Final Ghibli reminder!
Tonight is the last night in TCM's Ghibli film festival. Tonight's two films are both by Isao TAKAHATA, the lesser-known of the two main directors at Studio Ghibli.
The first is "Pom Poko", the story of a band of tanukis (also known as "raccoon dogs") who are trying to prevent humans from building apartments over their forest. These tanukis are, of course, the mythical shape-changing giant-testicled type, not just mundane real world tanukis. (And the English script just refers to them as raccoons, presumably for simplicity. But don't blame Disney for that -- the translation Ghibli sent them used plain old "raccoon.") It's sort of a strange mix of comedy with a fight against inevitable human expansion. I thought it dragged in a few places, but, the story spans quite a few years, so that may be inevitable.
The second movie tonight is "Only Yesterday". I have never seen this movie. It's not currently scheduled to be released in the US, and as such, Disney has not dubbed it. So, both showings of it tonight will be subtitled, and it's the US premiere of the film. Here is nausicaa.net's capsule summary: "Only Yesterday revolves around Taeko, a single woman working a desk job in Tokyo in 1982, taking a vacation in the countryside with the family of her sister in-law. During her vacation, Taeko finds herself looking back at her time as a young schoolgirl growing up in 1966. The film flips back and forth between the two time periods with a lot of nostalgia and beautiful country scenery as Taeko sorts out her flashbacks and tries to make some tough decisions about her future."
So, in some ways, this film may remind viewers of last week's "Whisper of the Heart", in that it's a "mundane" story about modern Japanese people, not a fantasy or a sci-fi epic. I am looking forward to it.
The first is "Pom Poko", the story of a band of tanukis (also known as "raccoon dogs") who are trying to prevent humans from building apartments over their forest. These tanukis are, of course, the mythical shape-changing giant-testicled type, not just mundane real world tanukis. (And the English script just refers to them as raccoons, presumably for simplicity. But don't blame Disney for that -- the translation Ghibli sent them used plain old "raccoon.") It's sort of a strange mix of comedy with a fight against inevitable human expansion. I thought it dragged in a few places, but, the story spans quite a few years, so that may be inevitable.
The second movie tonight is "Only Yesterday". I have never seen this movie. It's not currently scheduled to be released in the US, and as such, Disney has not dubbed it. So, both showings of it tonight will be subtitled, and it's the US premiere of the film. Here is nausicaa.net's capsule summary: "Only Yesterday revolves around Taeko, a single woman working a desk job in Tokyo in 1982, taking a vacation in the countryside with the family of her sister in-law. During her vacation, Taeko finds herself looking back at her time as a young schoolgirl growing up in 1966. The film flips back and forth between the two time periods with a lot of nostalgia and beautiful country scenery as Taeko sorts out her flashbacks and tries to make some tough decisions about her future."
So, in some ways, this film may remind viewers of last week's "Whisper of the Heart", in that it's a "mundane" story about modern Japanese people, not a fantasy or a sci-fi epic. I am looking forward to it.