A bleak look at food consumption through Onze’s blend of animation and photography.
Tag Archives: Animation
SATURDAY SHORT: BABOON (2011)
A man with a camera approaches another and gets punched in the face. It gets satisfyingly creepy and disjointed from there.
Content Warning: This short contains some violence and poorly drawn nudity.
CAPSULE: PORCO ROSSO (1992)
DIRECTED BY: Hayao Miyazaki
FEATURING: Voices of Michael Keaton, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, Cary Elwes, Susan Egan (English dub)
PLOT: A bounty-hunting pig-man (a victim of an unexplained curse) flies his seaplane through the Adriatic between World Wars, battling air pirates and a hotshot American rival.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Although it has its strange, and its sublime, moments, I would rate this as flying pig oddity as relatively minor Miyazaki—which, of course, means it’s still well worth seeking out.
COMMENTS: Porco Rosso is set in a precise, but unreal, historical place and time: the Italian Adriatic, in between the great wars. But its pig-man hero isn’t the only fantastic element here. In this alternate history, the Adriatic sea is its own far-flung multi-island kingdom with its own political intrigues, a realm where seaplane pilots are legendary demigods, like the mythologized gunfighters of Westerns. The local hot spot is a floating hotel only accessible by watercraft, with a valet to parks seaplanes. There are Italian fascists and references to WWI, but this universe evolves out of old movies rather than history: it’s a mixture of Casablanca and romantic aviation movies like Wings or Hell’s Angels, a world where you expect to see the Red Baron and Mata Hari sharing a drink in the corner of a flyboy saloon.
Although with its Humphrey Bogart-esque antihero Porco Rosso often seems more adult-oriented than Miyazaki’s usual fare, at other times the drawing style and caricatures are more indebted to Saturday morning cartoons than his later work. Observe the big-mouthed, howling anime schoolkids, and the cartoonish, kid-like antics of the pirate buffoons, who are drawn as goggles and pillars of teeth surrounded by bristles. Despite the flying duels and machine guns, the danger level here is minimal: no one dies onscreen, and the abducted schoolgirls treat their capture by pirates as a fantastic adventure, hanging out in the gun turret with their captors and screaming “whee!” as they dive off the stranded plane into a giant life preserver. The mixed tones are odd, but Miyazaki makes them harmonize well.
Clearly, the weirdest element of Porco Rosso is its hero’s porcine curse, which is never fully explained and is scarcely even wondered at by the movie’s denizens. Perhaps his piggish visage only reflects the way Porco sees himself. Perhaps the curse is the result of a mystical vision he saw after he was the only survivor of a massive dogfight, where he saw dozens of fighter pilots soaring upwards to heaven. Whatever the cause of his condition, symbolically, his bestiality sets Porco apart from ordinary citizens: “laws don’t mean anything to a pig,” he explains. Still, his snout and porky complexion can’t keep this charismatic pig from having two love interests, and there is an ambiguous suggestion at the ending that he may regain his humanity. I doubt Miyazaki was aware of the English-language idiom “when pigs fly,” meaning something so exceedingly rare as to be impossible, when he conceived Porco Rosso. Still, it’s probably safe to say you’ll enjoy this movie when pigs fly.
In 2015, Disney upgraded Porco Rosso to Blu-ray.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
LIST CANDIDATE: POM POKO (1994)
DIRECTED BY: Isao Takahata
FEATURING: (Disney dub) voices of Maurice LaMarche, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Clancy Brown, Tress MacNeille
PLOT: A community of shapeshifting “racoons” struggle to deal with suburban encroachment on their forest homes, inventing schemes that range from arranging hauntings to all-out war.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: To Westerners, much of the weirdness in Pom Poko comes from their unfamiliarity with Japanese folklore; however, there is a far deeper and more affecting strain of strangeness here than can be explained simply by culture clash. The hallucinatory “monster parade” sequence alone could be enough to put Pom Poko over the top.
COMMENTS: Written by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by Isao “Grave of the Fireflies” Takahata, Pom Poko was an all-star effort from Studio Ghibli. It’s also one of their most Japanese productions, made with no eye for how it might play for Western audiences, and it’s richer for indulging its indigenous roots. The epic story tracks the struggles of a band of tanuki (translated in the English dub as “racoons,” although the species is more closely related to dogs than to racoons) against the deforestation of their homes by the suburbs expanding outward from Tokyo. The tale embodies Miyazaki’s environmentalist concerns, although the mood is not so much one of activism as it is of melancholy. Since tanuki are spirit creatures, ancient tricksters who transform to play pranks on humans, their decimation symbolizes not only the degradation of the natural world, but also of the spiritual world, whose frontier continually recedes in modern times in the name of progress. The eventual fate of the tanuki is reminiscent of the Elves of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, as they cede their turn as the dominant culture to Men with reluctant dignity.
The tanuki are famous shapeshifters, and Pom Poko‘s creatures come in at least three forms: the quadrupedal state that we humans are familiar with; the anthropomorphic bipedal form in which they spend most of their time for exposition purposes; and, when they’re in a partying mood, the animals spontaneously shift into happy-faced teddy bears. That’s not counting the infinite variety of shapes gifted tanuki can take with practice; the best of them can even pass among us as humans. Watching their transmogrification training regimen, as young male tanuki show an unflattering aptitude for shifting into female forms, provides much of the comedy in the first few reels. Tanuki, though noble creatures, are also the buffoons of the spirit animal world. The helpful narration explains that they are basically lazy and hedonistic, somewhat gullible (Japanese children are able to trick them into revealing themselves by singing songs), and that they find hamburgers irresistible. Obviously, not all of this is strictly folkloric, but the mixture of legend and anime tropes makes for a surprisingly rich milieu: comic, tragic, and alien all at the same time.
Of course, it’s difficult for Westerners to discuss Takahata‘s tanuki without addressing their oft-prominent testicles, depictions of which have infamously given rise to the movie being described by immature sorts as “that raccoon ball movie.” Even worse than seeing the cartoon testicles is the fact that male tanuki occasionally stretch their scrotums to enormous proportions, large enough to serve as a parachute or a welcome mat for dozens of their fellows. That’s the perfect example of the film’s culture shock value. Other sequences from the film show cross-cultural weirdness, however, like the tanuki’s Nintendo presentation on their shrinking habitat, or the time they lured corporate functionaries into their Escher-esque flying cat shrine to steal a million dollars worth of yen. And the five-minute phantasmagorical “monster parade” of skeletal horses, fire-breathing tigers, and various misshapen yokai must be seen to be believed. Overall, Pom Poko is a remarkable adventure in Japanese mythology that is all the more involving because it makes no concessions to Western audiences.
Disney upgraded Pom Poko to Blu-ray in 2015. The film can be watched in the English dubbed version or in the original Japanese with subtitles.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SPONGE OUT OF WATER (2015)
DIRECTED BY: Paul Tibbitt
FEATURING: Tom Kenny, Antonio Banderas, Mr. Lawrence
PLOT: The irrepressible Spongebob Squarepants teams up with an old enemy to recover the stolen recipe for Krabby Patties.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: There’s just enough kiddie surrealism here to catch your eye, but not enough to justify awarding it any weird honors.
COMMENTS: For those who’ve been living in a cave far from the nearest ocean, “Spongebob Squarepants” is a popular American cartoon about an emotionally buoyant marine invertebrate who lives in a pineapple in an undersea town by the name of “Bikini Bottom.” His pals include a dimwitted starfish, a dyspeptic squid, and a squirrel from Texas who lives under a dome. The show’s “surreal” (by mainstream standards) humor, which coexists alongside an unironic cuteness, gives it a crossover appeal for heady adults. Hey, Max Schreck made a guest appearance on one episode, so it has to be somewhat hip, right?
Still, the second Spongebob feature-length movie (which debuts a full decade after the first one) caught me by surprise with its trippier aspects. The movie itself is a gimmicky mix of live action, CGI, and traditional 2D animation. It begins with pirate “Burger Beard” (Antonio Banderas) and his talking seagulls in an Indiana Jones-styled prologue, then moves to traditional animation as the story moves under the waves to Bikini Bottom. This segment of the movie, which features antagonist Plankton enacting one of his many schemes to try to steal the recipe for Krabby Patties, feels like an extended TV episode. Things get weirder when the recipe is successfully stolen by a third party, forcing Sponegbob and Plankton to team up to try to get it back as, bereft of its staple cuisine, Bikini Bottom slides into Mad Max-inspired anarchy. Their plan involves the construction of a time machine, and eventually results in their transformation into fish-out-of-water superheroes in an action-packed finale.
In between you get the really weird stuff: swirling psychedelic time-travel vortexes, a trip inside Bob’s saccharine brain, where talking Popsicles and kitty cats travel his candy-coated neural pathways and everyone vomits rainbows, and metanarrative shenanigans as characters magically rewrite the story as it happens. Strangest of all is a cameo from a cosmic space dolphin who, naturally, raps at the end of the movie. His name is Bubbles, he has a British accent, and I suspect he’s a member of the Illuminati. Although the 3-D renderings of the cartoon characters are meant to be the blockbuster highlights, it’s these small psycho moments that give the movie its lovably crazy texture. The semi-rationality of kid-logic is a close cousin dream-logic, and the best children’s films exploit this kinship. Kids laugh at the weirdest things, and you can, too.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: