A Musing on Miyazaki's "Ponyo on the Cliff"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 12 December 2009 15:59

Written by Eric Lurio

Much has been written about the Japanese "cult of the cute" -- ka-waii culture. Large dish-plate eyes and button noses in comics and cartoons are ubiquitous, and whether or not that's good or bad is neither here nor there. But the great animation director Hayao Miyazaki has used this cult's aesthetic to create one of the more disturbing monsters in cinematic history -- a fish-goddess named Brunhilde in Ponyo on the Cliff.

Bruni is being held prisoner by her father Fujimoto, who is the estranged husband of the goddess of the sea. He goes around in his submarine and pours his magic elixirs into the see to do something so horrible that it will destroy humanity and bring the world back into it's pre-civilized balance. He know about Bruni's potential power, so he keeps her in the form of a "goldfish" in a "bowl" located within the submarine, something she and her many sister/servants aren't to happy about.

When Dad isn't looking, B-h sneaks out of the sub and hijacks the nearest jellyfish, where she starts lolling around the seven seas before coming close to shore, where she gets stuck in a bottle, and gets rescued by a five-year-old boy named Sosuke, who lives with his parents somewhere on the Japanese coast.

Now presumably, Miyazaki has made a study of the behavior of five-year old children, but that doesn't seem evident. A real Sosuke wouldn't act in the way he does. The little tyke puts B-h in a bucket and fills it with fresh water. Now, a little kid on vacation at the beach might do that if he had never been to the sea before, but our Sosuke lives there. Mommy and Daddy would have told him that in doing so he would kill the creature. But this doesn't matter, because what he has isn't any ordinary fish but a little goddess who has tasted his blood and fallen deeply in lust.

Now here's where we get into the Japanese Cult of the Cute. B-h, named Ponyo by Sosuke, accidentally escapes, and gets caught by Daddy. She escapes again, and in doing so, cracks the entire space-time continuum which causes hundreds of trillions of yen's worth of damage to the coast of Japan. Supernatural waves crash on the shore, turning into fish that deliberately try to drown Sosuke and his mother's car.

Our hero sees B-h/Ponyo in the form of a little girl, running on top of the water with a happy-go-lucky grin trying to say hello. Isn't that sweet? When I saw this for the first time at San Diego's Comic-Con 2009, the reaction was mostly, "Isn't that special? Isn't that charming?"

Miyazaki's design is perfect, and that's what's so scary here. If Ponyo wasn't cute, we would all be screaming at the screen "bang her on the head with that shovel!!!!" Of course the whole thing ends happily ever after. It has to. What we have is a total deus ex machina in what has to be the most random of Miyazaki's films to date.

The character of Ponyo is closest to the main character in the famous Twilight Zone episode, "It's a Good Life," in which a child, played by Billy Mumy, terrorizes a small town because of his god-like powers. The recently released horror film Orphan, also has a little girl as the villain (spoiler: she's a 35-year old midget), but in that case we know that she's evil.

On the other hand, Miyazaki wants us to love little Ponyo, because she's happy and adorable. His style of anime overcomes the astoundingly insipid plot. The question is: why didn't Miyazaki, who has been a master of plotting in the past, fall so flat here. His previous fantasies have been well thought out stories wit deep characters. This time, it's idiot plotting cardboard figurines. It's sad to see a great man jump the shark like that.

Burton at MoMA - a Multimedia Masterpiece

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 10 December 2009 22:52

Written by Kevin Filipski

It’s not often that the Museum of Modern Art presents an exhibition of a film director that comprises more than mere screenings, but rarely has there been one as thorough (and thoroughly multi-media) as Tim Burton.

A director just outside the mainstream with his visually thrilling and fantastical tales of outsiders and misunderstood monsters, Burton has become a genre unto himself, from the willful silliness of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice to the fairy tale-like Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas, with such splendid one-offs as his biopic Ed Wood and the surprisingly moving tragicomedy Big Fish thrown in for good measure. (Let’s ignore such lavish duds as Sleepy Hollow and the unnecessary Planet of the Apes remake.) His recent adaptations of the musical Sweeney Todd and Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory have divided fans; surely his next film, based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, will do the same.

The MOMA exhibit displays artifacts of all kinds from Burton’s long career. (He likens it to rummaging through his closet and discovering things he’d forgotten existed.) From his teenage days making 8mm shorts in his Southern California backyard—which we can watch—we are privy to the unending frenzy of Burton’s imagination.

There are innumerable photographs, paintings and drawings, including amusingly deadpan sketches that visualize his punning wordplay, with a whimsicality reminiscent of both Frederico Fellini and John Lennon. There are also many objects taken from film projects both made and unmade, like miniaturized Martians from the loony parody Mars Attacks! and wondrous stop-motion puppets from Nightmare and the more sinister Corpse Bride.

Of course, there’s also a full slate of film screenings of all the features and shorts that Burton has made (including the classic six-minute Vincent, narrated by Price himself).

For me, the must-see day is April 5, 2010, when both of Burton’s underrated but gruesomely entertaining Batman movies will be shown, along with the wondrously warped Frankenweenie.

There’s also a series of films chosen by Burton himself as an example of his influences, Tim Burton and the Lurid Beauty of Monsters, which run the gamut from James Whale’s original Frankenstein (with Boris Karloff) and F.W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu to the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space, Glen or Glenda and Bride of the Monster, all made by none other than—you guessed it—Ed Wood himself.

In its wide-ranging approach to a director who started out in Disney’s animation department and then went on to cult status thanks to fourteen feature films that could be considered anti-Disney as a whole, MOMA’s Tim Burton will please his fans and maybe even make skeptics reconsider their opinion of one of Hollywood’s true iconoclasts.

For more info go to: http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/313

Tim Burton Exhibit at the MoMA
Sunday, Nov. 22 - Monday, April 26
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019
212-397-6980

Kevin’s Digital Week 5 - Busting Foodies

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 09 December 2009 02:50

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-Ray of the Week:
The General
(Kino)
One of Buster Keaton’s greatest comedies — and one of the very best silent films ever made — is a hilarious Civil War-era farce about a Confederate Army reject who becomes a hero after the Union Army hijacks his beloved locomotive. This is a movie that you can’t look away from, or even blink while watching, because there is so much going on in every shot that you don’t want to miss anything. The stunts are astounding, even by Keaton’s daring and exacting standards, and the Blu-ray version gives an added clarity and much detail that wasn’t noticed on VHS tapes or beat-up 16mm prints.

If you didn’t think that an 80-year-old film could look spectacular in high-definition, then The General is here to prove you wrong. Extras are plentiful, starting with three separate soundtracks — Carl Davis’ orchestral score performed by the Thames Silents Orchestra, Emmy nominee Robert Israel’s score and an organ score by Lee Erwin recorded at Carnegie Hall — and continuing with introductions by Orson Welles and Gloria Swanson, on-the-set footage and a montage of train sequences in Keaton’s films.

DVD of the Week:
Food Beware
(First Run)
Jean-Paul Jaud’s enlightening documentary about the perils of non-organic food is set mainly in a small French village, where the school menus, comprising locally-grown produce and meats, are completely organic. Jaud then widens his net by speaking with an array of people about growing, harvesting and eating organic food, from farmers and politicians to everyday folk, like the parents of children who have gotten ill due to pesticides. 

Jaud can’t help but step up onto his soapbox at times, as when he hears from a mother whose daughter was stricken, and never presents any incontrovertible evidence that environmental factors were definitely to blame for her illness: they surely are the cause, but a little more fact-checking would have helped seal the case. Food Beware (the French title is more euphonic: Nos enfants nous accuseront, or Our Children Will Accuse Us) is primarily an emotional call to arms that’s also a thought-provoking treatise on what the 21st century might be like.