NYT article on ``Japanese Cinema's second Golden Age...''

andrew osmond andrew
Thu Jan 24 02:18:00 EST 2002


>>      http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/20/movies/20KEHR.html

For the record, I was not very taken with this article either, though
it's an improvement over its predecessor. I include some comments I
posted to the Miyazaki mailing-list.

I'm very dubious about many of its generalisations - particularly 'the
60% of Japanese film today is anime' claim. [Can anyone here comment?]
Some quick points:

'[Anime]... a blending of the Japanese pictorial tradition represented
by silk painting and woodblock prints with American-style character
design and genre stories.'

Crude and American-chauvinist simplification, as if the US was the only
nation producing 'genre stories,' and the only one that influenced
artists like Tezuka. [David Mankins points out that the sentence could
be read as 'genre stories and American-style character design.'] All
right, the phrasing is ambiguous. Even granting that, I'm not sure
'genre stories' is the right phrase - very vague. Most pop-culture
narrative in the 20th century relies to a large degree on 'genre.' You
could say exactly the same for US comics and cartoons. 

Final Fantasy is cited as an example of the mainstreaming of anime,
despite the fact it bombed pretty much everywhere, including Japan.

'The anime filmmakers who followed Tezuka, in the boom in theatrical and
television animation engendered by the success of "Astro Boy," imitated
his style, establishing what was, in fact, a specific, strictly dated
form of 1920's-30's graphic design as the baseline of the new medium.'

More crude generalisations. For example, it ignores how French comic-
strip styles later influenced artists like Otomo and Miyazaki [in their
comic work, not their films], feeding through them to many others. Yes,
anime designs are often similar, but this guy suggests there's no
difference between Astro Boy and Akira. 
The subsequent discussion of Metropolis obscures the fact that it's an
overtly retro film, and would have looked as retro to manga-and-anime-
consuming Japanese audiences as it does to Westerners..

'Even a film like Mr. Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke," with its clear
aspirations to Disneyesque detail and grandeur, animates its characters
with only slightly more grace and fluidity than a low-budget television
series like "Angel Tail."'

I'd put this in the same category as the 'falling literacy' claim in the
previous article. Yes, 'grace' and 'fluidity' are subjective terms, but
to suggest, as the writer effectively does, that there's no more skill,
finesse and artistry in Mononoke's animation than in a bog-standard TV
toon is grossly insulting and cretinous. It's a shameful slur; contrived
defences notwithstanding, it should be recognised and condemned as such.

'The heroes of the long- running series "Guyver" and "Neon Genesis
Evangelion"... are both empowered and overwhelmed by merging with the
electro-mechanical world. (Expressed already in "Astro Boy," this is
perhaps the most deeply embedded theme in the anime universe.)

A quick flick through the Anime Encyclopedia underlines how laughable
this generalisation is.

'Like Disney in his early features, Mr. Miyazaki deals with the deepest
kind of childhood trauma - the loss of a parent, the resentment of a
sibling, the difficulty of belonging to a family and the difficulty of
separating from it...'

A contrived and misleading comparison, ignoring the fact that Miyazaki's
films are infinitely less 'traumatised' than early Disney when it comes
to families.

'Mr. Miyazaki has separated himself from the pack of anime artists by
his refusal of technology-driven stories and techniques. Despite an
increasing use of computer animation in his backgrounds, he continues to
hand draw his principal characters.'

So the bulk of 'principal anime characters' are computer-animated these
days? What rubbish. [Note: I'm talking about _characters_, as opposed to
other effects animation and backgrounds]

'The implication is clear that Totoro is an imaginative projection of
the children.'

This argument is also made by Napier, but I find it extremely hard to
make sense of the end this way. I certainly don't see it as a 'clear
implication.'

[Mononoke] 'It is also a work of astounding formal beauty, in which
elaborate, computer-generated backgrounds merge seamlessly with the
vigorous, hand-drawn animation of the foreground characters.'

So the animation's graceless and non-fluid, but it's still vigorous?
Ah, that makes it all right then. 
-- 
andrew osmond




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