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12/21/2004 Archived Entry: "Howl's Moving Castle"

If you remember months before I was talking about how much I am anticipating "Howl's Moving Castle", Slashdot just barely now posts an article about it. LoL! You know, I'm beginning to love-hate Slashdot the more I read it. I should just hop over to Kuro5hin instead - if I can remember what my username and password is there. *sweat*

One thing I'm realising in the movies coming from Japan is... you have to watch the movie twice in two formats to understand and get a grasp for the whole thing. Reading the reviews I've realised that the voice talents for the original films are every bit as full of character as the English dubbing, watching a movie subtitled has certain things you wouldn't get from a dubbed film. English dubbed cartoons, typically, are dubbed to match the mouth movements of the film. So you'll miss a lot of the true meaning of what they say unless you also watch it subtitled. When we (John and I) watched "Spirted Away" with the subtitles, it suddenly had a whole different ambiance even though the only difference was with who voiced the characters and the music was exactly the same. We've yet to watch "Castle in the Sky" subtitled, we'll get to it someday when we remember (we're very forgetful!).

From the Midnight Eye article by Jasper Sharp...

...I have heard mumblings, and from Japanese critics as well, that Howl's Moving Castle is "not typical Miyazaki", and lacks the personal touches that made his earlier work so memorable. At least part of the reasoning behind this judgement seems to be that not only did the source material for the project originate outside of Miyazaki - Kiki's Delivery Service in 1989, an adaptation of a book by Eiko Kadono, was the last time he directed a story written by someone else - but it also came from outside of Japan, from the novel of the same name by British children's writer Diana Wynne Jones that was published in 1986...

If it's one word I've come to recently loath it's "fanboy". It's a very accurate label, I think if anyone would understand that there -is- no competition (or should be no competition, provided I'm not putting too much faith and credit to these folks) it's the animators themselves. NO ONE has to compete, no animation studio is better than the other at all times. Whenever I hear the word fanboy now, all I can picture is "Syndrome" from "The Incredibles". You know, the little over-obsessive creature (gollum, gollum) who'll go out of his way to say the "opposition" sucks without giving it a chance or seeing it with unbiased eyes.

Another phrase I despise is "it's not your style". Sometimes I want to say "I have no style!" How can someone else who doesn't create anything determine for me what my style is? So when I read the part about "I have heard mumblings, and from Japanese critics as well, that Howl's Moving Castle is 'not typical Miyazaki'" all I could think of was "Who the hell made the people who said that all of a sudden Miyazaki's mind!??" Every artist hates being type-cast... actors, painters, poets, musicians... It really, really sucks to be stuck to this ball and chain that's called "the public opinion". Ever heard of those albums some artists do that's totally beyond what you're used to hearing? Sometimes it bombs soley because people weren't expecting it, sometimes it was just a mental playground. It's just something at that point that an artist does for themself.

I think -everything- Miyazaki's doing right now is so he can see his own imagination come to life, and if it happens that other people are enchanted by it then that means there is such a thing as magic in this world. In that regard, it's exactly like a classic Disney film. Every time something new is created, it holds the same life and will for magic as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" did when it was first released. So how dare these people say "It's not as good/the same as a Disney film."

What I say to that is "-You- try and make something that's pure imagination." It's not easy to bring a sense of realism to worlds that are total fabrications. It's not easy to build believable characters into a setting you can relate to and involved in a story that's complete.

*looks left... looks right... looks down....*

Oh.

*clambers down the soap box*