Three Films Make A Post: "This is the story of the world's secret that only she and I know."

Weathering with You aka Tenki no ko (2019): This is certainly one of Makoto Shinkai’s lesser films. There’s always a fine line between being emotional and being emotionally manipulative when you like to go for heightened emotional stakes like Shinkai’s anime tend to do, and here, he’s sometimes stepping over that line into obvious attempts at pushing audience buttons. Particularly the last act is simply too melodramatic, so much so its emotional loudness hinders the emotional impact it could possess if it were only holding back a little.

That doesn’t mean this is a bad film. There are certainly quite a few moments of great beauty here, as well as some insight into the teenage psyche – it’s just that the film as a whole doesn’t come together as well as those Shinkai movies that surround it, a great director sometimes being his own worst enemy.

Hell Hole (2024): Whereas this shot in Serbia body horror monster comedy by the Adams Family (minus Zelda Adams) is a downright disappointment. Gone is nearly all of the personality of the family’s other films, the idiosyncratic yet/and awesome decisions to use the weirder approach whenever possible. Instead, we get what once would have been a middling SyFy Original, full of obvious jokes, lots of feet-dragging disguised as dialogue sequences, and very little else beyond the basic competence filmmakers in the lowest budget end acquire over time when they don’t give up.

I wouldn’t be complaining if this were actually a good traditional body horror monster movie with a bit of bite to it. Alas, it feels as if the filmmakers were just ticking boxes on a list of monster movie tropes.

Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters (2019): At times, Gilles Penso and Alexandre Poncet’s documentary about the great special effects artist Phil Tippett (whose creations certainly made my childhood as much more interesting as Ray Harryhausen’s did for Tippett) also feels a bit like the directors are ticking boxes on how to structure a biography-driven documentary. But then, you get to the next bit of interview with Tippett or one of his peers, and you are struck by the sheer single-minded love these people have for Tippett and the art of hand-made special effects, and can’t help but mirror that feeling right back at them.

The film never manages to acquire an actual thesis about Tippett or his world. Thus, it never turns into the kind of documentary you’d recommend even to people who aren’t terribly interested in their subjects. There is, however, quite a bit to say for the film’s willingness to let Tippett and his peers simply speak about their lives and times, and work.

Three Anime Make A Post: They threatened his world. He will destroy theirs.

Kiki's Delivery Service aka 魔女の宅急便 (1989): An easy psychological test for weeding out people with whom something is dangerously wrong is finding out their opinion about Studio Ghibli movies, particularly classic ones like this directed by the great Hayao Miyazaki. If one doesn’t like these films they are not to be trusted.

The particular beauty of Kiki is how easily Miyazaki turns what would in lesser hands be a very rote story of growing up with very obvious valuable lessons to learn into a tale that’s not just charming as all get out but also suggests complexities in the character of its (barely) teen witch protagonist as well as in the world around her, never treating the elements that have clear metaphorical uses only as metaphor and never pretending inner or outer life were simple.

Mary and the Witch’s Flower aka メアリと魔女の花 (2017): While also pretty damn charming and imaginative for most of its running time, not quite on the level of classic Ghibli is this Mary Stewart adaptation by former Ghibli director (and owner of a particularly impressive name) Hiromasa Yonebayashi. It is a lovely example of the art of all ages anime, don’t get me wrong, it just becomes somewhat lesser in the direct comparison the very Ghibli-like style of the production can’t help but  invite. The difference here really is a comparative lack of that internal complexity I just praised Kiki for, Mary’s process of growing up never suggesting more than the most superficial internal struggle adding to the outer one, and a world that simply feels a bit flatter and simpler then in the best anime of this style.


Your Name aka 君の名は。(2016): Your Name’s director Makoto Shinkai has made at least one film very much beholden to the Ghibli style, too, to not terribly great effect, if I remember right, but at least this film is not at all interested in that comparison but goes aesthetic and philosophical ways all of its own. On paper, this is a bit of a science fictional romance weepie – and weep indeed I did watching it – so you could accuse it of focussing on emotional manipulation. However, it manipulates the audience’s emotions for good, perfectly encapsulating a feeling of emotionally big young love from afar, while also thinking surprisingly deeply about questions of fate and random chance, the gravity of distance (in a way only possible in the genres of the fantastic) and about the responsibilities of being human. These thematic concerns are  all effectively wrapped in a lot of tear-stained hankies, while also presenting a true sense of awe about the world as well as about  the human heart.

In short: Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below (2011)

A little girl who has lost her father early in life enters Agharta, a semi-mythical world lying under the surface of the Earth. She falls in with her teacher cum agent of a secret society in his attempt to bring his dead wife back from the dead by opening the gate between the world of the living and the dead situated down there. The people living in Agharta are not amused. Various action sequences and obvious melodrama happen.

This anime by Makoto Shinkai sure is pretty in a "let's try to imitate Studio Ghibli's visual style as closely as possible (hopefully without getting sued)" kind of way, especially when it comes to the character design that more than once oversteps the line between loving homage and outright rip-off.

Unfortunately for the film at hand, this visual closeness to the works of Hayao Miyazaki also invites the comparison with the other aspects of that man's work, and it's here where Children starts to look and sound rather tired. Shinkai replaces what I assume to be his big model's actual insight into humanity and the world with a sweeping soundtrack and trite morals like "you have to let your dead loved ones go". It's Miyazaki without soul and the understanding of the actual complexities of life, love and humanity.

As an adventure movie, Children is trying to hide its basic emptiness and its lack of a sense of wonder behind visual lavishness, but never manages to make the actual adventuring exciting enough to let its audience (at least in my case) overlook the general lack of charm and urgency of the endeavour.

For the tastes of someone like me, who prefers the rough and interesting to the slick and mindless, watching Shinkai's movie was particularly annoying: all that talent and all that money wasted on something without any emotional, intellectual or artistic ambitions beyond being a good imitation.

 

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