Word: princesses
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...back in the '80s the filmmaker contented himself with kids' movies that were both simple and sophisticated. Laputa: Castle in the Sky, about a pair of orphans in pursuit of a floating island; My Neighbor Totoro, where two girl meet forest spirits more domesticated than the ones in Princess Mononoke; and Kiki's Delivery Service, with a 13-year-old witch starting her own business. Those movies, which in their Disney DVD versions have diverted many an American child, prove that Miyazaki is more than a giant brain hatching grand schemes. At heart...
...States next year, is a parable for children, and they're entitled to the gift of hope. Besides, it's the genius of anime deity Hayao Miyazaki, the movie's writer-director, to create elemental images more wondrous than alarming - whether they're the forest demons of Princess Mononoke or the the bathhouse ghosts who transform the heroine's parents into pigs in Spirited Away. In Miyazaki's fantasy realm, people, even his putative villains, are less likely to be destroyed than transformed...
...Princess Mononoke (1997) and Spirited Away (2001) were enormous hits at home: the first becoming the all-time box-office winner in Japan, until it was overtaken by Titanic; the second breaking that record and remaining the country's top grosser today. Those were also the first of Miyazaki's movies to receive a wide theatrical release in North America. So U.S. audiences know him from those films, and from the 2004 Howl's Moving Castle, whose characters (and their dwellings and vehicles) seemed to spring from the mind of Joel Hodgson's Gizmonics Institute. People who hadn't seen...
...While computers are sometimes used - digital paint was employed in Princess Mononoke, for example - the essence if not the entirety of a Studio Ghibli film still consists of Miyazaki personally putting pen to paper. His latest fairytale, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, which grossed over $91 million in the first month of its Japan release, was done entirely by hand. The power of this as a means of differentiating Studio Ghibli's work from other animation houses cannot be overstated. Characters and story lines, too, are seemingly inimitable. "The Ghibli working style is possible because of Miyazaki," says...
...there as a lush forest drawn from high above, with blocks of clouds marked A to D - an instruction to the assembly line to animate them in that sequence, at a speed carefully specified on one of the clouds. In another layout, the camera swoops before Ashitaka from Princess Mononoke as he gallantly draws a bow at his enemies while riding a giant antelope. The image falls somewhere between reality and magic, which was probably the intention. "There is reality in the fantasy created by Studio Ghibli," says Ryusuke Hikawa, an animé critic for over three decades. "But their...