Setting Animation Back 50 Years

Hayao Miyazaki's swan song The Wind Rises is getting closer to closer to American cinemas, although the film is being shown in Los Angeles right now so it can compete in this year's animated Oscar race…

And already, the film is getting complaints…

There are concerns over how American audiences will respond to the film's themes, as it was already very controversial in South Korea, they saw it as a "celebration of Japan's wartime aggression". It also generated a lot of brouhaha in its home country, the New York Times states that Japanese conservatives didn't take too well to the film, declaring it unpatriotic.

But this is the usual for animated features. Need I bring up how many Americans embraced WALL-E? Or how about when someone freaks out over something as harmless as The Lorax because of a lightweight environmental message?

The other complaints are idiotic. Concerns over smoking? Seriously? Imagery of bombs and tuberculosis? My goodness, think of the children!

Oh wait, this is not a children's film. It is not a family film, either. It's carrying a PG-13 rating and it's being released under Disney's Touchstone banner!

This is proof that we have a loooooooooong way to go. Animation still doesn't get the full respect it deserves in America, we're still in 1966 apparently. Everything animated must be "for kids" or "childish" to some degree, animation can't tackle "serious" stories. This is one good reason why more artistic foreign films or films with adult-oriented content in them have a hard time catching on here… Unless the films in question have innuendos, raunchy humor and crap that makes immature 12 year olds laugh. A Family Guy Movie would easily make $150 million domestically.

Then there was the whole issue with the film's 126-minute running time, and how some people at a screening said it was too long. Yeah, because animation can't cover two-hour epics, right? Right? They can't be serious films, they gotta be short-n-sweet romps with dancing farting animals and goofy action! To people used to 90-minute diversions, something this long is apparently unheard of.

Animation just keeps getting sent back to the kiddie corner by the ignorant adults here… Oh well, here's hoping that The Wind Rises tries to reverse this and is actually something of a domestic box office surprise hit. Pipe dream...

Module 13: Japan (and the Rest of Asia) and Computer Animation

Hoo boy. This was a MASSIVE module, mainly because it incorporated two huge topics that probably warrant their own modules: Computer animation and Japanese animation. Computers have been a major tool in the production of animation since the 1970s, giving the ability to produce rendered animation with a 3 dimensional look or vector animation. It has taken over not only the field of animated films but also the production of many live action features. The technicalities of computer animation is way beyond the limits of my understanding, but needless to say it has completely transformed the animation industry.

And then there's the realm of Japanese animation, which has gained a massive following of its own. While animation has been in production since the 1910s and 1920s, it didn't really start to take off until the efforts of Osamu Tezuka, who is prolific in both the production of manga and anime. From then it expanded into Japanese culture as anime films and series became a big source of entertainment for the Japanese. And now it is becoming an international interest. I'm a big fan of the films of Studio Ghibli, and from that people seem to think of me as being an anime buff, but I've really cut back on watching anime since getting into the Oscar nominated animated shorts,* while my sisters have taken on the title of true blue anime otaku. It's still an interesting field for me.

*I really should come up with some abbreviation for this term, like ONIS.

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Spirited Away: A Personal Journey

So, this post is kind of unrelated to Oscar nominated animated shorts, but it is about an Oscar winning piece of animation, so it's got more in common than the one post that has the most views on this blog: the top 5 animated nuclear explosions.

Anyways, my favorite movie of all time turned 10 last year. It's a pretty significant milestone, and I celebrated it by watching the film (although I missed the actual anniversary by a couple of days.) I didn't do any writing about it, probably because I wanted to get back to playing Tales of Symphonia. However, now is the time that is a much more significant anniversary for me personally: the 10th anniversary of the first time I watched the film. Now that this anniversary has arrived, I think it's a good time to look back on my experiences with the movie.

So what movie am I talking about? Well, it's in the title, but just for the heck of it, it's 千と千尋の神隠し (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi), better known in the United States as Spirited Away.

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Best Animated Short - 2002

We have come to 2002. In many ways this was the most memorable Oscar ceremony, even more so than 1997, the first one I saw. It's got Michael Moore blasting the Bush administration while accepting the Best Documentary Feature Oscar for Bowling for Columbine. It's got Eminem winning the Best Original Song Oscar for Lose Yourself in 8 Mile without even performing it. It's got Adrien Brody laying one on Halle Berry after becoming the youngest Best Actor winner for The Pianist. Most importantly, it featured the one award that made me forever loyal to the Academy Awards: Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (aka Spirited Away) winning Best Animated Feature.

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