Pascoite gets bored and blogs about anime, vol. 2 · 3:54am Feb 13th, 2021
Another one of these already? Well, I didn't actually talk that much about anime last time. A couple movies, after the break.
A little more admin stuff this time. The stuff on my "finished" tab is sorted alphabetically so I can find things easily. I'm just going to start at the top and go down it. I'll stop once I've talked about 2-3 things I've rated either excellent or very good. Last time I said I wouldn't bother listing anything I rating less than that, but I've decided I will at least toss in the ones to that point and either leave it at that or give a one-line comment on a few I feel like. I'll try to keep whole series together, so if I intend to watch a sequel, I'll skip talking about the original series for now. And as I move new things into the "finished" tab, I'll skip back up to get them from parts of the alphabet I've already covered.
But before I begin with the A's, I'll grab a couple movies to talk about this time. One I actually should have mentioned last week, because it is a Ghibli/Miyazaki movie, and I hadn't realized that. I was sure it was either Ghibli but not Miyazaki, or that it was a former Ghibli staffer working somewhere else. But no. And as I said, I want to keep series together, so I'll also cover its sequel of a sort.
First, we have Whisper of the Heart. I've tried to talk this movie up to a number of people: a former co-worker and fellow anime fan I still keep in touch with, my sister, a few friends on Discord/Skype/whatever we were using at the time. And in doing so, it really struck me that it's hard to say what this movie is about and make it sound interesting.
One thing I'll mention up front is that you'll need to have a high tolerance for hearing the song "Take Me Home, Country Roads," because you're going to hear it a lot.
I won't give a full synopsis of the plot, but here's the minimal spoiler version. A girl named Shizuku enjoys her friends and is generally upbeat, but she's feeling kind of directionless in life. She can't really picture what she wants to do with her future. One day, she follows a cat on a whim, and it leads her to an antique shop. There's a boy she's run into a few times around town who has thoroughly annoyed her each time, and she's noticed someone has checked out a lot of the same library books she has. It turns out that not only are those two the same person, but he works at that shop. In the basement, the owner (the boy's grandfather) also builds and repairs instruments, and the boy is his apprentice. Shizuku befriends them both, and she becomes fascinated with a cat statue in the antique shop.
That statue finally prods her to find a source of passion: she wants to become a writer, and she wants to start by writing a novel about this cat. There's no reason she'd need to, but she asks the old man for permission to write about his statue, and he agrees, on the condition that he be the first to read her novel. And so she spends the summer crafting and agonizing over her novel.
That's as far as I'll go with the plot, but the thing I love most about this movie is its attention to realism. It's no surprise that this studio and director would sweat the details, but it's still nice to see them right. There are several types of realism, of course. One is that the plot feels reasonable, and while that can be an easy thing to do, it kind of depends on the genre. Slice of Life is going to be the closest to real everyday life, so it's the easiest to make feel contrived. The obvious thing here would be the cliche that this girl is so naturally talented, her first novel is phenomenally good. But most of us here are writers, and we know it doesn't work that way. (Except for one person.) So that doesn't happen. As promised, the old man reads Shizuku's first draft, and while it has some good parts to it and an imaginative plot, of course she just doesn't have the experience to make a well-crafted story out of it. But it's a good start, he makes sure she knows that, and she does end up feeling encouraged by that.
Another level of "getting the details right" is the kind of thing only some people would notice, depending on their expertise, but this studio/director consistently do their homework. I'd be curious to know how. Is it the director researching it and telling the writers/animators they need to make sure to do it this way, or those staff taking it upon themselves to make sure? There may well be other examples in the movie that I didn't catch because they're not subjects I know much about, but the instruments. That I did notice.
The old man not only builds instruments. He can build modern ones, and most of his sales would presumably be those, but he also builds the older kinds that you would have seen hundreds of years ago. He has a couple friends who enjoy playing music with him, and they put on a little show for Shizuku. I love how they got the instruments just right. Your average person would figure it was reasonable to have a cello and draw a modern cello. But this is supposed to be an older style one, and the instruments the old man's friends play as well are, too. They got it spot on. The old-style cello has a different number of strings. The neck looks a little different. The bow has a different shape, and it's held with a backhand grip. I was really impressed they got it right, because 99.5% of people wouldn't notice, and it has zero effect on the plot. It just shows the level of care they put into things.
Another thing I love about Miyakazi films is that there can be little hidden gems during the credits. Kiki's Delivery Service was like this. It just had some scenes of life around the city, but for her heroism, Kiki has become a bit of a celebrity, and there's a quick snippet of her noticing a little girl who's dressed up like her. The fact that even happens and how Kiki reacts to it say a ton about her character and how events have unfolded since the main part of the movie ended, all within a few scant seconds.
This film does the same. There's a B plot about a love triangle between Shizuku and two of her friends that leads to a rift between them, and it never really gets resolved. Then if you pay attention during the credits, you'll see what becomes of that, again in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment that you don't even realize at first what it was.
Rating: excellent
There's a sequel movie called The Cat Returns, and this is what I thought the previous movie was: Ghibli but not Miyazaki. It's only a sequel in the barest sense, though. That cat statue Shizuku liked? He plays a starring role, but while the legend about him is basically what the old man eventually told Shizuku (after she'd written her story, so it didn't influence the plot she'd come up with), it has nothing to do with what happens here, and that's the single point of connection between the two movies.
This movie starts out with a similar high-school crush as the main source of conflict at the beginning, but that becomes exceedingly minor to the plot. A girl named Haru has an ability to understand cats on some level, and she saves one from being hit by a car. Turns out the cat is royalty, and the king of cats insists on repaying her for her service to his son.
He won't take no for an answer.
Haru tries to get out of it by ignoring the cats who continually come to call, then asking them to please consider the debt to her paid, then looking to have the implied contract dissolved, but she gets dragged off to the cat kingdom to accept the honor of becoming the prince's bride. And the longer she stays there, she notices the more she turns into a cat. The king is of course not on the up-and-up here, so Haru and Baron (the cat from the statue) and a couple of other allies conspire to determine what the king is up to and effect Haru's escape before she becomes a cat fully and permanently.
The narrative here is fine, and the story was as whimsical as I would have expected, but the action scenes kind of felt directionless to me. I also never felt that well grounded in what Haru's life was like in the human world so that I understood what she would be losing if she failed to escape the cat kingdom. They do get a few dire but vague warnings, but I would have liked a stronger anchoring of what that would mean for her personally, not just in the general case.
At the end, they do finally bring back in that love interest from the very beginning, but that's not part of the plot. Her response to a development on that front is another example of implying a ton of character development in just a few words, and it was a nice note to end on.
Rating: very good
I'm a fan of the light fantasy vibe so I really love The Cat Returns. And wasn't as big a fan of Whisper of the Heart, though I want to revisit it sometime as I suspect being older and having done editing I'd appreciate it more.
I've never seen Whisper of the Heart, but clearly I need to.
Anime remains a huge blind spot for me. I was never exposed to it much early on, and I didn't go far beyond the few bits of it that I did happen to encounter along the way.
These are interesting so far, though. I've considered checking a few things out, but I don't know what's good versus overhyped. Seems like these could yield a few possibilities.
Cat Returns was always great.
And I can do take me home, country roads all day long.
But if you to go classic, My Neighbor Totoro is the way to go.
One thing I did forget to mention about Whisper of the Heart is that I felt like how things ended up between Shizuku and the old man's grandson felt rather pat, in contrast to what I had said about the situational realism being very good for the movie in general. But then I later found out it's only that way in the dub. The sub has different dialogue at the end.
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I'll definitely be covering some overhyped stuff when I say what I listed as "decent" or less. And I suspect I will have some very unpopular opinions about that.
I love The Cat Returns. Big fan! XD I even Isekaied a fic of it. What I really love about Baron in that is that the dude is like a total 30's style hero archetype. You could totally see him flying an airplane just as easily as being Robin Hood.
You say this like it's a negative, and not a massive selling point!
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When I saw you'd left a comment, that was not what I was expecting it to be about...
Whisper of the Heart! I adored that movie, and it remains my all-time favorite Miyazaki film. You, sir, clearly have good taste.