"It's a Small Film After All..."

This week has blessed me with two ideas for The Whitly-Verse. The first ties into Mulan, as it was revealed that Disney would stop releasing physical media of their movies. While this frustrates me, I won’t discuss it today. Instead, I’d like to focus on something different. Let’s talk about the most-recent video from YouTuber The Royal Ocean Film Society.

I’ve been a fan of this channel for some time. Ever since the video on the late-Isao Takahata, I’ve appreciated its slick, clean and well-polished/delivered style. The channel reminds me of Tony Zhou’s Every Frame a Painting series, except if it hadn’t disappeared after a controversial video on MCU music. I’d recommend giving the channel a look if you haven’t already. Seriously, you won’t regret it.

Anyway, the creator of the channel recently posted a video on Christopher Nolan and his decent into the same pit David Lean was in at the end of his career. He argued that Nolan’s desire to be bigger and grander with each new film hurts his writing, and that he wishes he’d go back to the smaller, more intimate style of The Prestige. It’s an interesting sentiment, but I think that “smaller = better”, while nice in theory, isn’t necessarily true. And nowhere can that be seen then with another filmmaker: Hayao Miyazaki.

I love Hayao Miyazaki’s work. His views aside, the man’s made 11 films to-date, and all of them, even his lesser ones, are classics. He’s been compared to Walt Disney and Steven Spielberg routinely, and with good cause: he captures the youthful exuberance both were famous for in their heydays, and all while appealing to adults. Still, while I love Miyazaki’s films, his filmography stands as a counterargument to The Royal Ocean Film Society. More specifically, it’s a counterargument because of Howl’s Moving Castle and Ponyo. 

Howl’s Moving Castle, based on the books by Diana Wynne Jones, tells the tale of a modest and insecure hatter, named Sophie, who’s cursed by a witch to be an old woman after she meets a wizard named Howl. Desperate to break the curse, Sophie travels to find Howl’s mysterious castle. Once there, she discovers that it’s run by a fire demon named Calcifer. Calcifer agrees to help Sophie on the condition that she helps him in return, so she becomes a cleaning lady to get on Howl’s good side. Through a series of shenanigans, Sophie and Howl uncover a plan to prolong the war with a neighbouring kingdom, connect to Howl’s lost youth and fall in love.

I’ve made no secret my thoughts on this movie. Despite excellent sound design, dubbing, music by Joe Hisaishi and animation, the story’s all-over. It takes forever to get going, longer to be interesting and even longer to arrive at its point. At under two hours in length, it feels too long with not enough meaningful content. Instead, we’re greeted with shenanigans, aimless side-threads, some red herrings and a clumsy, anti-war message that Miyazaki’s stated was a commentary on The US invasion of Iraq. I still enjoy it, but my frustrations can be summed up by the late-Roger Ebert’s Rotten Tomatoes summary:

“A parade of weird characters comes onstage to do their turns, but the underlying plot grows murky and, amazingly for a Miyazaki film, we grow impatient at spectacle without meaning.”

(FYI, he gave the movie a 2.5/4 review.) 

It’s worth noting that the film received solid reviews. Especially from fans, who regularly cite it as one of their favourites from Miyazaki. But there’s no denying the grandness of the film hurts it. Howl’s Moving Castle’s a big story with big ideas on a big scale. It has lots to say about war, fate and love, yet juggles everything so haphazardly that it’s a chore to watch. This is Hayao Miyazaki’s big spectacle movie where the story falters. So why do I think its existence contradicts The Royal Ocean Film Society?

Because of Ponyo.

I was skeptical going into Ponyo. Whereas Howl’s Moving Castle was one of the first Miyazaki movies I’d watched, Ponyo was one of the last, and my frustrations with the former film made me nervous about the latter; after all, Ponyo was his most-recent film at the time. Surely Miyazaki had run out of steam, right? Nope!

Ponyo’s about a magical fish who escapes her underwater kingdom and gets trapped in a bottle. She winds up outside the house of a young boy named Sosuke, who develops a bond with her before she’s snatched away by her father, Fujimoto. However, said fish, now named Ponyo, decides she doesn’t want to be with Fujimoto, so she escapes and comes back to Sosuke as a human. Ultimately, Fujimoto’s forced to let his daughter go if it means restoring balance, which has been messed with because of Ponyo’s escape. 

Ponyo should fit the bill of “smaller = better”. It’s the smallest-scale film Miyazaki’s done since Porco Rosso, and I think it works for that reason. The story, while going slightly off-the-rails in the second-half, is easier to grasp, and its characters are really simple. Even its animation and music are bare-bones, going with a “children’s colouring book” aesthetic to compliment Joe Hisaishi’s operatic score. This, theoretically, should be a better-received film. Yet while its critical praise is higher than Howl’s Moving Castle, something I agree with, audience members were less-impressed. To quote one Super Reviewer on Rotten Tomatoes:

“What really annoys me is despite how crazy, unusual, and magical all of the events of the movie are, no one seems to even give a shit.”

This is among the many issues detractors lob at the film: it’s too childish. Its characters are apathetic. It’s too weird. Ponyo’s annoying. I don’t agree with any of these, but it goes to show that smaller =/= better with filmmaking.

I’d be remiss if I called Howl’s Moving Castle “bad”. It’s not. It’s not even my least-favourite Miyazaki movie; that honour belongs to Porco Rosso. But the disconnect with Howl’s Moving Castle and Ponyo should demonstrate that The Royal Ocean Film Society’s thesis has a gaping hole in it. Or maybe I’m being overly-critical? 

Either way, it’s an excellent video from an excellent channel. It’s too bad the video discussed Christopher Nolan, though, especially given the news about Tenet!