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rainsometimes*weeps* Why are there so many cool manga and anime beginning with this letter? This will take forrrever...
edit: WHOOPS and I still forgot about Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea in the anime corner! to be updated.../edit
Phoenix by Osamu Tezuka
This monumental manga consists of twelve different and nominally self-contained stories spanning immense time periods from prehistory to a time in the far, far future*. All the stories feature the immortal firebird of the title in key ways, and have similar themes and even - through a use of Tezuka's "Star System" that might this time imply reincarnation - recurring characters across centuries. The time periods interweave, starting with the earliest then cutting to the latest, so that the movement is toward the present. Tezuka planned to make the final story one set in World War II, but died before he could get that far. Thus the work remains unfinished at a whole; but all the twelve stories he drew still have real beginnings, middles, and endings.
If you drink the blood of the Phoenix, the legend says you will live together. Thus many characters in these stories come to hunt the Phoenix; many are saved by her powers of resurrection and healing. People are greedy for power and immortality, but they may also seek a way for loved ones to survive. The questions of sins and guilt, of expiation and redemption, of sacrifice, cruelty and forgiveness and what is truly human return over and over. As with Tezuka's Buddha, the essential connectedness of all life and the immense tragedy of the common human inability to understand this is a constant recurring theme.
Like many reviewers (so unoriginal!), I found the fifth story, "Karma" (Ho-ō in the original), the richest and most impressive one, rivalling Buddha in impact. But all of the stories are rewarding, with intriguing formal aspects in some (like "Robe of Feathers" that's got the same "camera shot" all over, as if it's a play; or "Space" in the sequence where we follow a team of astronauts communicating, each one in their own separate isolated panel sequence) and very cool ideas (like the protagonist of "Resurrection" who suffers a brain injury where he sees all humans as weird rocklike beings, while machinelike robots look like people; or the entire plot structure of "Strange Beings). Phoenix is an essential manga reading experience in my opinion, not to be missed out on.
*In English, they're published in 11 volumes, while a twelfth volume titled "Early works" shows some of the same themes in a more conventional, rambling story set in Antiquity and reminiscent of "Princess Knight": to me it doesn't feel like part of Phoenix proper notwithstanding its use of the firebird.
Planetes by Makoto Yukimura
A low-key five-volume manga of the hard SF kind (the title is from the classical Greek planetes, wandering), set in a near future where we can travel to Mars regularly and our base on the moon is so established and large that people get born there. However, by then there's an awful lot of garbage from earlier trips in Earth's orbit, constantly putting space ships in danger. The protagonist Hachiroti "Hachimaki" Hoshino and his coworkers are a small close-knit team of garbage collectors who trawl the orbit to pick up all the debris they can find. Hachimaki's true goal is to get a spaceship all his own, though, and he knows the meagre salary he holds in his current position won't help him there, so he's looking to get out. The corporation they work for doesn't give them a lot of money, seeing their section as an unprofitable necessary evil they have because they're compelled by law, so they're quite understaffed. Meanwhile, some activists with terrorist methods are against all forms of space exploration and will do anything to sabotage it.
At first glance, this manga is quite down-to-earth for a space story, paying attention to actual physics - no sounds in space here! - and existing astronaut practices when they're not using what seems like quite plausible extrapolations to me (not that I'm an expert). But looking further, it looks deep into the main character's psychology and not only gets pretty damn thoughtful regarding both politics and emotions, but also has some arguably lightly surreal elements that to me felt poetic and right, not out of place (your mileages may vary).
The main character is a prickly sort at times, so focused on the goal that he can be downright cold to others, but IMO it's all the more interesting to see his development. Also, I for one really liked the love interest Ai Tanabe, who isn't quite as prominent as in the anime (she comes in much later, for one) but OTOH has her own unique backstory here. She's still a believer in the Power of Love, which I know not everyone finds appealing. Other coworkers Yuri and Fee are nicely portrayed as characters in their own right, with awesome badass moments (Fee) and heavy pasts (Yuri) of their own.
Pluto by Naoki Urasawa (artist and co-writer) and Takashi Nagasaki (co-writer)
Pluto is an odd duck of a manga in concept: Tezuka's Astro Boy as revisited by writer/artist Naoki Urasawa (also 20th Century Boys, Monster, and more) and co-writer Takashi Nagasaki. More specifically, what they have revisited is the storyline "The Greatest Robot On Earth" from 1965, probably the most popular story in Astro Boy's whole run. This featured the mysterious and unimaginably powerful robot Pluto, who menaces the seven most advanced robots in the world - one of whom is naturally Astro Boy.
All this and more of the basic set-up and the character cast is kept in the eight-volume Pluto remake, but there are also many changes/additions besides the art shift to Urasawa's very realistic style. For one, there's what TV Tropes calls a Perspective Flip, where original supporting character Gesicht, a German robot detective, is now the protagonist of the story and Astro - or rather Atom, keeping his original name - is a secondary (but still hugely important) character.
Intended for an older audience, Pluto actually doesn't so much introduce darkness to the story - it's already quite a dark-tinted one in the original - as make it more coherent and puts a clearer political frame on it, with a recent Central Asian War still traumatising the characters who took part in it and motivating some of them. The questions of robot rights, if robots have emotions, and just basically how robots and humans do, can and should relate to each other are always present. This also follows Tezuka's original, but here those questions are developed even further in that many of the robots look extremely humanlike and they are even allowed to have robot children. But can robots become so much like humans that they can feel hatred? And if they do, what will happen to humans? ...In the end, this story completely converted me from original skepticism to fully-fledged admiration, not to mention delight at seeing the new versions of the familiar characters and how they get put to use. I'm not sure how it would strike someone who's never read Astro Boy; but I'm strongly inclined to think the power and beauty of the story will still come through.
Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon by Naoko Takeuchi
I never read the Tokyopop version of the manga, nor checked scanlations, so the current Kodansha release is my first exposure to manga Sailor Moon. Hence, I'm only up to volume 7 at the moment. (For the record, I haven't seen all that much of the anime, either: bits and pieces of season 1 and 3, and the whole of season 5: that's it.)
Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon takes a while to hit its stride for me; the wispy art is not the kind that I find immediately appealing (though boy, are the covers ever pretty!!), and the first volumes in particular feel rather choppy and abrupt as storytelling, with elements and characters often quickly introduced and then quickly dealt with; also, many of the plot intrigues can be a bit hard to follow. The villains' plans in particular often sound rather far-fetched and wonky (though not moreso than in the anime). On the plus side, though, the arcs aren't too dragged out. And I do think that Takeuchi grows as a storyteller over these volumes, improving the way she presents and handles her characters and putting them to a stronger use, particularly emotionally. (I was surprised by how little I minded Chibi-Usa, for instance, who I understand used to be much disliked by anime-viewers. Also, Pluto is awesome.♥)
A real downside of these volumes is the way the translation has been handled, where the dialogue reads very stilted and unnatural to me. From what I've read online this isn't the translator's fault so much as Kodansha's, who apparently insist on a very literal wording throughout so as to be as "faithful" as possible to the original. If you ask me this is a very foolish policy. - Nevertheless, I still recommend them: far from the most amazing manga I've ever read, but quite fun - and sometimes quite touching - even so.
Princess Knight by Osamu Tezuka
This pic not actually used for the English volumes, sad to say.
Honestly, I think it's best not to expect too much from Tezuka's seminal shojo story: not only are essentialist gender views integral to the plot (as protagonist Sapphire has both a "boy heart" that makes her courageous and strong and a "girl heart" which is much weaker), but it's also got a lot of that Tezuka-making-stuff-up-as-he-goes-along thing, throwing plot elements hither and thither and not always bothering to pick them up later.
That being said, it's still easy to get why this would have a lot of impact back in the 1950s - to see a young beautiful princess be a badass crossdressing warrior must have felt like a real breath of fresh air for young readers at the time, boy heart or no. (Also, IIRC after the plot twist where [SPOILER]Sapphire loses her boy heart and can't fight anymore, she eventually starts to fight again even so without any explanation why.) [/spoiler] Also, while it's true that the plot rambles a lot I still find it hard not to be entertained by Tezuka - for instance, I was quite charmed by the arch-villain's daughter [SPOILER]why couldn't she have survived whyyy[/spoiler]and found the attitude of the women in Sapphire's kingdom interesting.[SPOILER]When they think Sapphire is a boy, they express disappointment in her lack of manliness when compared to a strong and handsome visiting prince from a neighbouring kingdom. However, much later when the truth about her being a girl is out, they're the ones to stand up for her against the male half of the population. Go female solidarity![/spoiler]
The setting is very fairytale-like and storybook European, in an early Disney way. (Sapphire's love interest is even called Prince Charming!)
********************************
Anime corner
Planetes
A 26-episode anime adaptation of the manga that keeps the main characters, the basic set-ups and many key scenes of the manga, but which also expands the cast - with the garbage-collecting Debris Section, with the company as a whole, people from Hachimaki's past, and more - and putting a more overtly political and perhaps less contemplative bent on the story while keeping the thrilling action sequences and adding more. Sometimes it also adds a bit of a sitcomish feel, too - more comic relief characters here - but in the end it uses all its elements effectively, IMO. The climax is frightening in its intensity. A good example of a successful if not terribly faithful adaptation - crucial things like Hachimaki's character development still feel like the same in essence, even as the path it takes to get there is somewhat different.
Princess Tutu - A truly wondrous anime series, also in 26 episodes. Set in a European-ish fairytale-like town where ordinary folks are mixed with anthtopomorphic animals without drawing comment, our heroine is originally a duck who's been turned human by a mysterious powerful being so that she can help the sad-looking human boy she's fallen in love with. Then the hapless girl Duck, the clumsiest pupil in ballet school, transforms into the graceful Princess Tutu, who can turn things aright just by dancing. But this is not an easy fairytale to win through in. Bit by bit, the plot turns darker and thicker, characters grow and reveal much more of what they first seemed like, there are more alter egos; and the questions of fate and the power of creativity become central. Can you truly rebel against the role that has been allotted to you? What seemed right and clear and relatively easy in the beginning turns ever thornier, and the protagonist and other central characters must go through much suffering and growing before the end of the story.
Paprika - Another extremely pretty-looking mind-trip by Satoshi Kon, though more chaotic and horror-tinged than Millennium Actress, the basic plot of Paprika concerns a device invented by a research team of scientists that can enable you to watch and enter other people's dreams. The intention is to use this consensually for "dream therapy" on psychiatric patients: however, the device is stolen and a mysterious perpetrator starts to wreak havoc on people's minds while using it, threatening the wall between dream and reality itself to catastrophic results. Now, the scientists and Paprika - an avatar persona only living in dreams - must together try to find the culprit and stop them. As the creator notes, the story follows dream logic and it can be hard to sort out what actually happens and what only seems to happen, but if you don't mind that so much, it's a magnificent movie of exciting fight scenes, unsettling nightmares, teeming dreamscapes full of creativity, and cathartic emotional journeys.
Pom Poko
A warm, funny and melancholy story about a tribe of raccoon-bears (what the Japanese call tanuki) who are threatened by human development of the grounds they live in. The raccoon-dogs start to train each other in shape-shifting and illusion-casting techniques (as folklore dictates that tanuki are good at those), and are soon terrorising humans in an attempt to get them to give up. There's a hardline faction wanting to use physical force to fight the humans proudly, too. But deep down the raccoon-dogs are fun-loving characters who find it more appealing to trick and tease humans than to smash them.
Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea
A mythical story for pre-school children about the power of the sea, of transformations and epic love/friendship across boundaries, of an overprotective father trying to shut his daughter away and the spectacular consequences. Ponyo is not one of my absolute favourite Ghibli pics - like Totoro, its primary audience is young children, but it's not as good as the older film at speaking to an older audience as well, and may not even intend to. (Possibly the difference lies in the way Totoro applies to nostalgia for older viewers, which Ponyo doesn't do in the same way?) The ending bears clears sign of Miyazaki's predilection for not planning things too tightly, IMO. However, it's still a very charming and original movie, and the two leads - noisy sea-child Ponyo who loves ham, quiet but termined human Sosuke - are quite adorable.
Porco Rosso
This Studio Ghibli movie was initially conceived as an "airplane movie" for middle-aged salarymen who didn't want to think too much, which doesn't sound all that promising a concept. But in Hayao Miyazaki's hands in his golden years, this turns into a very charming story with the feel of a fun old adventure movie, all sunlight and brightly flashing aquaplanes above a glittering Adriatic sea. At the same time, there are harsh angles and a sadness to it; the main character somehow transformed into an anthropomorphic pig (while everyone else is a human) after living through World War II as a combat pilot, and later he left the Italian air force once Mussolini took over because he'd "rather be a pig than a fascist". He makes a living as a bounty-hunting pilot in a small fictional country across the Adriatic; while the film follows real history when it comes to Mussolini, it also invents air pirates making a living from robbing and kidnapping passengers on ferries. There's a beautiful bar owner and singer named Gina who knows Porco from before, and a much younger woman named Fio who's a budding airplane engineer. Also a cocksure American rival pilot and a lot of scheming but perhaps not terribly evil pirates. Mostly just very entertaining, but a sadness in it that makes the joys and victories all the more heartfelt.
Princess Mononoke
Alone among my favourite animated movies, sometimes when I haven't watched this for a while I'll wonder if it's really as good as the others topping my personal list. Isn't it a little too earnest, a little too dark in tone, a little too preachy...? And then I'll watch it again and get completely captivated. The power in this movie is hard to pin down, in spite of the obvious and serious themes of man and man's civilisation versus nature, hatred and unending conflict versus a spirit of forgiveness, co-operation and peace. Perhaps I should just point to my love of forests, the fantastic Ghibli beauty of this forest, and the transcendent, awe-inducing portrayal of the forest spirit that brings blossoming life and withering death together, in the same step.
...whew!
What are your manga and anime likes for P? Or if you have any additional comments to the specific recs above, I'd love to hear it!
edit: WHOOPS and I still forgot about Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea in the anime corner! to be updated.../edit
Phoenix by Osamu Tezuka
This monumental manga consists of twelve different and nominally self-contained stories spanning immense time periods from prehistory to a time in the far, far future*. All the stories feature the immortal firebird of the title in key ways, and have similar themes and even - through a use of Tezuka's "Star System" that might this time imply reincarnation - recurring characters across centuries. The time periods interweave, starting with the earliest then cutting to the latest, so that the movement is toward the present. Tezuka planned to make the final story one set in World War II, but died before he could get that far. Thus the work remains unfinished at a whole; but all the twelve stories he drew still have real beginnings, middles, and endings.
If you drink the blood of the Phoenix, the legend says you will live together. Thus many characters in these stories come to hunt the Phoenix; many are saved by her powers of resurrection and healing. People are greedy for power and immortality, but they may also seek a way for loved ones to survive. The questions of sins and guilt, of expiation and redemption, of sacrifice, cruelty and forgiveness and what is truly human return over and over. As with Tezuka's Buddha, the essential connectedness of all life and the immense tragedy of the common human inability to understand this is a constant recurring theme.
Like many reviewers (so unoriginal!), I found the fifth story, "Karma" (Ho-ō in the original), the richest and most impressive one, rivalling Buddha in impact. But all of the stories are rewarding, with intriguing formal aspects in some (like "Robe of Feathers" that's got the same "camera shot" all over, as if it's a play; or "Space" in the sequence where we follow a team of astronauts communicating, each one in their own separate isolated panel sequence) and very cool ideas (like the protagonist of "Resurrection" who suffers a brain injury where he sees all humans as weird rocklike beings, while machinelike robots look like people; or the entire plot structure of "Strange Beings). Phoenix is an essential manga reading experience in my opinion, not to be missed out on.
*In English, they're published in 11 volumes, while a twelfth volume titled "Early works" shows some of the same themes in a more conventional, rambling story set in Antiquity and reminiscent of "Princess Knight": to me it doesn't feel like part of Phoenix proper notwithstanding its use of the firebird.
Planetes by Makoto Yukimura
A low-key five-volume manga of the hard SF kind (the title is from the classical Greek planetes, wandering), set in a near future where we can travel to Mars regularly and our base on the moon is so established and large that people get born there. However, by then there's an awful lot of garbage from earlier trips in Earth's orbit, constantly putting space ships in danger. The protagonist Hachiroti "Hachimaki" Hoshino and his coworkers are a small close-knit team of garbage collectors who trawl the orbit to pick up all the debris they can find. Hachimaki's true goal is to get a spaceship all his own, though, and he knows the meagre salary he holds in his current position won't help him there, so he's looking to get out. The corporation they work for doesn't give them a lot of money, seeing their section as an unprofitable necessary evil they have because they're compelled by law, so they're quite understaffed. Meanwhile, some activists with terrorist methods are against all forms of space exploration and will do anything to sabotage it.
At first glance, this manga is quite down-to-earth for a space story, paying attention to actual physics - no sounds in space here! - and existing astronaut practices when they're not using what seems like quite plausible extrapolations to me (not that I'm an expert). But looking further, it looks deep into the main character's psychology and not only gets pretty damn thoughtful regarding both politics and emotions, but also has some arguably lightly surreal elements that to me felt poetic and right, not out of place (your mileages may vary).
The main character is a prickly sort at times, so focused on the goal that he can be downright cold to others, but IMO it's all the more interesting to see his development. Also, I for one really liked the love interest Ai Tanabe, who isn't quite as prominent as in the anime (she comes in much later, for one) but OTOH has her own unique backstory here. She's still a believer in the Power of Love, which I know not everyone finds appealing. Other coworkers Yuri and Fee are nicely portrayed as characters in their own right, with awesome badass moments (Fee) and heavy pasts (Yuri) of their own.
Pluto by Naoki Urasawa (artist and co-writer) and Takashi Nagasaki (co-writer)
Pluto is an odd duck of a manga in concept: Tezuka's Astro Boy as revisited by writer/artist Naoki Urasawa (also 20th Century Boys, Monster, and more) and co-writer Takashi Nagasaki. More specifically, what they have revisited is the storyline "The Greatest Robot On Earth" from 1965, probably the most popular story in Astro Boy's whole run. This featured the mysterious and unimaginably powerful robot Pluto, who menaces the seven most advanced robots in the world - one of whom is naturally Astro Boy.
All this and more of the basic set-up and the character cast is kept in the eight-volume Pluto remake, but there are also many changes/additions besides the art shift to Urasawa's very realistic style. For one, there's what TV Tropes calls a Perspective Flip, where original supporting character Gesicht, a German robot detective, is now the protagonist of the story and Astro - or rather Atom, keeping his original name - is a secondary (but still hugely important) character.
Intended for an older audience, Pluto actually doesn't so much introduce darkness to the story - it's already quite a dark-tinted one in the original - as make it more coherent and puts a clearer political frame on it, with a recent Central Asian War still traumatising the characters who took part in it and motivating some of them. The questions of robot rights, if robots have emotions, and just basically how robots and humans do, can and should relate to each other are always present. This also follows Tezuka's original, but here those questions are developed even further in that many of the robots look extremely humanlike and they are even allowed to have robot children. But can robots become so much like humans that they can feel hatred? And if they do, what will happen to humans? ...In the end, this story completely converted me from original skepticism to fully-fledged admiration, not to mention delight at seeing the new versions of the familiar characters and how they get put to use. I'm not sure how it would strike someone who's never read Astro Boy; but I'm strongly inclined to think the power and beauty of the story will still come through.
Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon by Naoko Takeuchi
I never read the Tokyopop version of the manga, nor checked scanlations, so the current Kodansha release is my first exposure to manga Sailor Moon. Hence, I'm only up to volume 7 at the moment. (For the record, I haven't seen all that much of the anime, either: bits and pieces of season 1 and 3, and the whole of season 5: that's it.)
Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon takes a while to hit its stride for me; the wispy art is not the kind that I find immediately appealing (though boy, are the covers ever pretty!!), and the first volumes in particular feel rather choppy and abrupt as storytelling, with elements and characters often quickly introduced and then quickly dealt with; also, many of the plot intrigues can be a bit hard to follow. The villains' plans in particular often sound rather far-fetched and wonky (though not moreso than in the anime). On the plus side, though, the arcs aren't too dragged out. And I do think that Takeuchi grows as a storyteller over these volumes, improving the way she presents and handles her characters and putting them to a stronger use, particularly emotionally. (I was surprised by how little I minded Chibi-Usa, for instance, who I understand used to be much disliked by anime-viewers. Also, Pluto is awesome.♥)
A real downside of these volumes is the way the translation has been handled, where the dialogue reads very stilted and unnatural to me. From what I've read online this isn't the translator's fault so much as Kodansha's, who apparently insist on a very literal wording throughout so as to be as "faithful" as possible to the original. If you ask me this is a very foolish policy. - Nevertheless, I still recommend them: far from the most amazing manga I've ever read, but quite fun - and sometimes quite touching - even so.
Princess Knight by Osamu Tezuka
This pic not actually used for the English volumes, sad to say.
Honestly, I think it's best not to expect too much from Tezuka's seminal shojo story: not only are essentialist gender views integral to the plot (as protagonist Sapphire has both a "boy heart" that makes her courageous and strong and a "girl heart" which is much weaker), but it's also got a lot of that Tezuka-making-stuff-up-as-he-goes-along thing, throwing plot elements hither and thither and not always bothering to pick them up later.
That being said, it's still easy to get why this would have a lot of impact back in the 1950s - to see a young beautiful princess be a badass crossdressing warrior must have felt like a real breath of fresh air for young readers at the time, boy heart or no. (Also, IIRC after the plot twist where [SPOILER]Sapphire loses her boy heart and can't fight anymore, she eventually starts to fight again even so without any explanation why.) [/spoiler] Also, while it's true that the plot rambles a lot I still find it hard not to be entertained by Tezuka - for instance, I was quite charmed by the arch-villain's daughter [SPOILER]why couldn't she have survived whyyy[/spoiler]and found the attitude of the women in Sapphire's kingdom interesting.
The setting is very fairytale-like and storybook European, in an early Disney way. (Sapphire's love interest is even called Prince Charming!)
********************************
Anime corner
Planetes
A 26-episode anime adaptation of the manga that keeps the main characters, the basic set-ups and many key scenes of the manga, but which also expands the cast - with the garbage-collecting Debris Section, with the company as a whole, people from Hachimaki's past, and more - and putting a more overtly political and perhaps less contemplative bent on the story while keeping the thrilling action sequences and adding more. Sometimes it also adds a bit of a sitcomish feel, too - more comic relief characters here - but in the end it uses all its elements effectively, IMO. The climax is frightening in its intensity. A good example of a successful if not terribly faithful adaptation - crucial things like Hachimaki's character development still feel like the same in essence, even as the path it takes to get there is somewhat different.
Princess Tutu - A truly wondrous anime series, also in 26 episodes. Set in a European-ish fairytale-like town where ordinary folks are mixed with anthtopomorphic animals without drawing comment, our heroine is originally a duck who's been turned human by a mysterious powerful being so that she can help the sad-looking human boy she's fallen in love with. Then the hapless girl Duck, the clumsiest pupil in ballet school, transforms into the graceful Princess Tutu, who can turn things aright just by dancing. But this is not an easy fairytale to win through in. Bit by bit, the plot turns darker and thicker, characters grow and reveal much more of what they first seemed like, there are more alter egos; and the questions of fate and the power of creativity become central. Can you truly rebel against the role that has been allotted to you? What seemed right and clear and relatively easy in the beginning turns ever thornier, and the protagonist and other central characters must go through much suffering and growing before the end of the story.
Paprika - Another extremely pretty-looking mind-trip by Satoshi Kon, though more chaotic and horror-tinged than Millennium Actress, the basic plot of Paprika concerns a device invented by a research team of scientists that can enable you to watch and enter other people's dreams. The intention is to use this consensually for "dream therapy" on psychiatric patients: however, the device is stolen and a mysterious perpetrator starts to wreak havoc on people's minds while using it, threatening the wall between dream and reality itself to catastrophic results. Now, the scientists and Paprika - an avatar persona only living in dreams - must together try to find the culprit and stop them. As the creator notes, the story follows dream logic and it can be hard to sort out what actually happens and what only seems to happen, but if you don't mind that so much, it's a magnificent movie of exciting fight scenes, unsettling nightmares, teeming dreamscapes full of creativity, and cathartic emotional journeys.
Pom Poko
A warm, funny and melancholy story about a tribe of raccoon-bears (what the Japanese call tanuki) who are threatened by human development of the grounds they live in. The raccoon-dogs start to train each other in shape-shifting and illusion-casting techniques (as folklore dictates that tanuki are good at those), and are soon terrorising humans in an attempt to get them to give up. There's a hardline faction wanting to use physical force to fight the humans proudly, too. But deep down the raccoon-dogs are fun-loving characters who find it more appealing to trick and tease humans than to smash them.
Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea
A mythical story for pre-school children about the power of the sea, of transformations and epic love/friendship across boundaries, of an overprotective father trying to shut his daughter away and the spectacular consequences. Ponyo is not one of my absolute favourite Ghibli pics - like Totoro, its primary audience is young children, but it's not as good as the older film at speaking to an older audience as well, and may not even intend to. (Possibly the difference lies in the way Totoro applies to nostalgia for older viewers, which Ponyo doesn't do in the same way?) The ending bears clears sign of Miyazaki's predilection for not planning things too tightly, IMO. However, it's still a very charming and original movie, and the two leads - noisy sea-child Ponyo who loves ham, quiet but termined human Sosuke - are quite adorable.
Porco Rosso
This Studio Ghibli movie was initially conceived as an "airplane movie" for middle-aged salarymen who didn't want to think too much, which doesn't sound all that promising a concept. But in Hayao Miyazaki's hands in his golden years, this turns into a very charming story with the feel of a fun old adventure movie, all sunlight and brightly flashing aquaplanes above a glittering Adriatic sea. At the same time, there are harsh angles and a sadness to it; the main character somehow transformed into an anthropomorphic pig (while everyone else is a human) after living through World War II as a combat pilot, and later he left the Italian air force once Mussolini took over because he'd "rather be a pig than a fascist". He makes a living as a bounty-hunting pilot in a small fictional country across the Adriatic; while the film follows real history when it comes to Mussolini, it also invents air pirates making a living from robbing and kidnapping passengers on ferries. There's a beautiful bar owner and singer named Gina who knows Porco from before, and a much younger woman named Fio who's a budding airplane engineer. Also a cocksure American rival pilot and a lot of scheming but perhaps not terribly evil pirates. Mostly just very entertaining, but a sadness in it that makes the joys and victories all the more heartfelt.
Princess Mononoke
Alone among my favourite animated movies, sometimes when I haven't watched this for a while I'll wonder if it's really as good as the others topping my personal list. Isn't it a little too earnest, a little too dark in tone, a little too preachy...? And then I'll watch it again and get completely captivated. The power in this movie is hard to pin down, in spite of the obvious and serious themes of man and man's civilisation versus nature, hatred and unending conflict versus a spirit of forgiveness, co-operation and peace. Perhaps I should just point to my love of forests, the fantastic Ghibli beauty of this forest, and the transcendent, awe-inducing portrayal of the forest spirit that brings blossoming life and withering death together, in the same step.
...whew!
What are your manga and anime likes for P? Or if you have any additional comments to the specific recs above, I'd love to hear it!
Re: addendum!
Date: 2012-10-13 07:29 pm (UTC)I do like Yazawa's storytelling in Nana, though I guess it took some time to get used to along with the art style, but I've yet to read any of her older works. But Paradise Kiss is the one I've thought I should try for a while now. I guess I should check how many volumes it has first so I'm not left high and dry if the final volume is out of print... ^_^