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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Shinkai (a rambly Hoshi wo Ou Kodomo review)
So, Makoto Shinkai. I used to not be a fan.
My first encounter with Shinkai was Voice of a Distant Star, which was based on a thought-provoking and utterly haunting premise (the length of time it takes to send and receive messages across the vast distances of space) but executed in the most anime-cliche-riddled, ridiculous way possible (cute teen girl in a cute school uniform fighting space aliens in a giant mecha and hallucinating the shit out of all of her emotional revelations really Shinkai?!?!). Then there was The Place Promised in Our Early Days, which was unbelievably stupid on almost every possible level - the characterizations sucked, the characters acted like plot-puppets instead of real people, the science-fiction elements were so stupid and poorly thought-out so as to be almost insulting the intelligence of the audience, and the dénouement of the film was anti-climatic yet at the same time utterly ridiculous. Yet for some reason this was the film that seemed to give everybody and their dog a massive throbbing boner for Shinkai and he was being praised left and right as "the next Miyazaki."
Well, I will say that Early Days was a very, very pretty film to look at. Gorgeously animated and just dripping with beauty from every frame. But the story and the characters and the sci-fi elements were just. so. bad.
I was so disappointed by The Place Promised in Our Early Days that I admit I decided not to waste my time on 5 Centimeters per Second.
But a lot of people whose taste I admire were gushing about Shinkai's latest film, Children Who Chase Lost Voices Deep Below, and the film was specifically recced to me as a film that was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING LIKE any of Shinkai's previous films. Well heck, I didn't like Shinkai's previous films, so as far as I'm concerned, "this movie is absolutely nothing like anything Shinkai has made before" is a good enough reason for me to try it.
And wow, you guys. This film. I have a lot of feelings about this film.
To start with, I guess maybe I should try to describe the film a little bit? Or at least explain the hook? The problem is, that's kind of hard to do without giving too much away. The best that I can say is this: It's What Dreams May Come by way of Studio Ghibli with a color palette by Thomas Kinkade.
Our Heroine is a young girl named Asuna who lives in rural Japan. One day she encounters a mysterious boy who claims to be from Agartha, a mystical world buried beneath our world. Asuna and the boy briefly hang out together. They make a profound emotional connection. And then he dies.
Later, Asuna encounters a substitute teacher at her school who is obsessed with myth/folklore stories from across cultures about journeying to the Underworld in order to bring back somebody who has died. As it turns out, he believes that Agartha exists. In fact, he's heard of it plenty of times before. And he came to Asuna's school searching for an entrance to Agartha, where he believes it will be possible to bring his beloved wife back from the dead. He starts to plant the idea in Asuna's head that if she entered Agartha with him, maybe she could bring her friend back from the dead too.
Yeah, I bet you can all see where this is going.
It takes about half an hour for Asuna and her teacher to finally make it to Agartha/the Underworld. The majority of the film is about their journey through the Underworld, in which they encounter gods, monsters, and ordinary humans - but no actual dead people. Nope, there are no souls of the deceased in Agartha. In order to bring back someone from the dead, Asuna and her teacher have to overcome impossible odds to make it all the way to the literal End of the Underworld, and then make that request directly to the face of God himself. That's God with a capital G.
And I also don't think that I'm spoiling anything by giving away the Moral of the Story, which is that death is a natural and inevitable part of life, and that truly loving someone means being able to say goodbye to them. The film embraces the idea that it's important to let yourself feel grief when you lose somebody that you love, but that eventually you have to be able to move on and continue to enjoy life without that person.
The film is utterly predictable at every turn, yet somehow that never actually detracts from the experience of watching the story unfold. I think that's largely because this is the first time that I've actually enjoyed a Shinkai film on an emotional level. The characters act like real people and not like plot-puppets! They have complex emotions and form complicated, nuanced relationships with each other! The audience knows from the outset that both Asuna and her teacher are doomed to fail their quest, but we still feel for them, sometimes achingly so, every step of the way.
And in addition to, you know, actually having a non-stupid plot and emotionally resonant characters (which were both severely lacking in Distant Star and Early Days), Children Who Chase also has that one thing that every Shinkai film does so deliciously well: It's a fucking gorgeous film. Sumptuous backgrounds, amazing use of light and color, some awesomely well-animated action sequences: From the ordinary settings like the kitchen in Asuna's home to the extraordinary settings like the otherworldy vistas in Agartha, every frame of the film is a feast for the eyes. Well, there is one notable exception, but we'll get to that in a minute.
Now, let's talk about what I didn't like about the film. Because Shinkai has a habit of mucking up his films with Extraordinarily Fucking Stupid directorial choices (hi Distant Star!) and boy does this film provide some moments that really make you wonder what Shinkai was smoking when he decided to roll with that shit.
First, Shinkai apparently couldn't decide upon a time period to set his film in, so he apparently decided to go for ALL OF THEM. Asuna clearly lives in contemporary Japan, yet her middle-aged Japanese teacher flashes back to having fought in what looks suspiciously like World War I. Yes, that's right. Not the second World War, but the first one. Even more confusing, his wife dresses like she lives in the nineteenth century. I'm not even kidding about that. Maybe it was a personality quirk of hers, or maybe Shinkai thinks that every beautiful doomed lost love interest should dress like a late-nineteenth century British schoolmarm. Either way, Shinkai's choice of giving this particular character a wardrobe from the WRONG FUCKING CENTURY is so distracting that it threw me right out of the movie every time that I saw it. This is particularly egregious when it happens right in the middle of a scene that should have been the emotional climax of the film. But it was kind of hard to feel for the characters in that moment when my brain was stuck on "Jesus Christ why the hell is she dressed like that?!"
Second, in the first half hour of the film there's this utterly disposable subplot about a Shadowy Secret Organization interested in proving the existence of Agartha to the rest of the world for... reasons, I guess. Anyway, this scary secret organization have a lot of guns. They also have a lot of men in black suits and sunglasses. They also have a lot more men in gas masks and combat gear. At one point in the movie, Asuna is literally chased by one of the organization's helicopters that is shooting a machine gun at her. The scary secret organization happens to be named Arch Angel, again for.... reasons.
Arch Angel is so out of place within the film and so discordant with every other element in the story that, again, every time I see them onscreen I just get thrown out of the story again. There was also absolutely no reason for them to be in the movie. The in-story justification for Arch Angel's inclusion in the plot is that Asuna's teacher joins Arch Angel solely so that he can gain access to the gateway to Agartha; once he's finally through the gate, he immediately defects from Arch Angel and we never hear about them again. But Arch Angel isn't anywhere near a necessary plot device in order to get the teacher to Agartha; he could just as easily have been, say, an eccentric academic who followed Asuna to the gateway by himself.
My final nitpick about the film is the depiction of God with a Capital G, who appears in the final five minutes. It's... Well. The nicest thing that I can say about it is that it is rather silly-looking. The meanest thing that I can say about it is that it's incredibly stupid-looking. Either way, it just doesn't work, so much so that it nearly ruins what should have been one of the most dramatic and powerful scenes in the movie. I know that Shinkai was clearly going for "creepy and unsettling" rather than "awe-inspiring," and the whole being-covered-with-a-thousand-eyes thing is clearly drawn from the Sanskrit literature that Shinkai seems to be basing his conception of God upon, but still... again, it doesn't succeed in being creepy or unsettling. It just looks silly.
In the end, the smaller flaws in this film seem to suffer from the same root cause as the much larger, more glaring flaws in Distant Star and Early Days: Namely, that Shinkai's love of blatantly otaku-pandering tropes and characterizations is really, really obvious in his works. And it's damn difficult to level that same accusation against that other animation director to which Shinkai is constantly compared, Hayao Miyazaki. In fact, Miyazaki is quite vocal with his contempt for otaku fan-pandering, and it shows in how delightfully non-fan-pandering his greatest films such as Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and Ponyo are. Shinkai, on the other hand... Well. Sad schoolgirls in cute uniforms in giant mecha. Tragic doomed female love interests who have no personality traits other than to be impossibly kind, loving, wise, and tragically doomed. Moe-moe damsels in both literal and emotional distress who need to be saved by the badass male protagonist. Shadowy secret organizations that exist for no purpose other than to be shadowy, secret, and vaguely sinister. My Gun Fetish, Let Me Show You It. These elements aren't nearly as overwhelmingly bad in Children Who Chase as they are in the other two Shinkai films that I've seen, but they're all still there in one way or another.
Yes, all of the preceding significantly detract from Children Who Chase Lost Voices Deep Below. But in the end, I still enjoyed the film. Despite its flaws, it's still a goddamn beautiful movie with an emotional moral that I think we can all universally relate to. It's a film that sticks with you for hours and even days after you watch it, despite being one of Shinkai's most simple and straight-forward films to date. Two of my friends that I watched the movie with were still talking about it when I saw them again today. Yes, it really is that kind of movie.
I liked it enough that I'm even willing to give Shinkai another second chance. I still don't think he's anywhere near deserving to be called "the next Miyazaki" and I still think that Mamoru Hosada can artistically kick Shinkai's ass clean across the room. But at least now I don't, you know, actively hate Shinkai's body of work. How could I, when his oeuvre now includes this wonderful gem of a movie?
I still haven't seen 5 Centimeters Per Second, though. Although because Children Who Chase convinced me that Shinkai can make a film that's actually, you know, good, I'm now seriously considering giving 5 Centimeters a try.
My first encounter with Shinkai was Voice of a Distant Star, which was based on a thought-provoking and utterly haunting premise (the length of time it takes to send and receive messages across the vast distances of space) but executed in the most anime-cliche-riddled, ridiculous way possible (cute teen girl in a cute school uniform fighting space aliens in a giant mecha and hallucinating the shit out of all of her emotional revelations really Shinkai?!?!). Then there was The Place Promised in Our Early Days, which was unbelievably stupid on almost every possible level - the characterizations sucked, the characters acted like plot-puppets instead of real people, the science-fiction elements were so stupid and poorly thought-out so as to be almost insulting the intelligence of the audience, and the dénouement of the film was anti-climatic yet at the same time utterly ridiculous. Yet for some reason this was the film that seemed to give everybody and their dog a massive throbbing boner for Shinkai and he was being praised left and right as "the next Miyazaki."
Well, I will say that Early Days was a very, very pretty film to look at. Gorgeously animated and just dripping with beauty from every frame. But the story and the characters and the sci-fi elements were just. so. bad.
I was so disappointed by The Place Promised in Our Early Days that I admit I decided not to waste my time on 5 Centimeters per Second.
But a lot of people whose taste I admire were gushing about Shinkai's latest film, Children Who Chase Lost Voices Deep Below, and the film was specifically recced to me as a film that was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING LIKE any of Shinkai's previous films. Well heck, I didn't like Shinkai's previous films, so as far as I'm concerned, "this movie is absolutely nothing like anything Shinkai has made before" is a good enough reason for me to try it.
And wow, you guys. This film. I have a lot of feelings about this film.
To start with, I guess maybe I should try to describe the film a little bit? Or at least explain the hook? The problem is, that's kind of hard to do without giving too much away. The best that I can say is this: It's What Dreams May Come by way of Studio Ghibli with a color palette by Thomas Kinkade.
Our Heroine is a young girl named Asuna who lives in rural Japan. One day she encounters a mysterious boy who claims to be from Agartha, a mystical world buried beneath our world. Asuna and the boy briefly hang out together. They make a profound emotional connection. And then he dies.
Later, Asuna encounters a substitute teacher at her school who is obsessed with myth/folklore stories from across cultures about journeying to the Underworld in order to bring back somebody who has died. As it turns out, he believes that Agartha exists. In fact, he's heard of it plenty of times before. And he came to Asuna's school searching for an entrance to Agartha, where he believes it will be possible to bring his beloved wife back from the dead. He starts to plant the idea in Asuna's head that if she entered Agartha with him, maybe she could bring her friend back from the dead too.
Yeah, I bet you can all see where this is going.
It takes about half an hour for Asuna and her teacher to finally make it to Agartha/the Underworld. The majority of the film is about their journey through the Underworld, in which they encounter gods, monsters, and ordinary humans - but no actual dead people. Nope, there are no souls of the deceased in Agartha. In order to bring back someone from the dead, Asuna and her teacher have to overcome impossible odds to make it all the way to the literal End of the Underworld, and then make that request directly to the face of God himself. That's God with a capital G.
And I also don't think that I'm spoiling anything by giving away the Moral of the Story, which is that death is a natural and inevitable part of life, and that truly loving someone means being able to say goodbye to them. The film embraces the idea that it's important to let yourself feel grief when you lose somebody that you love, but that eventually you have to be able to move on and continue to enjoy life without that person.
The film is utterly predictable at every turn, yet somehow that never actually detracts from the experience of watching the story unfold. I think that's largely because this is the first time that I've actually enjoyed a Shinkai film on an emotional level. The characters act like real people and not like plot-puppets! They have complex emotions and form complicated, nuanced relationships with each other! The audience knows from the outset that both Asuna and her teacher are doomed to fail their quest, but we still feel for them, sometimes achingly so, every step of the way.
And in addition to, you know, actually having a non-stupid plot and emotionally resonant characters (which were both severely lacking in Distant Star and Early Days), Children Who Chase also has that one thing that every Shinkai film does so deliciously well: It's a fucking gorgeous film. Sumptuous backgrounds, amazing use of light and color, some awesomely well-animated action sequences: From the ordinary settings like the kitchen in Asuna's home to the extraordinary settings like the otherworldy vistas in Agartha, every frame of the film is a feast for the eyes. Well, there is one notable exception, but we'll get to that in a minute.
Now, let's talk about what I didn't like about the film. Because Shinkai has a habit of mucking up his films with Extraordinarily Fucking Stupid directorial choices (hi Distant Star!) and boy does this film provide some moments that really make you wonder what Shinkai was smoking when he decided to roll with that shit.
First, Shinkai apparently couldn't decide upon a time period to set his film in, so he apparently decided to go for ALL OF THEM. Asuna clearly lives in contemporary Japan, yet her middle-aged Japanese teacher flashes back to having fought in what looks suspiciously like World War I. Yes, that's right. Not the second World War, but the first one. Even more confusing, his wife dresses like she lives in the nineteenth century. I'm not even kidding about that. Maybe it was a personality quirk of hers, or maybe Shinkai thinks that every beautiful doomed lost love interest should dress like a late-nineteenth century British schoolmarm. Either way, Shinkai's choice of giving this particular character a wardrobe from the WRONG FUCKING CENTURY is so distracting that it threw me right out of the movie every time that I saw it. This is particularly egregious when it happens right in the middle of a scene that should have been the emotional climax of the film. But it was kind of hard to feel for the characters in that moment when my brain was stuck on "Jesus Christ why the hell is she dressed like that?!"
Second, in the first half hour of the film there's this utterly disposable subplot about a Shadowy Secret Organization interested in proving the existence of Agartha to the rest of the world for... reasons, I guess. Anyway, this scary secret organization have a lot of guns. They also have a lot of men in black suits and sunglasses. They also have a lot more men in gas masks and combat gear. At one point in the movie, Asuna is literally chased by one of the organization's helicopters that is shooting a machine gun at her. The scary secret organization happens to be named Arch Angel, again for.... reasons.
Arch Angel is so out of place within the film and so discordant with every other element in the story that, again, every time I see them onscreen I just get thrown out of the story again. There was also absolutely no reason for them to be in the movie. The in-story justification for Arch Angel's inclusion in the plot is that Asuna's teacher joins Arch Angel solely so that he can gain access to the gateway to Agartha; once he's finally through the gate, he immediately defects from Arch Angel and we never hear about them again. But Arch Angel isn't anywhere near a necessary plot device in order to get the teacher to Agartha; he could just as easily have been, say, an eccentric academic who followed Asuna to the gateway by himself.
My final nitpick about the film is the depiction of God with a Capital G, who appears in the final five minutes. It's... Well. The nicest thing that I can say about it is that it is rather silly-looking. The meanest thing that I can say about it is that it's incredibly stupid-looking. Either way, it just doesn't work, so much so that it nearly ruins what should have been one of the most dramatic and powerful scenes in the movie. I know that Shinkai was clearly going for "creepy and unsettling" rather than "awe-inspiring," and the whole being-covered-with-a-thousand-eyes thing is clearly drawn from the Sanskrit literature that Shinkai seems to be basing his conception of God upon, but still... again, it doesn't succeed in being creepy or unsettling. It just looks silly.
In the end, the smaller flaws in this film seem to suffer from the same root cause as the much larger, more glaring flaws in Distant Star and Early Days: Namely, that Shinkai's love of blatantly otaku-pandering tropes and characterizations is really, really obvious in his works. And it's damn difficult to level that same accusation against that other animation director to which Shinkai is constantly compared, Hayao Miyazaki. In fact, Miyazaki is quite vocal with his contempt for otaku fan-pandering, and it shows in how delightfully non-fan-pandering his greatest films such as Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and Ponyo are. Shinkai, on the other hand... Well. Sad schoolgirls in cute uniforms in giant mecha. Tragic doomed female love interests who have no personality traits other than to be impossibly kind, loving, wise, and tragically doomed. Moe-moe damsels in both literal and emotional distress who need to be saved by the badass male protagonist. Shadowy secret organizations that exist for no purpose other than to be shadowy, secret, and vaguely sinister. My Gun Fetish, Let Me Show You It. These elements aren't nearly as overwhelmingly bad in Children Who Chase as they are in the other two Shinkai films that I've seen, but they're all still there in one way or another.
Yes, all of the preceding significantly detract from Children Who Chase Lost Voices Deep Below. But in the end, I still enjoyed the film. Despite its flaws, it's still a goddamn beautiful movie with an emotional moral that I think we can all universally relate to. It's a film that sticks with you for hours and even days after you watch it, despite being one of Shinkai's most simple and straight-forward films to date. Two of my friends that I watched the movie with were still talking about it when I saw them again today. Yes, it really is that kind of movie.
I liked it enough that I'm even willing to give Shinkai another second chance. I still don't think he's anywhere near deserving to be called "the next Miyazaki" and I still think that Mamoru Hosada can artistically kick Shinkai's ass clean across the room. But at least now I don't, you know, actively hate Shinkai's body of work. How could I, when his oeuvre now includes this wonderful gem of a movie?
I still haven't seen 5 Centimeters Per Second, though. Although because Children Who Chase convinced me that Shinkai can make a film that's actually, you know, good, I'm now seriously considering giving 5 Centimeters a try.
no subject
It has pretty backgrounds too, but also worse. At least The Place Promised was giving me eyegasm every second, 5cm I remember it as the biggest losing of time I have had the disgrace of watching.
I'm curious about Children Who Chase. I loved What Dreams May Come and I will mostly like anything that is similar to it. And your review makes it seem at the least worth watching.
no subject
Honestly though, I tried 5 cm. I fell asleep 20 minutes into the movie. Im not joking I actually fell asleep and I woke up when the credits were rolling |:
no subject
Shinkai apparently couldn't decide upon a time period to set his film in, so he apparently decided to go for ALL OF THEM
I am now picturing Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei-like anachronisms. It works there because it's all ridiculous anyway. Are the anachronisms concentrated in such a way to show a specific character is "living in the past"? Regarding how the dead wife dresses... considering the moral you mentioned about moving on, could it be to symbolically blatantly show that she belongs to the teacher's past? In a redundant and unnecessary manner, I suppose. Symbolic hyperbole. That's all I can think of to maybe excuse it. But if it's sloppily done, it would fall apart.
no subject
In Enzo's review of the film there isn't a perfectly clear screenshot of the wife for me to mooch off of, but here's a blurry one: http://randomc.net/image/Hoshi%20o%20Ou%20Kodomo/Hoshi%20o%20Ou%20Kodomo%20-%20Movie%20-%20Large%2072.jpg So yeah, as you can see, she's definitely dressed for the wrong century.
But I rather like your interpretation. Maybe that really was what Shinkai was going for and it flew right over my head!
no subject
It'll work if he clustered the anachronisms around the relevant characters, especially if it's during relevant dialogue. If they're willy-nilly, it will fall apart.