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I'm still holding out a small amount of hope for Akira because I'm a fan of the director they got. He's the guy who made Orphan and Unknown, both genre flicks that are way better than the have any right to be, and well worth checking out. But ya, it's probably going to suck.
What's funny is that Lassetter claims to worship Miyazaki as one of the greatest animation directors ever. But their other flicks are the really amazing ones. Only Yesterday, Whispers of the Heart, Grave of the Fireflies... These films could be made as live action dramas.
Squiggly_P: I disagree with your stance on Miyazaki. He is and always has been the driving creative force behind Studio Ghibli. I love the movies you name, in large part because getting other directors to inject their DNA into a Ghibli production keeps the storytelling sharp and fresh, and I see can see their influence folded back into Ghibli's style.
Are those movies really better than Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, or Spirited Away?
What criteria are we using here, anyway? You said "amazing," but do you mean influential, or original? Or are we just talking about quality? Or personal preference?
It sounds a bit like your criteria might be "could be made as a live action drama," whereas the thing that impresses me is when an animated movie tells a resonant story that would be difficult or impossible to tell as a live action drama, or would at least lack the lyricism and visual imagery of something like Spirited Away.
And certainly from an animation standpoint, Miyazaki is the genius behind Ghibli. In a sense the films you name are examples of other directors telling their stories through the animation style of Miyazaki.
...I'm not entirely sure what my driving point is, here. I just love Hayao Miyazaki.
Miyazaki, and by extension Studio Ghibli, capture an innocence and purity which would not naturally translate into live action, it's simply the wrong medium for what they've made. I think this is some of what Lasseter aspires to.
If companies were babysitters, and I had children, I'd trust them to the care of both Pixar and Studio Ghibli.
My criteria for a movie, animated or not, is the same. I have a raging hard-on for animation due to my opinion that animation is a far superior medium for storytelling than live-action. That is a whole other discussion, tho.
In my opinion, the most important element of a story are the characters. Characters are what makes the rest of the story happen if you've written your story correctly. The motivations of the characters and the clashing of the characters makes everything else in a movie happen. The movies I mention have, in my opinion, superior characters and relationships. Princess Mononoke is a really good film, I will admit, and deserves to be listed as one of the absolute best of the ghibli films and therefore as one of the best animated films of all time. Miyazaki's other movies are a bit more fluffy and loose with their characters and their motivations and actually lie to you about the motivations to a certain degree. You go through most of Spirited Away with a very negative portrayal of the villainess, but at the end of the movie I had a completely different opinion of her and she felt much less of a threat to me. I'm still not sure what her motivation was throughout the film, aside from just "I'm the bad guy, I have to make things hard for this girl". The girl was actually doing her huge favors for most of the movie, but the villain continued to harass her, neutered as she was by the end.
Mononoke is a great film, tho. I won't even try to argue. There's only one part that I think isn't utterly brilliant, and it's a stupid little trivial thing that no one in their right mind should care about.
The three films I mentioned are all extremely character-oriented stories, and I find that those films that emphasize character over plot end up with the most engrossing stories. Ghibli has always emphasized character more than most other studios - live action or animated - but I think Kondo and Takahata were/are better at it than Miyazaki. Not to say that Miyazaki isn't damn good at it - he is - but I would say those three films I mentioned are better than any of Miyazaki's films.
Just my opinion, tho.
Sorry for length, I'm a little drunk at the moment and it's making me possibly ramble more than usual - which is significant for a guy who tends to ramble even when he's not drunk.
Heh. Fair enough.
And now I shall be a fanboy and quibble over details, so feel free to ignore the rest of this post if you're not interested in Ghibli discussions.
In the case of Spirited Away, I think you're crediting the film with a reliable narrator, when a key part of the movie is that the story is told through the lens of an unreliable narrator -- a child. When you're a child, adults tend to be either good or bad, with no middle ground. So yep, the old witch is the villain throughout most of the movie, and then swings into a grey and understandable character right at the end. I think that's a triumph of storytelling, because Chihiro has grown and matured, so that by the climax her worldview allows for an adult who might have both good and bad qualities, or who might be mean and full of bluster, but whose actions speak of a person who's understanding and practices tough love. That arc of Chihiro's understanding is told through the animation and story, and told brilliantly.
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