Slashdot Mirror
Miyazaki's 'Spirited Away' Wins Best Animated Picture
DavidBrown writes "Moments ago, Hayao Miyazaki won the Best Animated Picture award for 'Spirited Away.' It's about time."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Exactly. I wish these american marketing people would realize there is a real market for widely-appealing anime such as this, and not just to hardcore otaku. If feature-film anime had serious marketing in america, maybe everyone would realize its not just "one of them there japanese cartoons". Maybe miyazaki's next hit movie will have a better reception here.
Sorry, I submitted this post, so I guess I'm responsible. It's significant not just because it's recognition of Hayao Miyazaki and his body of work (Nausicaa, Porco Rosso, Cagliostro's Castle, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, Kiki's Delivery Service, etc.), it's also an historic Hollywood recognition of Anime as an art form. This is the first time that any Anime has won an Oscar - and it was up against "Ice Age", a CG wonder, and two Disney films, "Treasure Planet" and "Lilo and Stitch".
It's also recognition that animated films don't have to be musicals for children in the Disney style.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
I'm not pissed off that he is against the war. First of all, his comments were inappropriate for the Academy Awards... it's not the time to get up on your soapbox. Second, to say that we live in "Fictious times" while there is a very real war going on is sickening. People are over in Iraq dying and he's ranting from his safe little place on stage in California. All he had to say was "Support our troops, bring them home."
Finally, what is really interesting is that he is against something whose end result might give the same freedom he just exercised to millions of people who haven't had that freedom in more than 24 years.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
You are taking a basic, generic thesis--the capitalist west encroaches on some native populace, seduces it, which causes it to lose its soul. Sure, this is a common story that can be applied to many places throughout the world.
But not here.
Perhaps more than any other country that I know Japan has done a credible job of managing a harmonious coexistance of traditional culture with an international one. Notions that the west introduced capitalism to japan is bullshit. While arguably democracy (or something close enough to it) didn't come to japan until after the war, Japan developed a parallel capitalist culture along the lines of that of western europe regardless of the dutch, perry, or whoever else you want to point to.
The japanese have famously "embraced and extended" outside technologies, but have not done it at the expense of their cultural soul as, say, Shanghai or Jakarta is in the process of doing. Japanese culture is alive and well, and we have no particular need to sympathize with the Japanese for the reasons you suggest. The movie might be interpreted as a reminder to japanese to be mindful of the importance of traditional values, but your suggestion that it is an apt allegory for the japanese condition as pitiful victim of the west is absolute and total nonsense.
(disclaimer: 10 years lived in japan, saw movie in both languages, etc.)