7 years ago
Studio Ghibli 10
The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: “Ponyo”
At this point in the retrospective, Studio Ghibli has been somewhat capitalizing on its international success by choosing distinctly western fictions to adapt, their last two films Howl's Moving Castle and Tales From Earthsea being adaptations of distinctly Br...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: “Tales From Earthsea”
As has already been documented on the Retrospective, I wasn't as big a fan of Isao Takahata's Pom Poko or Hiroyuki Morita's The Cat Returns as many others were; but neither of them were explicitly "bad" movies. While I wasn't particularly amused by Pom Poko's ...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: “Howl’s Moving Castle”
Throughout this retrospective, I've talked at length about Miyazaki's visual and thematic fascination with flight. But I haven't talked as much of another somewhat consistent image in the famed animators' work: castles. We certainly have obvious choices like t...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: “The Cat Returns”
Hiroyuki Morita's The Cat Returns is the second film from Studio Ghibli to not be directed by company co-founders Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. It is also, for my money, the weakest film to come out of Studio Ghibli that I've seen (though keep in mind that...
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“The Wind Rises”: A Gorgeous Film That Doesn’t Take Off
The following review has been republished from our AFI Film Festival coverage. It reviews the original Japanese dub, and not the newly released English dub.
If The Wind Rises is truly Hayao Miyazaki's last film (and remember, this is the seventh time that h...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: ‘Spirited Away’
Nothing sad happens in the opening fifteen minutes of Hayao Miyazaki's eighth feature film Spirited Away. Nothing really even happens until the very end of the opening, where a traumatic event occurs to our protagonist that will change her life forever, but it...
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How We Fell In Love With the Movies
'Tis the day of love, this February 14th, and thus we'll all be focusing on the loves that make our lives worth while, whether they exist or not. But no matter how many times your heart is broken by another person, you could at least always count on great movi...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: ‘My Neighbors the Yamadas’
A family distilled
In ink and paper
We all rise to the clouds
Joined in laughter
Forever
~Dumb Haiku by Christopher Runyon
A haiku, as most readers hopefully know, is a Japanese poem meant to lyrically juxtapose two images or ideas with just a few lines ...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: ‘Princess Mononoke’
Studio Ghibli was constantly proving what animation could be capable of, but it took 12 years for them to produce their first real "epic". If other works of Japanese anime like Akira and Ghost in the Shell showed how animation could bring stunning sci-fi visio...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: ‘Whisper of the Heart’
Whisper of the Heart. What a lovely title for a story. Simple, poetic, and evocative of how beautifully transient the simplest of moments can be. It also best describes the appeal of Yoshifumi Kondô's short-lived legacy as an animator: he came and went like a ...
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