The Witch Rises: On Kiki's Delivery Service

A young witch coming of age arrives in a seaside town to master her abilities. To do so she has left behind her family and her home, with nothing but a broom, a bag, and a cat by her side. The girl is a romantic and a bit of a klutz, longing for the ocean whilst crashing into trees. She is taken in by a kind woman on the verge of motherhood, who gives her a job and a home. An enthusiastic and indefatigable boy falls for her and pesters the young woman to be his friend. The witch makes pancakes. It is wonderful.

Kiki's Delivery Service is certainly one of the most low key films director Hayao Miyazaki has created. While at its center it has a protagonist with magical powers, the film is more often concerned with the minor moments in life that we all face, meeting a new person, getting over an illness, being bored behind a counter. There are no cat buses or cities in the sky. No one turns into a pig, a scarecrow or a giant forest god. More than any other movie, this Miyazaki film is about people. Most of them are strong, independent women of varied experience and expectations. All of them, every single character, even the non-humans, are rich. Think of Jeff the dog, a fleeting character who gets two minutes of screen time at most, much of that unconscious. The care in conceiving and animating the altruistic animal's movements tells us more than we could ever hope to know about a hound.

The animation throughout Kiki's Delivery Service is, in a word, astounding. The Ghibli backgrounds are all framable, a series of lush masterpieces depicting ornate cityscapes, quaint storefronts, and cozy houses. Miyazaki's undying passion for flight is on magnificent display as well. The attention to detail in Kiki's windblown skirt and the physics of making midair adjustments is second to none. Much of the enjoyment comes from the little nods to intricate care that Miyazaki sprinkles throughout. The brief pause as Kiki's dad lifts her up, adjusting for more weight than he expected; Kiki's brief slip as she rounds a corner running to save Tombo; even the mere inclusion of a once motionless train car falling into line as the cars preceding it begin moving is beautiful.

One of the most enjoyable elements of Kiki's Delivery Service is how practical it is despite the existence of magic. Sure, Kiki can fly and talk to cats but she still has to clean her room with a bucket and a brush. There are no Disney creatures popping out of the woodwork with a song and a helping paw. This is work. The assured dedication to one's goals is a common theme throughout the film. Kiki demands to help out around the house of an elderly woman and her caretaker after they pay her for a delivery that is canceled. Tombo boasts of how hard he needs to train in order to get his legs in shape to power his flying contraption. Ursula spends her days in the forest, sketching crows, and dedicating the entirety of her life to art.

Whilst sitting on the beach with Tombo after crashing his bicycle-plane, Kiki confides that although she used to love flying, the passion is gone now that she does it for a living. Upon returning home after this confession, the young witch discovers that her magic is missing. It's tempting to read Kiki's subsequent existential crisis as an allusion to Miyazaki himself, who by this point in his career had painstakingly finished his passion project, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and released what to this day is still his most beloved film, one whose title character went on to become not only a global phenomenon but the icon for the animation studio that he had founded. Was Miyazaki burned out? Did he think at this relatively early stage in his career that his best ideas were behind him? It is unclear.

What is known is that Miyazaki did not originally plan on directing the film but got so invested in the screenplay process that he jumped in head first immediately upon finishing My Neighbor Totoro. Kiki's Delivery Service was released a mere fifteen months later. When recently discussing his retirement, Miyazaki mentioned that each successive film is taking longer to complete than the last. It is astounding that at one point in an animation director's career, one who in particular, also writes his own screenplays and does much of the drawing himself, managed to knock out two indisputable masterpieces so close to one another. So this is what it was like to live during the same time as Mozart or Shakespeare.

My Top Ten Most Anticipated Films of 2013

Welcome to the most optimistic post of the year! It's all a spiraling ball of negativity from here on out. Below are the ten films scheduled for release sometime in the next 364 days that have me standing outside at midnight in the theatre of my mind. There is a new rule being implemented this year so please pay close attention. If a film I mentioned in a previous year's list is finally making its way into theatres after any number of delays, it can't make the cut, as I hate repeating myself. Sorry The Grandmaster and To the Wonder. Without further ado, here are your ten 2014 Best Picture Oscar nominees!

10. Upstream Color

There are a few distinct camps centered around Shane Carruth's directorial debut, the mega-low-budget time-travel feature Primer. There are those who find it an impenetrable mess, those that understand it completely (I call this camp "the liars") and those that were puzzled, fascinated and invigorated by it. Count me in as a card-carrying member of Group C. Excepting some work on Rian Johnson's Looper, Upstream Color will be Carruth's first film work in nearly a decade. The film is a love story featuring two people living in an ageless organism. Seeing the film probably won't make it any clearer.

9. Frozen

I may not be obligated to see every single animated Disney film from now on but the CGI Frozen sounds promising enough. Based on the fairy tale The Snow Queen, the film stars Kristen Bell as Anna, an estranged princess who must trek across icy tundra to vanquish the wicked queen. Let's hope that this role is a winner for Bell who hasn't been able to parlay her idiosyncratic talents into anything worthwhile since Veronica Mars. The production art for the film teases a crisp, unforgiving environment and Disney has done all right by itself when adapting the works of Hans Christian Andersen in the past.

8. Queen of the Desert

Werner Herzog and Naomi Watts. Naomi Watts and Werner Herzog. Queen of the Desert is the story of the explorer Gertrude Bell, British attaché in the early 1900s. It is Herzog's first fictional film since Nicolas Cage talked to imaginary iguanas and by all accounts seems like a far more austere affair. (However, don't entirely dismiss the potential for some crazy camel shenanigans.) Sure, detractors will point out that Robert Pattinson is attempting to fill the shoes of Peter O'Toole by playing T.E. Lawrence, and Jude Law is also running around here somewhere, but just remember: Werner Herzog and Naomi Watts.

7. Her

The restlessly inventive Spike Jonze returns to the big screen with this story of a man, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who falls in love with his computer's new operating system. While the premise sounds like the work of frequent Jonze collaborator Charlie Kaufman, this go-around it is borne solely from Jonze's mind. Spike has yet to top the achievement of Being John Malkovich, his feature film debut, but both of his films since then have shown potential and contain several glimpses of the genius more frequently found in his short film work. Samantha Morton, Rooney Mara and Phoenix's co-star in The Master, Amy Adams, also appear.

6. Inside Llewyn Davis

Following their Oscar-winning return with 2007's No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers went into a steady rhythm of releasing a film per year. But since 2010's enjoyable but rather thin remake of True Grit, the brothers have been silent. Come February that will change with their tale of a Greenwich Village folk singer in the early 1960s. The film is loosely based on the memoirs of Dave Van Ronk and should provide the brothers with a cast of characters crazy enough to rival The Big Lebowski and a soundtrack that might match O Brother, Where Art Thou's ubiquity.

5. Star Trek Into Darkness

Step aside Christopher Nolan and Michael Bay, J.J. Abrams is the real blockbuster auteur of our time. His last two features, Super 8 and the Star Trek reboot, were the best films of their respective summers. Now that he got the pesky introductions out of the way and created that genius parallel timeline so that the new films can go and do whatever the hell they damn well please, the real fun should begin with this Star Trek sequel. How could it not, when the villain is played by Sherlock's own Benedict Cumberbatch? Let's hope this film has more of Simon Pegg's Scotty. Bring on the lens flares.

4. The World's End

Speaking of Simon Pegg, he has finally reunited with his Spaced companions Edgar Wright and Nick Frost to complete the third and final installment of their epic Cornetto trilogy, after Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Pegg and Frost play friends who come together in their forties to recreate a pub crawl they completed twenty years ago. Meanwhile, the Earth decides to bring about Armageddon. It is going to be quite a task reaching the heights of wit and hilarity of their first two collaborations but The World's End sounds just epic enough to achieve it.

3. Only Lovers Left Alive

My favorite film of 2009 was Jim Jarmusch's little seen and little loved, The Limits of Control, a glorious synthesis of themes the auteur had been pondering for roughly a decade. The Limits of Control can be seen as a cinematic culmination, a film that wipes the slate clean and leaves the director with a bold, white canvas with which to work with. His new film appears to take that freedom and run with it full throttle. Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston play centuries-old vampires who reunite when Hiddleston, now a musician, becomes depressed by mankind's direction. Who's a what now?

2. The Wind is Rising

Chances are Hayao Miyazaki's new film won't reach American shores before the end of the year but I don't care, I'm throwing it on here anyway. Maybe I'll just hop on over to Tokyo one weekend and catch this. That'll show you. This new animated feature is about the life of Jiro Horikoshi, celebrated designer of World War II fighter planes. The film continues Miyazaki's obsession with flight and rumor has it some of the pilots are anthropomorhized pigs, like the star of Porco Rosso. Expect some exquisitely designed backgrounds, flawless and kinetic action scenes, and some crazy magical stuff you can't wrap your head around.

1. The Tale of Princess Kaguya

Speaking of Studio Ghibli, exactly twenty-five years ago the famed animation company released Miyazaki's masterpiece My Neighbor Totoro on the very same day as studio co-founder Isao Takahata's heartbreaking tale of two brothers struggling to survive in the ruins of World War II, the phenomenal Grave of the Fireflies. To commemorate the greatest day in Japanese cinema history, the studio will be releasing Takahata's new film about a princess borne of bamboo the same day as The Wind is Rising. How can the world be so awesome?

Cinematic Capsules: June 2012

I'm stealing a device used by my mortal enemy Sean over at The End of Cinema blog. Each month I will be posting a compendium of capsule reviews for the films I saw over the course of the last thirty days (Disney features and films from the current year excepted). I will then be indexing the films on decade-by-decade pages for easier navigation further on down the line. One thing I will not be doing is retroactively ranking a year's new additions because that would drive me insane. It's the lightning round kids, did you bring your golf clubs?

Castle in the Sky (1986)

The lone Miyazaki film I had not yet seen is--as the rest--a sweeping tale full of chimerical imagination and gorgeous animation. The film follows a girl who is being pursued by an army and a band of pirates because she possesses a crystal that contains an energy source humans no longer no how to harness. She falls from an airship into the arms of a sweet boy looking for adventure. The two head off in search of the castle in the sky, a sort of Atlantis in the clouds, that was once home to an ancient race but has since fallen into ruin. The film combines many elements familiar to those of Miyazaki's oeuvre, there is a fascination with flight and aerial craft (Porco Rosso), an abiding reverence for nature (Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind), and a young female protagonist (all of the rest). Castle in the Sky doesn't quite live up to some of the masterpieces later in his career, in part because it feels just a tad too long, but second-tier Miyazaki is still some of the greatest cinema out there.


I'm A Cyborg But That's Okay (2006)

Park Chan-wook's follow-up to his revered vengeance trilogy, is the story of a girl who is convinced she is a robot and is institutionalized when she slits her wrists and inserts active wiring into her flesh. At the sanitarium she meets a bunch of patients with their own quirky brands of psychosis, including a boy who steals peoples' traits while wearing a bunny mask. The boy falls for the girl, who he longs to care for, in turn losing some of his psychosis along the way. The film is a tad overwhelming with all of the manic characters running about, but as the film slowly teases out hints of how all of these people came to be here, the girl's story most of all, it becomes something deeper and more rewarding. The budding romance between the two main characters is disarmingly sweet. Chan-wook's eye is as strong as ever, he practically overloads the frames with vibrant color and well-conceived action.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

My first official exposure to Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy and truly I only gave in for David Fincher (and that absolutely incredible teaser trailer). The brief plot outline for those living under a rock for the last couple of years, involves a disgraced journalist (Daniel Craig) who is offered the job of ostensibly writing the memoir of an aged industrialist (Christopher Plummer), when in fact he is investigating a decades-old murder. He is helped by the titular anti-heroine, played well by Rooney Mara, a tech-savvy, drug-addled, motorcycle punk with some serious issues. Because of all of the hype and hysteria surrounding the work I was expecting something all together more gruesome than what was delivered, maybe something more akin to a certain movie by the director of the aforementioned cyborg film. Admittedly the scenes of rape and torture were plenty brutal and stomach-turning, but I expected the film to be more relentless. Instead a lot of it is taken up with Craig looking at old pictures and talking to elderly nazis, while Mara types away on her MacBook. The investigative nature of the film immediately recalls Fincher's Zodiac, a more idiosyncratic and all together better film that leaves the viewer with a lot more to chew on. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is far from bad--in fact, it's good!-- but it feels less personal. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross once again contribute a stellar soundtrack, as they did for Fincher's The Social Network.

The Italian Job (1969)

Aptly summed up as the film where Benny Hill plays a computer wizard with an ass fetish, the original British version of The Italian Job is for the most part, a painful experience to watch. It is a woefully unfunny attempt at a comedic caper film that traffics in that special blend of tedious weirdness only Britain in the late sixties could produce. Michael Caine plays a career criminal who takes on an elaborate heist for his recently deceased friend. Noel Coward of all people plays a well-to-do, thoroughly British crime lord who oversees the plan from his regal perch in prison. The first hour is an absolute waste of time, with Caine bedding various birds while piecing together the elements for his theft of $4 million in gold being transported through Italy. The film is most remembered for its climactic car chase featuring a trio of colorful Mini Coopers, and the sequence is easily the most fun part of the picture, even though it is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen. Somehow the silliness that eludes the film for its first seventy minutes works here. Unfortunately the goofy getaway is not enough to salvage an otherwise worthless movie.