Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Rewinding 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.”

Having daydreamed and imagined and anticipated for quite some time a grand scheme of “sampling TV anime through the years,” once I’d decided it was about time to record something definite it didn’t take long to set down just what sample episodes I’d watch. The idea of starting a little earlier by using the last weeks of this old year to watch some anime movies as well was more sudden, but picking “a film per decade, working backwards” wasn’t altogether difficult. There were more movies to choose from between some arbitrary calendar numbers than between others, of course. After having thought myself fortunate to have found a movie from the past three years I hadn’t seen yet, for the full calendrical decade before them I was ready to return to a movie I had seen before, Makoto Shinkai’s your name.

After getting to see that movie at the movies, I’d bought it on Blu-Ray only to have never quite gathered up the time to watch it again. In finding the resolve to return at last to “a lightly comedic tale of body-swapping that transitions into a long-distance relationship and then to reflections on loss and natural disaster,” I also found some details that had slipped my mind. The film did continue to look impressive even on a smaller screen, although sometimes I can wonder about “bits of the story not shown” even as I suppose that has some risk of “nitpicking as a cheap substitute for any sort of real, articulate analysis.” I did find myself still pondering thoughts I’d begun having as I’d settled on watching the movie, namely whether the movie’s box-office success and a certain amount of “Makoto Shinkai’s made something impressive enough to not just be ‘someone who made a short animation impressive for being a one-man project’ any more” had slackened all the worries that “we need, we demand, someone who can make respectable anime movies” and led to the realisation of other casually acceptable anime movies (and their official availability over here, too). Of course, there has been an undercurrent of “now Shinkai just has to do it again.” I did happen to notice a line near the end of your name that seemed to anticipate the more controversial conclusion of Weathering With You. That later movie remaining the last one I’ve seen in a theatre to date (and I’d much rather be able to mention that than the one I saw just before it) does leave me aware he should have a new film opening in Japan soon; I can at least think there’d be something to that new film being the one I return to a movie theatre for.

For 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.
( That’s show business )

My local library offers two different ebook lending services, although I do tend to use one of them for its digital comics, music, and some movie and TV shows; its selection of books can seem a little eccentric if not “thin.” It was a change there to happen on the late J.W. Rinzler’s last book, a biography of movie producer Howard Kazanjian. I have to admit to not hurrying to sign it out, though. There had been reports it provided extensive comments not just from Kazanjian, producer on Raiders of the Lost Ark and Return of the Jedi, but also Marcia Lucas, former wife of George, and she just happened to criticize the Star Wars prequel and sequel trilogies alike. This would be thoroughly satisfying for a specific subset of fans, but left me stuck having to “take the bad with the good” (even as I have to acknowledge other people again could be in a similar if not identical situation, and at least a few dedicated souls are intent on insisting they draw no distinctions and have learned to stop worrying and love everything).
( In the end, though... )

Novelty alone might have got my attention when Netflix began streaming a movie based on a manga but animated in France. A “live-action adaptation” would have been familiar enough. (A few years ago, I happened to see reports of a French movie based on a “localized” version of City Hunter from quite a while before.) So too would have been an “anime-esque cartoon”; the manga being adapted seemed rather different than the Western fan-creator “impressions of anime” I’m aware of (for all that I’m not opposed to them in principle). In being distinct from either of those possibilities, though, the movie did get me thinking again of the hand-wringing among English-speaking anime fans about animators in Japan being stretched to snapping. (I’ve seen interviews with European animators enlisted for the final ordeal of Wonder Egg Priority, although I do wonder if the writing was more of the ultimate issue with that series, and whether the three-month delay before the last episode was three months some people could still feel positive towards the show...) The notices for the movie seemed good even so, so I was willing to make The Summit of the Gods the latest thing eking my Netflix subscription along. I happened to watch it in the evening with wind audibly blowing outside, which might have added something to a movie about mountain climbing.
( Ever upward )

When “I could make a whirlwind tour through a century’s worth of animation from Japan in three months of my time” turned into “I will stop by a different decade by the calendar every weekend,” I knew I’d have to start with decades’ worth of animation screened in theatres. With that in mind, it wasn’t long until I’d decided that even in that later era of “half-hour shows for television” I ought to keep watching movies. Rounding out the twentieth century stayed as much a matter of small samples as ever, but I did happen to book some “two movies over two nights” double features.
( Four decades, six movies )

The peculiar Peanuts tribute comic Haircut Practice has been appearing online at longer and longer intervals, and I have to admit to a thought or two it’s coasting to a close. Today, though, there was another new comic, in which one of the nameless (or “name them yourself”) kids described a theory of his father’s “that every good movie as someone either falling in the water or someone getting really wet.” I now have to admit my thoughts settled all of a sudden and with some rapidity on “say, The Phantom Menace has Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan swimming underwater, doesn’t it? In Attack of the Clones, Obi-Wan is soaked by rain twice, and in Revenge of the Sith he falls into water. Oh, and Luke is pulled underwater in Star Wars: A New Hope and he jumps into water in The Empire Strikes Back.” Even with all of those somewhat smug thoughts, though, I did bump into the realization there doesn’t seem anything like that in Return of the Jedi... and then, for all that I’m relying on recollections of a single viewing apiece, I happened to recall “soaked by water” moments in The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. I suppose “setups for punchlines” can only be carried so far.

The production of animation might be better suited to a time of protective isolation than live action, but imagining the sheer work of putting things together one frame at a time leads to supposing a lot of files are being sent back and forth. (So far as “yearning for another time” with its potential risks goes, I’m aware that while animation can set up close conversations conventional methods have a hard time handling “crowds.”) The shorter a piece of animation is the easier it is to imagine individual people managing it, though, which reminds me of works close to home from the National Film Board of Canada.

A few days ago, I ran across a pointer to a new NFB short called “June Night,” credited to Mike Maryniuk, and was a bit intrigued by descriptions of cutout animation featuring the silent movie comedian Buster Keaton. The animation did give quite a sense of “reproduced images,” but I wondered about “time coming unmoored in isolation”; it did seem to last for much longer than the advertised running time would suggest. Maybe that just means something about it was going over my head. I was conscious of being aware of Keaton without having seen much of his work, stuck in a noisy era; I could spare a thought, though, of my latest effort to justify my Netflix subscription by watching Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. It dealt with a good bit more than just “the assembly line” I’d known it took on while casting back as well, and I was intrigued to spot a Mickey Mouse doll and think of two “worldwide comedic icons” meeting. By the end of the short, in any case, I’d recognized one of the first works featuring Keaton I’d seen, his much later short “The Railrodder.” That piece also happening to be an NFB production gave an odd sense that having chosen him for this new one felt less arbitrary all of a sudden.

A number of the sites preloaded into one of my RSS readers started mentioning a short film recreating the enigmatic final minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey for our current age of protective isolation. (The first of the Apple-focused sites does seem to be run by someone impressed with Stanley Kubrick’s cinema, although I wound up noticing just a bit of Apple product placement in the video.) I was impressed by the matchup, but did get to thinking Lydia Cambron’s apartment seemed a good enough place to spend time in, tidy, bright, and attractive. (There’s always the contrast between Kubrick’s artistic chambers and the more mundane contemporary hotel suite Arthur C. Clarke described in the novel, even if not that long ago I started wondering about a way to rationalize Dave Bowman’s aging on film. While I have to admit to an instinctive negative reaction to Clarke’s final novel on the subject suggesting all of a sudden “there was actually no travel to another solar system; it all happened inside the monolith,” I happened to imagine interpreting the movie as “Bowman’s already ceased to exist physically even if that happened in another solar system, and is relinquishing his mental image of himself.”)

There have been more anime movies getting “special limited theatrical screenings” lately, but even as I noticed them I hadn’t been managing the critical step of looking up if they were playing at theatres near me. That awareness built to enough of a push that when I started seeing notices about Weathering With You approaching, I did make the effort to check the web site for my nearest movie theatre’s chain. More than that, perhaps, I was able to watch “a few extra anime episodes” the weekend before and escape the weighty thought “I’m stuck on a weekly schedule” (with its associated worry all those half-hour, mass-produced TV episodes are “eroding my attention span.”) There were still, though, a few thoughts swimming through my mind that not only had the last time I’d managed to see an anime movie in a theatre been Your Name, by now Makoto Shinkai is “part of the establishment” and I’d have been better off in some obscure, perhaps only self-promoting way to have seen one of the movies I’d missed. Plenty of positive things have been said about Promare.

Still, I headed for the theatre on a mid-weekday evening, getting there in plenty of time. On checking the self-serve ticket kiosks, though, I saw just a few spaces still open at the lowest corners of the seating. A large and youthful crowd drifted into the theatre as I wondered if they were from an anime club at the local university or college, or in fact a high school organization (along with recalling the time I’d seen the Love Live movie with much less of an audience); the front row I was stuck in didn’t fill to capacity, but I didn’t try ascending the steps in the last minutes to see if anything else was left open. Peering up at the screen threatened to put a crick in my neck and might have distorted the picture even as I could sometimes pick out its pixels, but that could also have made the visuals that much more overwhelming.
( Some discussion of the ending )