The author | Wei Xiaolin
A little girl runs on the surface of the sea.
The frenzied storm rolled up terrifying waves, almost drowning the terrified audience in front of the screen. Just then, a pink figure leapt up and ran fast on the surface of the sea. The wind sometimes blew the hem of her skirt, and the waves sometimes completely hidden her. She tried to lean out and laugh into the camera.
The goldfish on the cliff finally crossed the ocean and ran to China on this shore.
After 12 years, Ghibli's classic "Bo Niu on the Cliff" (also known as "Goldfish on the Cliff") was released in China. After its release, the film received 20 million at the box office, even surpassing many new domestic animation films. In fact, this is not the first re-release film of Ghibli to be released in China: in 2018, "Totoro", which premiered in 1988, was released in China and won 100 million at the box office; in 2019, "Spirited Away", which has been the box office champion in Japanese film history for nearly 20 years, was released in China and won nearly 500 million at the box office.
Thick and cute totoro, coal ball creatures hiding in the shadows of old houses, princess mononoke through the forest, white dragons who turn into handsome teenagers, strange towns that "eat too much and become pigs"... For many, "Ghibli" means childhood, summer, love and dreams. Since Miyazaki released Nausicaä in 1984, almost every animated film Ghibli has brought in in the past three decades, which has generated a frenzy of attention and box office.
But 2020 may be an important milestone for Ghibli.
This year, after four years, Ghibli released the studio's first fully 3D animated feature film , Aya and the Witch , directed by Hayao Miyazaki goro and planned by Hayao Miyazaki. As Ghibli's first full-3D work, the film premiered at the Lumiere Film Festival and was broadcast on Japan's NHK television on December 30. However, Ghibli's first work of "testing the waters" 3D has not reached expectations, and the iMBD and Douban scores have not exceeded 6 points.
This year, "Spirited Away" maintained the first place in the history of Japanese box office films for 19 years, and was finally broken by the theatrical version of "Devil's Blade". A reporter wanted to ask Miyazaki to talk about his feelings about this, and he admitted that he had neither seen nor paid attention to it, "I am just a retired grandfather who came out to pick up garbage."
It was also this year that people once again realized that the problem of Ghibli's "replacement" was quite serious. On January 5, 2021, Miyazaki celebrated his 80th birthday, and Toshio Suzuki, another important member of Ghibli, is about to turn 72.
Looking back at Ghibli's last animated feature, "The Red Turtle" with a French studio has a mediocre reputation, four years ago, and the last feature film that caused a big sensation, and the number of "Windy" called Miyazaki's retired work, has also passed eight years ago.
Although the audience is still eagerly awaiting Miyazaki's three-year-old feature film "What Kind of Life Do You Want to Live", for Ghibli, who has given birth to famous images such as Totoro, Bou, and White Dragon, is the road ahead, still full of flowers?
Ghibli's glory days
In the eyes of producer Toshio Suzuki, Totoro became Miyazaki's "enemy".
"Miyazaki has done many kinds of films, and Totoro should be the most popular character so far, and there is no character that can surpass Totoro yet. It became a spell. In the four-episode documentary "Hayao Miyazaki: A Dream of Ten Years" launched by NHK in 2019, Toshio Suzuki said.
After the success of Ghibli's first work, Castle in the Sky, in 1988, Miyazaki's Totoro was released at the same time as Ghibli's other director, Takahata's Grave of fireflies. Although the two films only grossed a total of 800,000 viewers at the box office, they won almost all the important film awards in Japan that year, and the image of Totoro was even more popular, not only as an opportunity for many people to first know Ghibli, but also as an iconic image of Studio Ghibli in the future.
However, the proposal for "Totoro" was initially rejected by the producer Tokuma Shoten. Investors believe that "Totoro" is set in Japan and yokai, which is not in line with the trend of audiences liking foreign stories at that time. At the turn of Toshio Suzuki, Ghibli decided to produce both Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies, each released in a 60-minute format.
After the filming of the two films began, Miyazaki and Takahata, two animation masters, although they admired each other, they have been secretly competing. It is said that in order to better represent the gait of a child walking, Miyazaki invited Kifumi Kondo to join Ghibli, but both Miyazaki and Takahata hoped that Kondo would join their production team, and the stalemate ensued. In the end, producer Toshio Suzuki considered that Miyazaki himself was an original artist, so Kondo arranged for Takahata's team.
In addition, the two even have to "compete" for the length of the film. Takahata was extremely demanding, not only extending the film from 60 minutes in the planned period to 88 minutes, but also failing to complete the production even when the film was released. Miyazaki then changed the protagonist to the setting of the sisters and extended the time of the film. Not only that, but "Totoro" and "Grave of the Fireflies" were also "on the same stage" and were released on the same day on April 16, 1988.
In fact, miyazaki's relationship with Takahata has long been talked about. When they were young, both were deeply influenced by the French animation master Paul Gullimo and the poet and screenwriter Jacques Préville, and had similar concepts of animation aesthetics. After the founding of Ghibli, the two gradually diverged in their creative orientations and formed the two main styles of Ghibli animation.
In his book "Happy at Work", Toshio Suzuki recalls: "He (Miyazaki) had great admiration for Takahata. Takahata was his predecessor and competitor, and to Mr. Miyazaki, Mr. Takahata was sometimes a man he loved and hated. When making film break-ups, Mr. Miyazaki often asks me, 'Jun Suzuki, would Mr. Takahata be unhappy about this?' He looked like a six- or seven-year-old boy. ”
As the two cores of Studio Ghibli's work, Miyazaki's collaboration with Takahata began with The Adventures of The Sun Prince Halls during the Toei period. Takahata, who had just directed the tube, promoted Hayao Miyazaki, who had only been in the company for two years, to be the background designer and original painting of the film. After that, the two collaborated on the TV animation "World Famous Theater" series such as "Chimney Worker and Shepherd Girl", "The Girl of the Alps", "Three Thousand Miles to Find Mother", "Annie the Red Haired Girl" and so on.
In the world's famous theater, Takahata's emphasis on "realism" has begun to appear. In "Anne the RedHead", he will even use ten minutes of images to restore the 10 minutes of tea making time in reality. After this, he began to think about using "Japan" as a stage for stories, rather than blindly depicting foreign stories.
Also in 1979, Miyazaki's first "City of Lupin III Kaliostro" was released and was a great success. In an interview, Miyazaki said: "For me, if I cut off the relationship with Apo (Takahata), I can't talk about animation. ”
However, the difference in the creative style of the two also makes the contradiction gradually become prominent, which is vividly displayed in the Ghibli pioneering work "Valley of the Wind" that the two collaborated on. When Miyazaki was planning Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, he invited Takahata to be the producer several times, but all of them were rejected. Miyazaki also said to Toshio Suzuki, "I gave all my youth to Mr. Takahata, but I didn't get anything." In the end, with the persuasion of Toshio Suzuki, Takahata agreed to be the producer of "Valley of the Wind".
The film was a huge success after its release, attracting 920,000 viewers, and the Asahi Shimbun also published an editorial about "Valley of the Wind", which formed a social boom. However, Takahata was not very satisfied with the work. He believes that the film can be given 100 points from the perspective of the producer, but only 30 points from the perspective of friends, because Miyazaki does not do a good job of "reflecting modern society from the perspective of the future".
In the eyes of critics, Takahata is "a rare realist in the Japanese animation industry, who pays attention to the real problems of Japanese society through his works, and also shows the life and beauty of ordinary people's lives." Miyazaki, on the other hand, is often thought to be more concerned with how to give full play to the characteristics of animation and create an unparalleled fantasy world.
In Takahata's works, "Tomb of the Fireflies", "Fairy Tale of the Years" and "My Neighbor Yamada Jun" focus on the lives of ordinary people, the narrative is bland and trivial, the picture is simple, very literary or prose atmosphere, and even in "My Neighbor Yamada Jun", the "four-grid manga" style of drawing is completely adopted, and the scene setting and picture background are almost omitted.
Studio Ghibli's style is more similar to Takahata's, as well as "Hearing the Waves" directed by Tomomitsu Mochizuki and "Listening in the Ear" directed by Yoshifumi Kondo. However, Tomomitsu Mochizuki did not belong to Studio Ghibli and only worked with it for a short period of time; Kifumi Kondo, who was considered the most promising successor of Ghibli, died young due to overwork.
Beginning with Nausicaä, Miyazaki added more and more fantasy elements to his directing works, and gradually became the most prestigious director in Studio Ghibli. The "tradition" of miyazaki and Takahata' two masters, who interacted with each other, also became the soul of Studio Ghibli, allowing the two to devote themselves to animation creation.
Not only that, but both masters are constantly seeking to surpass their previous works.
In 1997, in "Princess Mononoke", the picture adopted a form that Miyazaki was not good at, and for the first time confronted the philosophical proposition of "life and death", which once caused questions from all sides in the production process. However, after the release of the film, it was a great success, and some commentators believed that this was one of Miyazaki's most in-depth works, and the perfect interpretation of Oriental philosophy in the film achieved Miyazaki's self-transcendence in terms of the depth, complexity and breadth of the connotation.
The release of "Spirited Away" can be regarded as a transcendence of "Princess Mononoke". The film not only won the crown of best picture at the 52nd Berlin Film Festival as an animated film, but also swept dozens of awards such as the Annie Award and the Academy Awards, becoming a monument in the history of Japanese animation. The film is not only meticulous in its painting, every character detail is a true imitation of reality, and it is also the first work in the Japanese film industry to use DLP high-definition imaging technology. In this work, the world once again sees Miyazaki's immortal imagination.
After Spirited Away, Miyazaki continued to experiment with different genres of films in Hal's Moving Castle and Pony on the Cliff. Back to the opening to Toshio Suzuki's comment that "Totoro is Miyazaki's opponent", there is also the second half of the sentence: "Miyazaki really hopes to make a better character than Totoro, which is why we have to work so hard to create the character of Hayao." ”
During the four-year production period of "Po Niu on the Cliff", director Hayao Miyazaki, who was nearly 70 years old at the time, insisted on painting for 12 hours a day, and in the end, the total number of manuscripts in the whole film exceeded 170,000, which was 1.5 times that of "Spirited Away". In terms of image depiction, "Ponyo on the Cliff" subverts the common sense of "changing color in the water" in the animation industry, just to make Po Niu "more like Po Niu":
In Ghibli's numerous works, what remains unchanged is the directors' reflections and care for life at each stage of life. Mei Xuefeng, a famous film critic, once commented: "Miyazaki is particularly like Spielberg, or Nolan and other Hollywood directors. They have always walked a tightrope between the public and the self, between the naïve and the profound, and they have all survived in the end, so that thousands of viewers have harvested spectacles and moved. Finally, in addition to the touch, there is another thing that silently affects everyone, making everyone think and reminisce. ”
As Hayao Miyazaki said in the documentary: "I am the slave to the film." It's not that I like to do this, I'm destined to do it only for the film, to dedicate everything I have to the movie. ”
And this, perhaps, is the long-lasting charm of Ghibli.
Ghibli's Future Outlook: Moving to 3D?
Time magazine once named Hayao Miyazaki one of the world's most influential figures and commented on his insistence on 2D hand-drawn painting: "It's like clear water dripping on a mossy rock, like a train sailing across the sea at dawn." ”
Since its inception in the last century, Each of Ghibli's works has been called the top production of 2D animation, "I have also tried 3D computer animation, I can copy with a computer, I don't need to draw a lot of pictures, but I have no sense of happiness at all, or I draw with pencil." 」 Miyazaki once said.
Helpless 3D animation is threatening. In 2013, Disney's 3D animation "Frozen" "Slaughter List" Japanese box office list, three songs in the film on the stage of the Red and White Song Club, and won the 38th Japan Academy Awards (Japan Oscar) Best Foreign Language Film. This is the first time an animated film has won this honor.
Traditional 2D animation has suffered an impact. In the face of new technologies, many Japanese animation production companies have adopted the "three-tone two" technology, using 3D technology while retaining the characteristics of hand-drawn. Because the treatment of the character's expressions is close to 2D animation, it looks very natural and gives people a feeling of "not at all like 3D", such as "The Knight of Sidnia" and "The Land of Gems".
Miyazaki has also tried to use 3D technology to shoot a ten-minute short film called "The Cracks of the Caterpillar", but the work will only be screened exclusively at the Studio Ghibli Museum in Japan, and Miyazaki does not intend to use 3DCG technology to make animated feature films exclusively. Before the tide of the times, Ghibli, known as the "traditional handicraft workshop", has always been synonymous with classic 2D hand-drawn painting.
- Until 2020.
This year, Hayao Miyazaki announced that Ghibli's latest work was an animated feature film made entirely in 3DCG.
Written by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by Goro Miyazaki, the work is based on the novel of the same name by Diana Wayne Jones, the original author of "Hal's Moving Castle", and tells the story of a little girl who begins to live with a bad-eyed witch without knowing her identity as the "witch's daughter".
Although the work has been shortlisted for the "Cannes 2020" film list, there are also Miyazaki Hayao and Ghibli's halo blessing, but after the trailer was released, many domestic netizens commented that the 3D modeling was somewhat stiff, quite a sense of "uncanny valley effect", questioning why Ghibli "did 3D"? It has also been argued that although Ghibli's 3D "first trial cry" was not as stunning as expected, it should still be affirmed that Ghibli had the courage to jump out of his comfort zone.
But more attention is paid to the director of the work, Miyazaki Goro. Will he be the best person to pick up Ghibli?
As early as the production of "Po Yo on the Cliff", Miyazaki was nearly 70 years old. Although he was still energetic, he was no longer able to draw with a soft pencil, as his powerful hands were when he was younger. In 2013, when Miyazaki announced that he would use "The Wind Rises" as his last work before retiring, the discussion about who could take over the burden of Ghibli in the "post-Miyazaki" era did not stop. In the eyes of the outside world, in 2014, Ghibli announced the dissolution of the animation production department may be a symbol of "no one to follow", and Miyazaki, who has announced his retirement several times, faces such a dilemma in Ghibli and has to constantly "repent".
"In principle, when Takahata and Miyazaki retire, it is the end of Ghibli."
In early 2005, when Hayao Miyazaki, Takahata, and Toshio Suzuki formed an independent company, Studio Ghibli Co., Ltd., Toshio Suzuki reiterated that "Ghibli is a system established to create wonderful works, not a perpetual business."
In 2018, Takahata died at the age of 82. This is a huge blow to Ghibli and Miyazaki. "I always thought Paku-san (Takahata's nickname, Apo) would live to be 95 years old. After Paku-san passed away, I thought I didn't have much time myself. Miyazaki said darkly at the farewell ceremony.
On January 5, 2021, Miyazaki celebrated his 80th birthday. According to media reports, since 2017, he has been involved in the production of the animated film "What Kind of Life Do You Want to Live", intending to end his creative career with the animation adaptation of this 1937 novel of the same name. Toshio Suzuki once revealed on a TV show that Miyazaki decided to make a comeback because he wanted to leave a work for his grandson. Through this film, he wanted to tell his grandson, "Grandpa is going to another world, but he left you this movie." ”
Never before have viewers been so deeply and clearly aware that Miyazaki will leave Ghibli with fewer and fewer works. It also leaves "Who will be the next head of Ghibli?" "Once again, it was the focus of attention.
At the end of 2008, after the success of "Po Yo on the Cliff", Miyazaki proposed the "Ghibli 5-year Business Plan", in which newcomer directors Hiromasa Mibayashi and Goro Miyazaki will be used in the first three years to launch two works, "Arieti the Little Man Who Borrowed Things" and "From the Blooming Hillside of Yu Meiren".
The performances of the two newcomer directors are eye-catching: after the release of "Arietti the Little Man Who Borrowed Things", with a box office revenue of 9.2 billion yen, it ranked first in the box office ranking of Domestic Films in Japan that year, and director Hiromasa Mibayashi was also regarded as Miyazaki's best heir and had a good future; "The Hillside of Yu Beauty" as Miyazaki's second animated feature film after "The Battle of the Earth and Sea", the attention and reputation exceeded the previous work, bringing a fresh and melancholy breeze to the film audience of that year.
But both works more or less bear the shadow of Miyazaki. He worked as a screenwriter for two works, often intervening in the work of the director, who was even commented as "the heroine is also the ideal woman of the typical Miyazaki Hayao" and "more like a collection of the advantages of Takahata and Miyazaki".
In 2013, after directing "Mani in Memory", Hiromasa Mirin announced that he was leaving Ghibli and established The Puleka Studio with producer Yoshiaki Nishimura. He admits that he has worked at Ghibli for 20 years, and Ghibli's influence on him has penetrated deep into the marrow. In 2018, Mirin Hongchang launched "Mary and the Witch's Flower", but after the launch of the work, despite the blessing of the "Ghibli" aura, the word-of-mouth at the Chinese box office met waterloo, and finally only earned 20 million box office.
Miyazaki, who has always been considered "living in his father's shadow", continued to stay in Ghibli and tested the waters of his father's less involved field - 3D animated feature films. He said in a recent interview that if the studio is to continue, there will be no future if miyazaki is to be imitated. He noticed that at content fairs held in France, only Japan was still insisting on hand-drawn animation. Faced with 3DCG, which has become mainstream around the world, he believes it is necessary for Ghibli to try something new.
In fact, back in the 1990s, after watching the 3DCG footage in the OP of "Timeless Fortress 7" several times, Miyazaki immediately asked Katamoto Man, who was in charge of production, to join Ghibli in charge of CG work, and many anime fans regarded this anecdote as an argument for Miyazaki to actively embrace new things. In addition, "Tatajun Minkun" mentioned on Weibo that Ghibli began to contact digital technology to produce animation very early, and Miyazaki's earliest traceable 3D work was the opening of the film launched by Japanese television in 1992.
(Source @ Tatajun Minkun invasion and deletion)
But making a hand-drawn animated feature film may be even more of a sentiment. Someone once asked Miyazaki: "Now that CG has entered its heyday, why not make it with CG?" ”
Miyazaki replied: "I met a clogs shop owner on the street, he said that although many clogs shops have closed, but not all of them will go out of business, there will always be one or two will stay, until now, but there are more customers to this shop, so we don't want to give up drawing with pencils." ”
Today, that vision seems to be fading away with the older generation. In 2022, Ghibli Theme Park will be open to guests. People care, will this fairy tale kingdom with roadside stop signs squatting totoro, flying cats and cat buses in the air, and little witches riding on brooms to deliver will add more new partners?
But what they care more about in their hearts is that Ghibli will continue to carry the love and dreams of the next generation?
bibliography
Nan Longrui. The Connotation and Artistic Value of Animation in Takahata Theater[J].Journal of Beijing Film Academy, 2019(09):120-128.
YOU Zhihao. Hayao Miyazaki's First Journey to the Fantasy World[J].Journal of Beijing Film Academy, 2003(03):67-73+77.