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Can Hayao Miyazaki Save Disney's Soul?
IronicGrin writes "Even hard-core House of Mouse apologists have to admit that Disney's Feature Animation division has lost its way. After a half decade of pathetic failures (Atlantis) and epic disasters (Treasure Planet), the company shut its fabled Orlando 2D animation studios last year and announced that it was jumping on the computer animation bandwagon. A big motivation for the move to CGI was, of course, the Magic Kingdom's tenuous relationship with Pixar--the source of all of Disney's recent animated hits. But Disney is overlooking a better example of just what its toon team has been doing wrong...right under its nose.
Howl's Moving Castle, which opened this weekend to rapturous critical acclaim, is the third masterpiece from Japan's Studio Ghibli that Disney has released theatrically. Today's New York Times has a feature by A.O. Scott [reg required, blah blah] calling Miyazaki the "world's greatest living animated-filmmaker"; meanwhile, last Thursday, I wrote a column for SFGate.com on why Disney animation, 3D rendered or not, is doomed to irrelevance if it fails to (re)learn some basic lessons from Miyazaki and his cohorts at Ghibli. What do you think? Is Disney destined to fade to black, or can a little Ghibli flavor (mmm....Ghibli) get it back on track?"
usually means some pretentious quasi intellectual twats love it and the general public will hate it.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I concur. Fuck Disney.
Don't get me wrong - the animation quality of his films clearly beats everything else in the world hands down, he's got tons of imagination, the critics love him, and he's an institution in Japan. But his storytelling style is dull. Far too often his films go like this:
1) Protagonist(s) go somewhere they've never been before
2) Various unrelated showy magical stuff happens
3) The end
In other words there's little continuity or focus, and the storyline merely serves the visuals. I'm looking at you, Spirited Away, Totoro, and Kiki's Delivery Service. Such would appear to be the case with Howl's moving castle. Alternately, it's beat-you-over-the-head ecological fable (Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa).
Now that's not to say I haven't seen Miyazaki films that I liked - Castle in the Sky was a superior film, Castle of Cagliostro was the best of Lupin, and Porco Rosso had a sort of classic European feel to it. The trouble is the critics always go ga-ga over the visuals regardless of the other fundamentals (as they used to and still sometimes do for American blockbusters). So I'll be seeing Howl in the theaters, but I won't be recommending it to anybody until I do.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
...trotting out the rotting cadavers of cartoon characters ages old.
They need to fire their CEO and board, close the parks, fire all of the "political agenda" writers and start over as an animation company. Outsourcing talent from Japan or Pixar will not improve their game.