FunBlog

Studio Ghibli is the most prestigious of all anime studios. A small studio founded by acclaimed director Hayao Miyazaki, it primarily does theatrical movies with clever, original screenplays and top-quality animation. Disney has an exclusive deal to import these movies and usually gives them a limited theatrical run.

I can’t say for sure that every Studio Ghibli movie is worth watching, since I haven’t seen all of them, but I’ve been pleased with all the ones that I have watched (and someday I’ll get around to reviewing all of them.)

Whisper of the Heart is one of the less known Studio Ghibli films. It’s a small, simple story, but just about perfectly executed. It could hardly be simpler: a teenaged girl finds her ideal boyfriend, then learns that he is about to move out of the country, and she has to decide how she is going to deal with that. And that’s it; no battles, no explosions, no monsters, not even any magic.

Or maybe there is some magic. (That cat sure looks like he knows more than he’s saying.) Let’s just say that everything has a possible rational explanation. Perhaps the real point is that the heroine has the ability to see the magic underlying ordinary life.

I can’t help comparing this to Revolutionary Road, the last movie I reviewed, not because they are similar but because they are opposites. Revolutionary Road explores the dangers of not having a dream (while thinking that you do.) Whisper of the Heart is about what it really means to have a dream.
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I’m giving this movie a cautious recommendation because it is well-written, well-acted and thought-provoking. The reason for caution is that it requires spending 119 minutes with some very unlikeable characters.

Revolutionary Road is the story of an unhappy couple living in a Connecticut suburb in the 1950s. At first it looks like a standard Hollywood condemnation of suburban life, but it quickly becomes clear that in this case the suburbs did not make these people unhappy; they brought their unhappiness with them.

I remember reading about a sixth-grade class whose members all said they wanted to be “celebrities” when they grew up, but none of them were able to explain what they planned to do to become famous. Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the grown-up version of one of these kids. He has always talked a good line about wanting to live an unconventional, exciting life, but at age 30 he finds himself living in a boring suburb and working at an office job that he hates. He has no idea what else he might want to do with his life, but he has a vague disgruntled feeling that he is better than his vapid neighbors and annoying coworkers.

His wife April (Kate Winslet) had a more specific dream: she wanted to be an actress. However she has been forced to confront the fact that she has no talent and no future in acting. She and Frank deal with their disillusionment by tearing each other apart and making each other miserable.

(Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, eh? Is this how they would have ended up if the Titanic hadn’t sunk?)
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For an arthouse film that isn’t in many mainstream theaters, Slumdog Millionaire has been getting a lot of buzz and picking up a lot of awards. It’s pretty well done, but if you go in expecting an upbeat feel-good picture you may be in for a bit of a shock, since most of it is surprisingly dark and gritty.

Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) is a contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. He is one question away from winning the big 20M rupee prize when he is arrested on suspicion of cheating. The police try to beat a confession out of him, replaying each question in turn and challenging him to explain how he could possibly have known the answer. For each question there is a flashback to his experiences growing up in the slums of Mumbai. At some point in each story is a incident that caused him to know the answer.

It becomes clear that his real motivation for going on the show is not the money. He want to be reunited with his childhood sweetheart Latika (Freida Pinto).

There is a fair amount of humor in the flashbacks, but mostly they are very grim, depicting a world of extreme poverty, violence and cruelty. Some Indians have protested this depiction of their country. (It doesn’t help that this is a British production, though filmed in India with Indian actors.) Still it’s probably fair to say that most of the things depicted in the movie really do happen.

Crunchyroll.com has a checkered history. It started out as a pirate video site that featured unauthorized anime fansubs. Then, a few months ago, it went legit. It now offers only anime that it has properly licensed from the Japanese content owners or their American licensees. As such it may represent the future of the anime market outside of Japan, at least for the many shows that are not blockbusters. Internet distribution is cheaper than television broadcasting or shipping DVDs, and thus seems a more practical way to distribute shows to a niche audience. It also allows shows to made available soon after they are broadcast in Japan, which in theory should eliminate the main reason for the existence of fansubs.

Of the shows they have licensed, Shugo Chara! is the one that interests me most. It is a traditional magical girl story with a fresh new twist–possibly the funniest series of 2008 and certainly the cutest.

Some people have compared this show to Card Captor Sakura. I don’t think it’s quite that good. It doesn’t have the same kind of meticulous plotting or multi-layered subtlety, and it sometimes feels padded. However its wit, charm and enthusiasm make it constantly entertaining.
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Writing in Slate Emily Bazelon describes how her children were frightened by the 3-D animated movie The Tale of Despereaux and wonders how to determine if a movie is to intense for a small child. Clearly a “G” rating is no guarantee.

This strikes a chord with me. Regular readers know that I always include a “Parental Guidance” section in my anime reviews, and I sometimes include similar notes in my short movie reviews. I do this because of some experiences that convinced me that this is important.

I remember taking my daughter to see Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when she was 5 years old. She watched the movie in rigid silence and afterward said that she liked it, in a tone that didn’t sound very convinced. Years later she admitted that the movie terrified her. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. Snow White, after all, is basically a story about infanticide. You can sort of see why a small child might have a problem with that.
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This movie shines from a technical standpoint, with competent acting and advanced makeup and special effects, yet as a story it leaves me cold.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, very loosely adapted from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, tells the story of a man who is born old and ages backwards, growing younger as time passes. Part of the problem with this is that we know from the start pretty much how this has to turn out, and indeed it is all very predictable. Worse, while there are many colorful characters, none of them really came alive for me. They are all stock characters that we have seen many times before.

The whole thing seems like a tall tale, and it might have worked well at that level, but a good tall tale is generally short and witty. Fitzgerald was wise to make it a short story. The movie, at 2 hours and 40 minutes, wants to be an epic, and it drags as we wait impatiently for the next predictable stage in the hero’s life.