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Archive for the ‘ANIMATION’ Category

The Wind Rises

07 Apr

The Wind Rises – created by Hayao Miyazaki. Animated BioDrama. 126 minutes Color 2013.

★★★★★

The Story: From the time he was a boy, Jiro Horikoshi desired to design airplanes, and after a long apprentice and during a long romance, he eventually designed the Mitsubishi  A5M and then the Zero.

~

Well, this renowned animator takes us along by the allure of his cells and scenes, as we wait for the next and the next, each one as satisfying and striking and telling as the one we have just seen. What’s next? What’s to come?

It is the biography of a rather naïve male, who never gives up his quest, and in that quest has no obstacles except the material ones of an industry starting from nothing and with nothing. Cloth planes, no design foundation, the want of proper engineering.

Miyazaki show us is all the angles and the experiences of a young man who, like David Copperfield, is the blank outline in which we may place ourselves to endure the drama, the waiting, and the love affair.

He gives his Japanese hero and heroine curly hair and large round eyes, so they never quite look Japanese. They are faceless creatures, and we recognize Jiro mainly because his white suits are often tinted lavender. He would be vapid, save that he is defined by what he does, and so we enter into him, not as a character, but as a role enacting a story.

But the startling crowd scenes, the remarkable air shots, the crazy planes invented around him give me enough entertainment to beguile me along. I do not feel a thing is missing. Indeed, I have never seen such intricate splendor.

The vast politesse of the Japanese is demonstrated for me also. Because the film is animated, I can witness this aspect of Jiro and the Japanese character and cultural style. I can see the good of the bowing, the waiting, the respect, the formality. I can see the human usefulness of it.

I recommend this film as an uncommon pleasure.

 

 

 

Animal Farm

04 Mar

Animal Farm — directed by John Stephenson — Allegory. The animals on an English farm revolt against their revolting owners.  91 minutes Color 1999

* * * *

Expecting nothing, I was more bemused by the curious real-life animation of the animals than by the story told or the characters shown. I learned from the Extra Features that it was all done with animals made from robots, who moved, who spoke, and who even drooled. They looked so like real animals to me that I did not believe them for a minute. However, we have Pete Postlethwaite playing the main character, the drunken farmer (Nicholas II), an actor who always presents an ambiguity by his very presence and nature. He also plays one of the animals, and his fellow beasts are played by Peter Ustinov as Old Major, the mentor pig, Patrick Stewart as the loathed Napoleon, Ian Holm as Squealer, Julia Ormond as the little Collie Jesse, Paul Scofield as the dumb but noble Clydesdale, and Kelsey Grammer as the hero pig, Snowball. We are watching the Russian Revolution played out on a lower-mammalian level, just to illustrate to us that the actual personages, Trotsky (Snowball) Stalin (Napoleon) and Squealer (Beria, the head of the NKVD) are as we always knew them to be: dangerous weaklings. As an allegory we are also faced with the main allegorical pattern: revolutionaries become debauched, and the early ideals float away down the gutter. And there is something to be said for that view, as we watch, wonderfully, events in Egypt and Libya, Of course, the demagogues overthrown in those countries also were revolutionaries in their day. In this version, we have hope at the end, but the material is really probably better handled, although handled no differently by Marlon Brando, Mildred Dunnock, Jean Peters, Anthony Quinn, and Joseph Wiseman in Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata.

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James And The GIant Peach

15 Feb

James And The Giant Peach – directed by Henry Selick – Fantasy Fairy Tale. A ten-year-old boy desires to escape from his ghastly aunts. 79 minutes Color 1996.

* * * * *

Miriam Margolyes and the great Joanna Lumley play the venomous aunts in the live-action portion of the picture, the usual Disney horrible relatives which we all have. This story is a male version of Cinderella. In this case the little boy is worked like a slave by the wicked women, but salvation comes in the person a fairy godfather, played in the tattered uniform of a Napoleonic soldier by Pete Postlethwaite, a wonderful choice for the role, because you don’t know whether this is a poison pirate or a putative parent. For the pumpkin, which is the vehicle of salvation, we have a fruit of similar hue, a giant peach. Within this vessel and in animation now, our hero, well played by Paul Terry, is transported to The Ball, which in this male version is, of course, The Big Apple, a different sort of ball than a ball. He is accompanied by a gaggle of bugs: a centipede from The Bronx voiced by Richard Dreyfus, a seductive spider played by Susan Sarandon, Jane Leeves as Mrs Ladybug, Simon Callow magisterial as Sir Grasshopper, and David Thewlis voicing the Earthworm. They provide us with some merry songs and witty entertainment.  Whereas Cinderella is an important tale of sexual selection by a female assisted by no one, James And The Giant Peach, its male version, is the story of a resourceful boy headed for the commercial headquarters of the modern world and assisted by many. Make of that what you will, the piece is fine for anyone of any age, provided you are not a ten year-old boy who might take it to represent something true.

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