Rating: B-
Dir: Hayao Miyazaki
Star (voice): Soma Santoki, Masaki Suda, Kô Shibasaki, Aimyon
It’s been a while. The last Miyazaki film I wrote about was Howl’s Moving Castle, close to twenty years ago. I skipped Ponyo, because I hated the design of the fish characters and The Wind Rises just fell through the cracks. So here we are, with what might well be the director’s last feature. Sure, he’s retired more often than Ric Flair, but his eighty-fourth birthday was yesterday, and animation is such a labour-intensive process. Enjoy it while you can, because when Miyazaki goes, it may well be the end of hand-drawn cel animation as a large-scale art-form. There’s still nothing like it though, and every frame of this is a treat to look at.
This takes place in the latter stages of World War II, after Mahito Maki (Santoki) loses his mother in a fire. His father quickly remarries his late wife’s sister, Natsuko – I guess this was a thing? – and they move to her estate in the country. There, Mahito encounters a weird, talking heron (Suda) and after seeing Natsuko going into the forest, he follows, hoping to be re-united with his late mother. But he instead ending up in a bizarre world whose inhabitants include giant parakeets and other… things which, frankly, resemble the Adipose from Doctor Who. This world is ruled over – I guess “maintained by” is closer – by a wizard, who is Mahito’s grand-uncle and is seeking a heir to continue his work.
There’s a lot of other stuff going on, and that might be the biggest problem here: even at more than two hours, this feels overstuffed with imagination. To me, the best Miyazaki films are the simplest ones, like My Neighbour Totoro. Even the ones which are epic in scope, like Laputa: Castle in the Sky or Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, have a clear and well-established plot. This feels more like a breathless cross between Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, created by putting both books through a shredder, then filming the results. When I have to resort to reading the Wikipedia page for the film, to try and figure out what it’s about… Yeah, I think there’s an issue, and it might not be me.
Visually spectacular though it is, often to a jaw-dropping degree, this comes at the cost of emotional resonance. I never particularly cared for Mahito, in the same way as other young Miyazaki heroes and heroines. The relationship with his aunt/foster mother seems an unusual one, and his willingness to waltz off into the underworld with a talking heron as a (quickly discarded) guide is equally odd. It I’ve a feeling nobody is going to argue with Miyazaki, and I absolutely understand why. This man is the greatest animator who ever lived, and deserves to be indulged while we can. However, I’ve a feeling the gap between this and Francis Ford Coppola’s similarly “personal” project, Megalopolis, may be smaller than is comfortable.