The Fairy Tale of the Ages is a 1991 veteran film directed by Takahata. In addition, Takahata has also produced a series of classic works such as "Tomb of the Fireflies", "My Neighbor Yamada Jun", "The Tale of Hui Ye Hime" and so on. The anime achieved a good box office result that year, becoming the highest-grossing film of the year. The film only lightly tells the protagonist Myoko's memories of her childhood, and through her perception of rural life, she can grow herself.
The film takes place in the summer of 1982, when 27-year-old Myoko took a ten-day leave from the company to vacation to the countryside of Yamagata Prefecture, where her brother-in-law's family is located. Along the way, she remembered some of her past in the fifth grade of elementary school. Arriving at her destination, she was greeted by Toshio, who was two years younger than her. Toshio takes Myoko to learn about rural life, and she also shares with Toshio the bits and pieces of her childhood, and the two get along very happily. Life in the countryside also gave Myoko, who grew up in Tokyo, a different charm. On the eve of her return to Tokyo, Toshio's grandmother proposes to Myoko that she marry Toshio, and Myoko is horrified, but this also makes her realize that she has a good feeling for Toshio. On the train to Tokyo, Myoko thought twice and made a choice about her future.
Takahata and Miyazaki jointly created Studio Ghibli, which represents the highest artistic standard of Japanese animation, and unlike Miyazaki's fantastic and grand narrative style, Takahata focuses more on describing the trivialities of daily life, presenting the poetry of ordinary life with prose writing. His works are full of simple charm, and he often runs through his life feelings in movies.
This "Fairy Tale of Time" is a typical representative of Takahata's style. There is no twisting and bizarre dramatic effect, no majestic story structure, just telling ordinary life, using bits and pieces of memories as a basis, and the ordinary is more realistic. In this article, we will interpret the poetic life presented by Takahata In his calm and indifferent narrative style.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-center-line" >01, the film uses a two-line parallel narrative style, reality and memory echo each other, using reality to tell the current situation, and using memories to reminisce about the past</h1>
The film uses two parallel spaces to narrate the narrative, one is the scene of Myoko's current life, and the other is her intermittent memories of the fifth grade of elementary school.
First, use memories and real intertextuality to explain Myoko's yearning for rural life
The film opens in a high-end office building, where twenty-seven-year-old Myoko stands in front of her boss. The boss said, "I thought you were going to travel overseas if you asked for a ten-day long vacation, Okajima Jun, who turned out to be going to the countryside of Yamagata Prefecture." Myoko replied, "Yes." Boss: "Is it a lost love?" Myoko: "No, I've always dreamed of the countryside." This dialogue opens the curtain on Myoko's next trip to the countryside to experience life, and also opens up Myoko's memories of her childhood.
The picture switches to Myoko's childhood, a group of elementary school students run from the classroom to the playground, and myoko and her companions, who are about ten years old, ask a girl who ran over how she did, and she replies that she has to go to her grandmother's house in the countryside during the summer vacation anyway, even if she has to be scolded. Next, two more classmates said they were going to the countryside. Listening to the words of her classmates, Myoko was very envious, and when she returned home, she pestered her mother to ask to go to the countryside for summer vacation, but her mother had arranged for her and her sister to take a bath in Ohnoya. This memory explains Myoko's idea of going to the countryside at the beginning of the film, and it turns out that Myoko's plot of rural life has been planted in childhood.
Second, through the interspersed narration of memories and reality, the beauty of life constructed by ordinary trivialities is revealed
Myoko was born in an ordinary family, her mother was an ordinary housewife, her father was usually quite serious, and her grandmother looked like a leisurely wise man. Myoko has two older sisters, the eldest sister is in the first year of college to study art, and the second sister is still a first-year high school student. Both sisters are the embodiment of intelligence and beauty in Myoko's heart, while she herself is a stupid ugly duckling-like figure with many shortcomings.
One day Myoko's father brought back a green pineapple, this tropical fruit was not common at the time, everyone was particularly fresh, but after fiddling with it for a long time, I still didn't know how to eat it, so I had to give up. A few days later, the eldest sister Nanako learned how to eat pineapples at school, and when she returned home, she peeled and cut the pieces, and when the whole family took the pineapple and bit it with expectation, they showed a disappointed look. The more you expect something higher, the more disappointing it is, and in the end everyone agrees that the "king of fruits" is still a banana.
In the real scene, the 27-year-old Myoko has not been in love, Toshio asked the reason, Myoko said that there is no reason, maybe the people who had the obstacle to score division at that time were happy later. Myoko thinks that people who do well in score division have a smooth life. When she was a child, because she could not jump out of the thinking mode of "cutting apples" when calculating the score division, she only scored 25 points at a time, and was thought by her family that there was a brain problem. In fact, she is also very serious, the molecular denominator is adjusted up and down, the division number is multiplied, these mysterious children are clear, but she is thinking about the headache idea of "two-thirds of the apples are divided into a quarter of the person". Myoko feels that her brain is not good, but Toshio sees Myoko's persistence, and she does not simply accept the rules of arithmetic, but wants to really understand.
The little things that don't seem worth mentioning are the precious memories that make up our childhood. Everyone in the film has their own joys and sorrows, the trivialities in ordinary family life reflect the touching human touch, and the protagonist's description of childhood learning and life touches the empathy that we have all experienced. The detailed portrayal of these traces of life presents the order and beauty of the life of the Oriental family.
Third, the picture of recollection with a realistic voice highlights the protagonist's childhood psychology
In the memories, when the Myoko family went to Ohnoya to take a bath, Myoko and her grandmother sat in the carriage, and the voiceover was the inner monologue of the adult Myoko: "Of course, the sisters will not go to Atami with us that time." The picture switches to when she was a child: Myoko begged her grandmother, "Grandma, let's go to the bath." Grandma: "Didn't you just come back from your shower?" Myoko: "But I just took a swan bath."
Myoko opened the door of a bathhouse, and the voiceover of the adult Myoko sounded again: "The first time I entered the cream bath, and I was alone." Mermaid bath, lemon bath, tricolor lilac bath. "The picture shows these baths in turn, and finally a magnificent large bath. Ten-year-old Myoko: "It's so big!" Voice-over of the adult Myoko: "When I finally took a bath in the Roman baths, my blood was boiling and my head was dizzy."
In this plot, the counterpoint between the voice and the picture is very complicated, using the voiceover voiceover of the adult Myoko to connect this memory, the voice is the adult Myoko, and the picture is the scene of the childhood Myoko, the two are staggered but do not appear chaotic, using clever techniques to state the past, both the sigh of the adult Myoko, but also the restoration of the psychology of the characters at that time.
The narrative structure of the film seems to be loose and random, but in fact it has a cohesive spiritual core. Takahata is not obsessed with dramatic storytelling, but uses a prose style and relies on a two-line parallel approach to express his life logic and natural aesthetics. The driving force driving the development of the plot in the two-line narrative technique is transformed into the emotions and subtle emotions of the characters in the ordinary life, and the film pays more attention to the lyrical expression under the details, conveying the soothing human fireworks.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" >02, Takahata's unique and rustic picture style conveys meticulous character emotions and warm and beautiful emotional cores</h1>
"The Fairy Tale of the Years" continues Takahata's consistent realistic style, in addition to the plot arrangement without exaggeration, the same is true in the scene design. In reality, the high-rise Tokyo neighborhoods, the red subway crowded with passengers, the small apartments in Myoko's space, and the home furnishings, school buildings and streetscapes of the 1960s in Japan, as well as the costumes of the characters, are all as close to reality as possible. Even the hero and heroine are shaped according to the image of the two live actors.
In addition to striving for realism in the scene picture, the director also pays attention to the depiction of detailed pictures. For example, the protagonist wears a seat belt when he gets into the car, pulls the brake when driving, the realism of the wrist when picking safflower, the picture of soaking the bowl into ice cubes when beating whipped cream, and the steps of making rouge are also described in detail in the film. The cartoons, children's songs, popular topics, etc. mentioned in the film also make the viewers of Myoko's contemporaries have a deep plot of the times.
Takahata's observation of details and the spirit of pursuing meticulousness in realism can arouse the emotional resonance of moviegoers. With the cut film segments experienced in life, it presents the real atmosphere of life and stimulates a strong sense of identity in the audience's heart. And the style of the whole film is not single, and the pictures in the real time and space and the memory time and space are still different in the painting style.
The colors of the realistic time and space in the film are relatively gorgeous, the lines are thick, and the silhouette of the objects is clear, whether it is the scene of urban life in Tokyo or the mountains and farms in Yamagata Prefecture, it is very realistic. When expressing the picture in time and space, the film adopts a fresh and elegant watercolor-like style, the overall color is lighter, the lines are soft, the outline of the object is diluted, and there is a lot of white space in the composition.
Most of the composition of the rural countryside is a long-range picture, with layers of mountains, fresh emerald trees, and unfamiliar farmland, so that viewers can feel the simple and quiet life atmosphere and pastoral spirit of the Japanese countryside from the picture. In the memory of her childhood, myoko's white street scene background is the warm sunset afterglow, myoko flutters up in the air and then lands on the soft quilt, and the bold and reasonable imagination depicts the beautiful atmosphere of Myoko's sweet psychology. It became a memory that Myoko will never forget.
The freehand style of picture expression also made Myoko's characters at that time quite infectious, and this kind of painting treatment is very much in line with the simple nostalgic atmosphere of childhood memories, and also makes the memories have a hazy beauty. In "The Fairy Tale of time", there is both a realistic image style and a freehand painting method, revealing a freehand mood in realism. The two treatments complement each other, together forming the film's simple and simple image style, and the imagery expressed in the film is unified in the clear contour and hazy blurring, constructing Takahata's harmonious aesthetic interest.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-center-line" >03, tells various small plots about growth in a simple picture, and has more power to touch people's hearts in the ordinary</h1>
In "The Fairy Tale of the Years", Takahata tells us that the theme is growth, there is no scar of youth and decadence, there is no rebellious experience of wanton behavior, there is no sentimental despair of sad spring and autumn, and only focuses on the inner experience of ordinary ordinary people.
Myoko's upbringing is so unremarkable that everyone can see their former shadow in her. Growing up in the city, Myoko is full of longing for unfamiliar villages; asking adults to get pineapples many times, the first taste is difficult to swallow but still unwilling to eat it; the math test is broken but uses ridiculous excuses to excuse herself; in order to be able to become a good child who is not picky in her mother's mouth, it is difficult to drink unpalatable milk. These ridiculous childishness now seem to be all childish.
Myoko is severely reprimanded for being picky eaters, embarrassed by being teased by boys during menstruation, being slapped by her father who loves her most for the first time, and thinking she is very talented, but losing the opportunity to act. These details and tribulations hit the child's young heart like a terrifying wave at that time, and gradually forgot in time after adulthood. Now, it has been picked up by Takahata in a subtle and wonderful way, and while watching the movie, it also allows us to see our long-lost selves.
Myoko felt that the fifth grade of elementary school was an important time in her childhood, and in that year she experienced many unforgettable firsts, as well as sadness, disappointment and embarrassment, and these sad careful thoughts seemed to be the price of growth. Although Miko is now an adult and has a good job working in a large company, she is unmarried at an old age and has not found her ideal life. There are many knots hidden in her heart, just as the eldest sister said, carrying a heavy historical burden to live in reality. If Myoko's fifth-grade life was a physical growth, then Myoko's trip to Yamagata Prefecture was a spiritual growth.
In this rural journey, Myoko harvested many growth factors, such as the work of picking safflowers, which was arduous but very fulfilling; The idyllic life made her feel different from the quiet and beauty of the hustle and bustle of the city; Toshio's courageous choice of life path also inspired and infected Myoko. As Myoko unfolded her memories, she asked herself, "Why is it the fifth grade of elementary school?" Because in the fifth grade, Myoko's pastoral dream was not realized, and her ignorant first love did not end. This trip to Yamagata Prefecture made her heart knots for many years dissolve one by one.
The 27-year-old Myoko finally said goodbye to her awkward self because of a journey and dissolved the knot she had knotted since childhood, which was myoko's reconciliation with herself. In this settlement, she has really grown. These small fragments that happened in time are things that we have all experienced, and Takahata picked them up and painted them with warm and beautiful pictures. Because of the ordinary and ordinary we grew up, this sense of familiarity is even more intimate and moving.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" > summarize</h1>
The film "Fairy Tales of The Years" is not only to reminisce about the past years, it is more about how an adult woman transforms in her memories and gets further growth. At the same time, director Takahata Also integrated his unique idyllic and warm picture style into the film and spread his own thoughts. The film's methods of harmonious coexistence between humans and nature, people's attitudes towards different lifestyles in cities and countryside, and descriptions of the inner world of older unmarried young women can arouse the thinking of moviegoers.
We always have to grow, change, turn and then make choices in contradictions, and Myoko finally makes her own life choices, which is her growth. We follow myoko's memories of childhood in the film, reunite with our long-lost selves, see the years in the film, see ourselves, and regain the touch of time, which is also our growth.