Anime Movie Rewind: Pompo the Cinephile
Nov. 6th, 2022 05:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerFor some time now I’ve been contemplating spending some of next year, “sixty years since Mighty Atom got on TV,” watching a minuscule sample of anime from each of the years since then. Amid all that thinking ahead and advance selection of TV episodes (and the slightest bit of concern I’m making “too big a deal of it”), my viewing schedule for this year’s concluding quarter happened to fall together in such a way as to leave a day open each week I could watch a movie in, something I’ve all but wished for at certain times before. With that I did start pondering how last year I’d finished up watching bits of animation made in Japan before Mighty Atom with “a movie from each decade of ‘anime on TV,’ too,” and then I decided I could wind back to my project with “a movie a decade” again, this time heading from now to the 1960s. To start off with something recent, I looked through some of my newer Blu-Rays and settled on Pompo the Cinephile.
“A movie about making a movie” did seem a somehow appropriate starting point. As I began watching Pompo, though, I realised I’d been a bit mistaken about just what it was about. That did bring me back to a constant uncertainty about how commenting on my own surprise about a story means denying that surprise to anyone else who might happen on my commentary. The best I can do is to put a “cut” on this journal’s front page and hope that anyone who happens on this post later doesn’t look too far ahead too fast.
I’d more or less known Pompo was a movie producer, but I’d supposed, perhaps from her “young girl character design,” she was “a dreamer who got lucky” and pressed ahead with boundless enthusiasm and comedic consequences. Instead, she was quite competent even if the movie starts with her making “B-movies.” The story picks up with her giving a script she’d written herself to her assistant Gene (who has constant dark marks under his eyes), but also providing a top star and pretty much all the help he needs even as she stays out of the way and seems to make the movie more Gene’s story. I suppose I did get to wondering about “too good to be true” brushoffs and that general caution about how “you don’t want to know how the sausage is made” (along with certain complaints that these days there’s not as much variety in the sausage and what’s really being pushed at you is empty calories). When real complications did set in, though, they involved Gene’s struggles to edit the footage down to a reasonable running time. Things did become a bit more interesting. The movie was always visually intriguing (although I’m left struggling to describe its variations), and the range of character designs from the “cartoony” Pompo, Gene, and the young actress Natalie to the more “realistic” people they work with might be another sign of how animation and “drawings” have some strengths they can play to. In the end it was an interesting way to get started; anime movies from earlier decades still lie ahead.
“A movie about making a movie” did seem a somehow appropriate starting point. As I began watching Pompo, though, I realised I’d been a bit mistaken about just what it was about. That did bring me back to a constant uncertainty about how commenting on my own surprise about a story means denying that surprise to anyone else who might happen on my commentary. The best I can do is to put a “cut” on this journal’s front page and hope that anyone who happens on this post later doesn’t look too far ahead too fast.
I’d more or less known Pompo was a movie producer, but I’d supposed, perhaps from her “young girl character design,” she was “a dreamer who got lucky” and pressed ahead with boundless enthusiasm and comedic consequences. Instead, she was quite competent even if the movie starts with her making “B-movies.” The story picks up with her giving a script she’d written herself to her assistant Gene (who has constant dark marks under his eyes), but also providing a top star and pretty much all the help he needs even as she stays out of the way and seems to make the movie more Gene’s story. I suppose I did get to wondering about “too good to be true” brushoffs and that general caution about how “you don’t want to know how the sausage is made” (along with certain complaints that these days there’s not as much variety in the sausage and what’s really being pushed at you is empty calories). When real complications did set in, though, they involved Gene’s struggles to edit the footage down to a reasonable running time. Things did become a bit more interesting. The movie was always visually intriguing (although I’m left struggling to describe its variations), and the range of character designs from the “cartoony” Pompo, Gene, and the young actress Natalie to the more “realistic” people they work with might be another sign of how animation and “drawings” have some strengths they can play to. In the end it was an interesting way to get started; anime movies from earlier decades still lie ahead.