Anime Movie Rewind: Porco Rosso
Nov. 27th, 2022 04:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerRewinding back into the twentieth century to start there with one anime movie from its concluding decade, I settled on both “the respectability ‘everyone’ knows about” and a title I’d never quite got around to until now with Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso. While I’d watched the features Miyazaki had made before and after it back when they’d first been released on DVD over here by Disney (and then gone back to the new GKIDS releases of two of them to fill in previous quick-sample anime tours in more recent years), I suppose something about “the title character is an anthropomorphic animal and everyone else is a normal (Ghibli) human” might have had a certain dampening effect on me. The story involving air piracy in a propeller-driven age did seem to keep me thinking all the way back to the Disney afternoon cartoon TaleSpin, and more generally how their shows had been the respectable choice for television animation in their own way when they’d come out and yet might have occupied the moment when I’d thought myself getting too sharp and old for the stories in cartoons (for all that, thinking back now, I don’t think I’d been quite as sophisticated and mature as I’d thought myself to be then).
As I got started into this movie, though, I did get caught up in it. A part of that did have to do with the aerial animation, which might have had the risk of the more maundering moods “they sure don’t make things like that any more” can slide into. I did get to acknowledging the story winding up without any real “villains” in it; even “the threatening system of its time and place” was always off in the ominous distance. That had me reflecting on that other risk of “wanting a story to be one thing so much you never quite think about what it actually might be.” After I’d supposed the movie an all-audiences story, however, I did go so far as to look it up on a Ghibli fan site and noticed it had begun as an in-flight movie project “for tired, middle-aged men whose brain cells have turned to tofu,” which was also mentioned in the little booklet included in the “Steelbook” case. I had to acknowledge both Porco’s been-around-the-block character and this movie’s particular take on “Miyazaki heroines” might be seen as pitched in a certain way regardless of how familiarity with “the rest of anime” made them seem wholesome. That could get into the ticklishness of finding a balance between “specific audiences shouldn’t be stuck on the outside all the time” and “those who’ve had plenty of chances to easily identify with main characters might yet find it possible to identify with characters not so much like them.”
As I got started into this movie, though, I did get caught up in it. A part of that did have to do with the aerial animation, which might have had the risk of the more maundering moods “they sure don’t make things like that any more” can slide into. I did get to acknowledging the story winding up without any real “villains” in it; even “the threatening system of its time and place” was always off in the ominous distance. That had me reflecting on that other risk of “wanting a story to be one thing so much you never quite think about what it actually might be.” After I’d supposed the movie an all-audiences story, however, I did go so far as to look it up on a Ghibli fan site and noticed it had begun as an in-flight movie project “for tired, middle-aged men whose brain cells have turned to tofu,” which was also mentioned in the little booklet included in the “Steelbook” case. I had to acknowledge both Porco’s been-around-the-block character and this movie’s particular take on “Miyazaki heroines” might be seen as pitched in a certain way regardless of how familiarity with “the rest of anime” made them seem wholesome. That could get into the ticklishness of finding a balance between “specific audiences shouldn’t be stuck on the outside all the time” and “those who’ve had plenty of chances to easily identify with main characters might yet find it possible to identify with characters not so much like them.”
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Date: 2022-11-27 11:12 pm (UTC)Also, Fio is my favorite Miyazaki heroine.
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Date: 2022-11-28 02:15 am (UTC)(Still, I can certainly see your point about Fio.)
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Date: 2022-11-28 02:52 am (UTC)This is sort of ironic, because at work, I tend to overanalyze everything.