator and audience, in our turns, so that we may all make magick, and all EXPERIENCE it from others, and thereby inspire and draw inspiration by turns.
4. Obsession. By all means, anyone who obsesses about anything needs to broaden their horizons. HOwever, I would forgive obsession with sweet utopian benign materials before i would forgive obsession with vindictive acts, for example. Triage sir, triage!
Thank you for this forum. I am aware that the internet is a place for flaming and debate, and I love those. But I also love discourse of a gentlemanly and noblesse oblige nature. I hope that some of these observations might engnder some reasonabl replies, or rebuttles, as well as any flames. Thanks again, Zanvil
Alot of people are going to think that you are starting a flamewar. Some people get way too fanatical about anime. Being someone who likes *some* anime, I can find a few problems with your conclusions.
In order to cast vague generalizations, you must meet some criteria. Namely, that you have watched every single anime ever made. As this is unrealistic (and a waste of time) I'm going to prove by counterexample.
Another thing to keep in mind; just like in North America, some shows just suck. Will people still make the effort to bring sucky shows from Japan to North America? Yes. In fact, several animation translation firms have made alot of money doing this. *cough*animego*cough* *cough*disney*cough* *cough*vizvideo*cough*
Reductio ad absurdum:
1) Bad stories
My Neighbour Totoro doesn't even have a story. Or conflict. In fact, it's aimed at people about 6 years old, and is just a strange sequence of random events.
2) Bad animation, jerkiness with poor color composition
This is not true of all anime. For example, Cowboy Bebop had some of the nicest artwork and detail I've seen in years. Macross Plus is also up there.
3) Bad translations of
If you're watching it with english dialog, yeah. If you're willing to read subtitles, the translation quality will typically increase several times.
4) Bad dialogue
Some things simply can't be translated from Japanese to English. Having studied the language formally for a year, I can sometimes see when the English translation just doesn't cut it. Also, if the anime is geared at 10-year-olds, odds are it will sound lame in any language.
5) A bunch of people OBSESSED with this shit to a sickening point.
I hear that! I'm so sick to death of people whining about how much money they don't have because they *MUST* go to convention Y and spend $5,000,000 on trinkets. Let's get some perspective here.
And for all those posts in this thread that start with "Wai! Wai!"... YOU ARE NOT JAPANESE! STOP FOOLING YOURSELF. SAYING STUPID THINGS DOES NOT MAKE YOU JAPANESE. YOU WILL NEVER BE JAPANESE.
"Nobody should enjoy WATCHING something that much, you should save your fanaticism for creating things."
Agreed. In the last week, I've watched about half an hour of TV. In the past year, I don't think I've topped 24 hours. It's amazing how much more I can accomplish when I'm not tied to the idiot box.
I await the flames.
Beware TPB
I recommend these titles:
- Princess Mononoke
- My neighbour Totoro
- Grave of the fireflies
- Kiki's Delivery Service
- Ghost in the Shell
- Akira
These titles cover vastly different topics, are all characterized by wonderful animation and, IMHO of real artistic value.
In addition, you might find interesting some of the following titles:
- Some of the Galaxy 999 movies
- Porco Rosso
- Cagliostro's castle
I'm sure I omitted soe great representative of the anime scene. These are good pointers, though. The first list is warmly recommended.
mario
I will agree that anime stories tend to be confusing to the point of torture or nonexistent.
Although, when an anime story is written clearly, I believe it is usually experience I cannot find anywhere else. That is why I watch anime. The good anime usually overflows with creative and imaginative characters and environments.
I see you are a fan of the classic Warner Brothers cartoons. I remember when they were xenophobic and sometimes blatantly hateful to minorities. I remember for a time there was a stereotypical Aunt Jemima type character in Tom and Jerry.
I do agree that some Japanese need to improve on there veiw of the gaijin, but you cannot generalize the Japanese people based on your closed minded views.
Also the jerkiness is not necessarily a bad thing. The anime style is cheaper to make than the american style.
haahaa .. yes, fanatics of any sort are scary. i fear the rabid sports fanatic, who will paint their face and trudge through the snow to scream at the refs who must be blind. i fear the computer geek who rabidly defends any os / company, because everything has flaws. i fear the psychotic fan of any tv show / movie / author / director, for not being able to see that there are other things in life. rabid fans of anything are limiting their views on life. there is value in almost anything, if you take the time to look for it.
So... Little girls showing thier underpants is unusual? I reckon you don't have any daughters then. ;)
Seriously, I don't think it was meant as any kind of a turn-on, just as cute realism.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Always watch Anime in Japanese with subtitles instead of listening to dubs into English. This isn't snobbery, it's just that the American voice actors just read the script placed in front of the them and never, never, never bother to understand the meaning that script. Even when the script they're given is good, the actors do everything wrong.
Part of the problem is that Japan, like much of the world, has years of experience dubing English shows into Japanese and so they have wonderful voice actors, while we, in our English-only isolation, have no need for good voice actors. Another problem is that the dubbing is usually done by very small companies on the cheap. They just shovel stuff onto a DVD and release it.
I've also noticed that learning a little bit of a language can add a lot to watching a foriegn movie, because there are lots of words that don't really translate at all. If you enjoy Anime it's worth while getting a Japanese dictionary.
Rocky J. Squirrel