FunBlog

At the moment it seems that the two most popular posts on this blog are the ones about how to pick up subtle points that don’t survive the translation to anime subtitles–even if you don’t understand Japanese (Japanese Honorifics in Anime and Japanese Family Titles in Anime.) So here are my notes on Japanese pronouns [1], which also can convey a lot of information about the characters in ways that are not easy to include in the subtitles. Once again, this will probably seem very elementary to long-term anime fans, or to anyone who actually speaks Japanese.
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In 1999 Studio Ghibli was approached by the owners of a theme park who wanted a 20 minute animated short subject featuring cats. Hayao Miyazaki thought it should feature the cat characters from the movie Whisper of the Heart, so he went to Aoi Hiiragi, the author of the original manga, and asked her to write the story. She did, and it was eventually published as a manga called BARON: Neko no Danshaku (Baron: The Cat Baron).

However the deal with the amusement park fell through, so plans to make the anime were put on hold. Miyazaki, who was trying to nurture a new generation of anime directors, started to assign aspiring directors the task of drawing storyboards for the defunct “Cat Project”. A young artist named Hiroyuki Morita produced a massive set of storyboards that was so impressive that he was given the go-ahead to create a full-length movie.

The resulting movie is bound to interest any fan of Whisper of the Heart, even though it is not a sequel to that movie and the style is quite different. WOTH was a fairly realistic coming-of-age story, while this is a classic fairy tale. Aoi Hiiragi thinks of this as a story written by Shizuku, the heroine of the earlier movie, and that’s probably the best way to view it.
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Waltz with Bashir (Vals Im Bashir) is an interesting experiment: an animated documentary. It has received numerous awards and been nominated for the Foreign Language Oscar. While it is a fascinating effort, I found it ultimately unsatisfactory.

Writer/director Ari Folman hears an old friend tell of a recurring nightmare in which he is pursued by 26 vicious dogs. They decide that it must have something to do with his experiences during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which they both experienced as infantrymen in the Israeli army.

Folman realizes that he himself remembers almost nothing about the war, so he sets out to interview the other men who served with him to try to recreate what happened. As he interviews them their memories are shown in flashback sequences. The use of animation avoids one common issue with documentaries: there is no confusion about whether we are seeing actual footage of the events or staged re-enactments.
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Frost/Nixon is a semi-fictional account of an event of little historical importance: the 1977 televised interviews of Richard Nixon conducted by David Frost, a British talk-show host. As far as I know, the interviews didn’t reveal any facts that were not already known. Nixon did make a sort of half-hearted apology for his part in the Watergate scandal, but I doubt anyone today really cares whether he apologized or not.

The movie succeeds however as a compelling psychological drama, a sort of duel between two driven, flawed men.

Frank Langella dominates the film with his portrayal of Richard Nixon as a smart, wily and ruthless man whose confident demeanor barely conceals a boiling cauldron of resentment and feelings of inferiority. This is an introverted, socially awkward man who has struggled all his life to fit in and be liked, but whose efforts at cordiality and humor still tend to make people wince. The fact that a man with such handicaps could ever have become President is evidence of his talent and determination. Now disgraced and exiled to his villa in San Clemente, he is still surrounded by a small group of loyal followers who assure him that he was unfairly treated.

David Frost (Michael Sheen) is a young, handsome, glib and charming man with an eye for the ladies. A successful talk show host in England and Australia, he has made a career of pitching softball questions to celebrities. Yet he also feels himself to be in exile. His American talk show was canceled and he longs to return to American show business, which he regards as the big time.

So Frost pays Nixon $600,000 (a huge sum for that time) to appear in series of television interviews. Because no network will touch the project, Frost ends up putting up most of the money himself, taking the responsibility to line up sponsors and sell it to television stations.

Aside from the money, Nixon is looking for a chance to present his side of the story and rebuild his reputation. He assumes that with a lightweight interviewer like Frost he will be able to dominate the interviews and make his case both to the American people and future historians.

But Frost knows that no one will want to watch a Nixon puff-piece. If he is to salvage his career and avoid financial ruin he will have to remake himself into a tough, prosecutorial interviewer who can hold Nixon’s feet to the fire, and symbolically hold him accountable for what he has done. Yet Nixon is an old hand at this sort of thing and Frost finds himself severely outmatched. As the interviews proceed, his upbeat facade becomes increasingly shaky.