What I want to analyze here is Studio Ghibli, represented by Hayao Miyazaki.
Japanese anime works are a combination of reality and claimIt is the reincarnation of objective phenomena and the subjective worldIt is an artistic way to deconstruct the real world with a virtual plot
I still remember that I started with Japanese comic movies from Miyazaki, I like every character in his comics, and I even only know Miyazaki but I don't know the Ghibli behind him, and then through "Your Name", I began to pay attention to Makoto Shinkai, a high school student in his anime, beautiful love, and then I was completely intoxicated by Jin Min's dreams, and I felt that Jin Min's anime was more suitable for adults.
As a god-level figure in the Japanese comic film industry, Hayao Miyazaki has gone from "Castle in the Sky" to "My Neighbor Totoro" to "Spirited Away" to the recently re-released "Ponyo on the Cliff" and other works "The Wind Rises", "Princess Mononoke", "H'er's Moving Castle", "Porco Rosso", etc., it is not difficult to see the theme that Miyazaki wants to show - anti-war and love for nature, which is the most obvious feature of his works, and it is also the significance of the times that Studio Ghibli behind him wants to convey.
The protagonists in these works are often played by objects that are not in the real human world, such as Porco Rosso, My Neighbor Totoro, Faceless Man, Princess Mononoke abandoned by humans, Ponyo from the sea, Kiki from the magical world, and Hal with magic. Then the two of the human world and the non-human world have a special feeling, maybe love, maybe friendship.
GhibliFounded in 1985, it was originally affiliated with Tokuma Shoten, located in Koganei City, a suburb of Tokyo, Japan, and currently has 300 employees, co-ordinated by Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, Toshio Suzuki, etc., and the studio is identified as Totoro. The first film to hit the box office for Ghibli was The Witch Courier Service, followed by Fairy Tale of Time, Porco Rosso, and Spirited Away, all of which were huge successes. Almost every work of Ghibli has high scores, even Jun Miyazaki's least optimistic movie "Hearing the Waves", which has a score of 8 on Douban1 point.
At Ghibli, in addition to Miyazaki, I would like to mention another director, Isao Takahata, in whose works I only watched "Grave of the Fireflies", "Fairy Tale of the Years", "The Tale of Kaguyahime" and "Mary and the Witch's Flower", and the first three were the most impressive. At the beginning of "Grave of the Fireflies", this memory is opened in the voice of the dead protagonist, how he lost his father and mother in the war, then lost his sister, and finally lost himself, in the theme of Ghibli's anti-war works, I personally think that this one is the most intuitive reflection of the war on human beings.
In the fairy tale of the years, the 27-year-old Taeko returned to the countryside of her childhood, which also evoked her past memories, so following Taeko's footsteps, we also recalled how we spent our childhood?
Major works of GhibliHayao Miyazaki
Lupin III: City of Cagliostro 1979
Valley of the Wind, 1984
Castle in the Sky, 1986
My Neighbor Totoro, 1988
The Witch Courier Service 1989
Porco Rosso, 1992
Princess Mononoke 1997
Spirited Away, 2001
Howl's Moving Castle, 2004
Ponyo on the Cliff 2008
The Wind Rises 2013
Isao Takahata
Grave of the Fireflies, 1988
A Fairy Tale of the Years 1991
Variety Tanuki 1994
My Neighbor Yamada-kun" 1999
Kaguya Monogatari 2013
Mary and the Witch's Flowers, 2017
Hiromasa Yonebayashi
The Villain Who Borrowed Things, Arietti, 2010
Marnie in Memory 2014
Mochizuki Zhichong
Hear the Waves, 1993
Yoshifumi Kondo
Listen to the Ear, 1995
Hiroyuki Morita
The Cat's Kindness, 2002
Kaguya Monogatari is another masterpiece contributed by Isao Takahata to Ghibli, based on the ancient Japanese folk tale "The Tale of Taketori", which took up to 8 years to produce. It can be seen that this masterpiece is different from Ghibli's common painting style, there is no saturated color, but the use of pencil lines, plus ink, faintly depicts each character, writing an allegory of growth and love.
Nature is like a mother feeding human beings, and the protagonist bamboo comes from nature, so she was born to be a companion with flowers, insects, birds and beasts, dancing in this world. The baby that has not changed in the hands of the old man is picked up by the old woman and begins to grow, perhaps only the motherhood of the old woman can stimulate the growth of bamboo, and in turn the bamboo gives the old woman the ability to produce breast milk, this is a one-to-one childless old couple, the old man, natural care, if the bamboo is a gift from nature to them, then this gift that makes the old woman a mother is also given by nature.
Bamboo's first life was spent running in the mountains and fields, she and her friends were stealing melons in the garden, singing in the sunset fields, seeing birds, having Brother Shemaru hunting, seeing shiitake mushrooms, and thinking of making game hot pot, what a wonderful time it was. (It also reminds me of Lu Xun's intercalary soil in the fields under the moon).
The second life, a life bound by layers of heavy kimonos. She was arranged to learn etiquette, smile without showing her teeth, and were not allowed to have vulgar behaviors such as "sweating". She wandered back and forth between indulgence and bondage, and finally decided to return to the place where she came from because of the Emperor's compulsion. Every man who pursues her wants to show her his unswerving loyalty, but every one of them is just coveting beauty, cowardly and incompetent, and bamboo was born not to belong to this capital, how can it be distinguished from the laity. She doesn't want to be anyone's accessory, the men of that era married beautiful women home just to be beautiful accessories, for people to enjoy and have fun, especially in ancient Japan, women are just men's accessories, tool people, they obey all the arrangements of their husbands, gentle, virtuous, soft-spoken, and this traditional cultural foundation still exists in Japan, so this animation can be said to borrow the mouth of bamboo to shout out the independence of women.
Bamboo and shemaru. They were childhood sweethearts and fell in love with each other, but when they finally met again, her brother Shemaru had already married and had children, even if Takeko didn't leave in the end, I don't think they would be together, Takeko is an independent woman who doesn't want to do any accessories, back to reality, Brother Shemaru already has a wife, will Takeshi be willing to be his concubine? So that part became a dream, in that dream, Brother Shamaru was still alone, he only had bamboo in his heart, he could embrace bamboo with bamboo, soar between heaven and earth, just the two of them; In the dream, Takeko took off the kimono that bound her, and she was truly free. I think this last paragraph may be a dream specially created by the director for fans in order to make up for the audience's uneasiness. So when he woke up, a clear and loud "Daddy" pulled him back to reality, and told him with certainty that it was just a dream, but the life in this dream was the life he really wanted. This dream satisfies us and we also satisfy Brother Shamaru.
The last part of flying to the moon may be a reference to the myth of our Chang'e going to the moon, or even the same. In the eyes of the immortals who came up from the moon, human beings are filthy places, and only those who have made mistakes in the Moon Palace are sent to the human world to be punished, but when Bamboo is about to leave, she says to the immortals: The human world is not a filthy place. At least she had felt happiness and the love given by the old man and his wife.
The old man and his wife looked at their daughter who had been carefully raised, but because they thought that bamboo was born as a "little princess" and insisted on going their own way, they finally let this daughter leave them, and in the following days, how should the old man and his wife spend the next few days after losing their daughter. In the end, the little maid took a group of people to sing nursery rhymes when she was a child, and let us recall her childhood, the little person grew into a slim girl, and it is difficult not to feel how she grew from a baby to a girl, from daily laughter to silence, and at the same time to think about what kind of life we want to live. And this little maid may be the only person in Kyoto who understands her besides her mother, whether it is picking cherry blossoms for her, going out with her, or finally she leads the singing of nursery rhymes to see the bamboo leave.
This is not an animation that a ten-year-old child can understand, nor is it an animation that a junior high school student can understand, but an animation that you need to have a certain life experience and a certain understanding of life to savor slowly. It not only shows the motif of Ghibli's animation, but also adds a lot of traditional Japanese cultural heritage, and this animation style with a light ink almost sketch creates a strong cultural atmosphere.
And in Ghibli's other two works, "Listen to the Ear" and "Hear the Waves", both tell us the love story of our student days. In Kondo Yoshifumi's "Listen Closely", Tsukishima Wen in the third year of junior high school and Seiji, who is one year older than her, they have their own pursuits, Tsukishima Wen has been struggling in order to keep up with Seiji's footsteps, and at the end of the film, the two also made a promise to get married in a few years. In this animation, many details of the characters, about the language, behavior and demeanor are all suitable for us at that age, we will blush because of a word from the opposite sex, and then twist, read it in small pieces, but have some expectations for each other's behavior in our hearts, and even consciously show the impact of family education on children in this animation. In Tomomitsu Mochizuki's "Hearing the Waves", it is also a love affair of a high school student, but that kind of feeling is not revealed, but it seems to permeate between two people, what happens in the film is the bits and pieces of high school in our ordinary life, maybe it's the exam rankings, maybe it's an escape, maybe it's a physical education class.
The next issue will talk about the anime of Makoto Shinkai and Satoshi Kon.