A critic with attitude?

Coraline – a rare female action hero?

There aren’t too many UK-based film critics (as distinct from scholars who write) who I look forward to reading. Philip French in the Observer is usually reliable and Jonathan Romney in the Independent on Sunday is always worth reading. But that’s about it. I was intrigued therefore to clock the occasional appearance of Anne Billson in the Guardian. Billson has been around on various papers for quite a while and her other work includes horror novels and two BFI film guides. She belongs to the ‘anti-realist/pro-fantasy’ wing of the UK critics’ community. This gives her the motivation to weigh into quite a few sacred cows. Her Guardian columns last year went onto the film blog where they generated a healthy response from readers, many of whom showed put the paper’s film writers to shame. Strangely, Billson’s recent posts have lost their comment facility – perhaps she is too effective in getting up noses? I particularly enjoyed her New Year rant in which she declared that she wasn’t interested in all the Oscar hype and would far rather look forward to The Good, The Bad and The Weird.

A few weeks ago, Billson loosed a salvo at the British film industry in general and one of its leading practitioners in particular. I was all set to join in her attack on Richard Curtis and The Boat That Rocked, except that I couldn’t face going to see the film. In the event, everyone else seems to have agreed on how bad the film was, so we can just glow in quiet satisfaction. Today Billson has returned to the fray with an attack on the dearth of proper female action heroes in Hollywood animation films. She asks why it was felt necessary to add a male sidekick to the female action hero at the centre of the new film Coraline – and goes on to point out that in French and Japanese Cinema girls get a much better deal. It’s great stuff. I don’t know why, but the Guardian’s arts coverage has a very good team of women commenting on music, but Anne Billson’s is the only female voice on cinema. Why not give her some of Peter Bradshaw’s column inches on a weekly basis?

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (Japan 2006)

 

Makoto at home (eating a 'pudding').

 I first saw this film advertised as a DVD release in Sight & Sound, the main highbrow film magazine in the UK. It’s unusual to see an anime advertised in this way (although DVD distributors have got more savvy recently). My first thoughts were that the film must have a reputation on the par with the Studio Ghibli output and I rented it on this basis. I now realise that this is a well known property in Japan and you can read the history on Wikipedia, which also carries some useful links. Beware, however, if you do go to Wikipedia that there is a full synopsis/spoiler that could ruin your enjoyment – I found the film’s narrative development to be quite surprising and I’m certainly glad I didn’t know what would happen.

The ‘property’ was originally created by the veteran Japanese science fiction writer Tsutsui Yasutaka in 1967 and it is interesting that he should choose a teenage girl has his protagonist. A manga ’prelude’ based on the original, but updated, was published in Kadokawa Shoten’s Shōnen Ace magazine and then bound into a novel in May-June 2006 and the anime released in July of that year. The anime version proved to be a sleeper hit in Japan and has finally surfaced in the UK and US on DVD after occasional (and generally well-received) festival screenings.

The appearance of this story in a shōnen manga series strikes me as odd because shōnen implies a readership of adolescent boys – the equivalent for girls is shōjo manga. This probably just shows that I have an awful lot to learn about manga!

Makoto is the tomboyish 17 year-old at a Tokyo high school (the narrow streets and river walk suggest the ‘old town’ part of the city, but it looks like a spacious school with large grounds). She has a younger sister and two male friends at school with whom she plays baseball after classes. She also has an aunt – a youngish woman of indeterminate age who works as a picture restorer for art galleries. Makoto calls her ‘Aunt Witch’ and this appears to be appropriate when she is unfazed by Makoto’s revelation of her ability to time-leap.

In many ways, this anime strikes me as the perfect teen movie. I found it at once beautiful to look at and intriguing, but I confess also at first quite difficult to follow. Partly this was because of the jumping backwards and revisiting scenes that takes place in most time-slip stories, but also because I do find teen fiction difficult as I simply can’t intuit the language and the nuances of teen communication. (I was watching the Japanese version with English subs.) When I realised the full import of what was happening, I found the narrative to be engrossing and deceptively multi-layered. I’m sure that I didn’t get all of it and there were the usual mysteries. As some of the anime fan-bloggers have admitted there could be a few more ‘answers’ – but holding back some information makes for a more effective cult narrative.

It is partly science fiction, largely a teen movie/high school film, a ‘coming-of-age’ story (without a sexual relationship) and a sensitive romance element which I found affecting. Surely this must be a shōnen with a sizeable shōjo audience?

I was most taken by the drawn backgrounds (see still above) which are beautifully realised and reminded me of Miyazaki’s work. The action was sometimes very slow (I wondered if my DVD player had paused) and this allowed the eye to wander around the very detailed mise en scène (e.g in Auntie Witch’s apartment with its books and woodblock prints). By contrast, I found the characters to be all drawn as tall and thin with barely any body shape. The combination of richly detailed background and stylised characters gives the film a quite distinctive look. The music too, was at times similar to that in Miyazaki’s films. There are some songs as well, but I feel inadequate in analysing the use of music in anime. The narrative of course speeds up for the action sequences which I found original and effective. Having the hero literally run and leap in order to travel in time worked well in terms of the story.

There is an excellent review on AnimeNewsNetwork.com from which I learned that the Miyazaki references are understandable since the film was made by a Studio Ghibli refugee, Hosoda Mamoru, with other collaborators who also have Studio Ghibli experience. ‘Line artist’ Sadamoto Yoshiyuki is also very experienced. The Anime News Network Review emphasises the attractiveness of the central characters as more than simply generic characters, quoting the almost Buster Keaton-like antics of Makoto who begins her time travelling in order to put right some of her ‘accidents’. This review finds the final third of the narrative less successful – this was the part that gripped me most. Perhaps this is the distinction between those audiences with genre knowledge and outsiders like me?

I would heartily recommend this film and it would give students based outside Japan, not only an interesting narrative/genre case study, but also an insight into aspects of Japanese culture that still remain mysterious in the West. (The main one being the representation, as the Anime News Network review suggests, of the “wistful buoyancy that only the Japanese seem to be able to associate with high school”, when in reality, the Japanese education system seems to put so much stress on results for seemingly middle-class students like Makoto.)  

Watch the opening here (I’d urge you to buy it, but if you can’t there are more YouTube clips available):

Sennen joyû (Millennium Actress, Japan, 2001)

Movie romance

This movie flirts with postmodern frivolity but transcends it with a thoughtful, bitter-sweet meditation of memory, life and the impossibility of romance; other than in movies that is. The eponymous lead  spends her life seeking her Mr Right who she bumped into twice.when a youth. By the end she realises that all she is in love with is the chase.

The conceit of having the interviewers of the actress, at the end of her life, appearing in her ‘flashback’ memories is brilliantly conceived and executed. And we get a smattering of the history of post-war Japanese cinema on the way. The wonderful mixture of wit and visual beauty seems to be characteristic of writer-director Satoshi Kon; I’m looking forward to Paprika (2006).

Waltz With Bashir 2008

 

Israel / France / Germany / USA / Japan / Finland / Switzerland / Belgium / Australia 2008.

Directed and written by Ari Folman. 90 minutes. Certificate 18. In colour with English subtitles.

This film has received glowing reviews, frequently using the phrase ‘anti-war’. It is a powerful and imaginative documentary film, though it feels and looks much more like a fictional dramatisation. That is mainly due to the animation techniques, which are used so effectively. It is a film to be seen, and preferably in its proper format on a cinema screen

It treats of the massacre of thousands of Palestinian civilians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. So the powerful emotional responses that the film is likely to generate also need to be analysed. Whilst I feel that this is an impressive treatment for an Israeli artist, I still find the film is problematic and shot through with contradictions.

In a seminal article on Hollywood films and Vietnam the sadly deceased Andrew Britton wrote:

“The ‘anti-war’ film tends to protest against war as such from an abstractly moral point of view, in the name, frequently, of a humanist idea. . . . war is extrapolated from its socio-economic causes and functions and we are confronted with its ‘horrors’ – horrors which, given the vague definition of their origins, and the status of the protagonist(s) as victim (s) seems both intolerable and irremediable.”  [Sideshows: Hollywood in Vietnam, in Movie, 27/28, 1981].

These were comments that seemed to me apposite for Waltz with Bashir.

The opening credits are followed by a placing statement, which refers to the ‘war between Israel and Lebanon’. Already this is problematic. This was not a war in the sense of a two-sided conflict; Israel invaded Lebanon with no justification. And that is true of the most recent invasion, which receives no mention in the film. This is despite the film being completed in 2008, that is, when the more recent atrocities were well known.

The film uses interviews with participants and flashbacks to the actual event of 1982. The latter in particular reminded me of the well-known Vietnam film Apocalypse Now [a film that Britton's critically discusses in his article]. There is a similar noirish atmosphere, similar sequences of ’shock and awe’, and a similar overwhelming sense of masculinity. The few females in the film comprise a woman in a porn film excerpt, a fantasised sex-cum-mother icon, a girl friend who dumped the narrator, and, finally, the women in the Sabra and Chatila camps. [There may have been in brief a female military character?]  These are fairly stereotypical characters in war movies.

The film’s focus is on the combatants. These are Folman and his friends and colleagues. Troubled by dreams and memories he seeks out friends who participated in the invasion and also counsellors and psychologists for comment and advice. Thus it is these Israeli voices that present and contexualise the events that unfold. In Folman’s case he finds he does not remember the actual events of the invasion, hence his search to both recover and understand.

Clearly the climax of the film is the massacre in the camps: actually perpetrated by Christian Phalangist militia. At the time the Israeli authorities professed ignorance of the appalling atrocities that were perpetrated, but subsequent investigation has clearly exposed their complicity in the horrors. In the case of Folman and his friends, ordinary soldiers, they still maintain that they were unaware until the massacre was almost complete and finally ended. Whilst some reviews echo this claim, I found the film very ambiguous on this point. In the flashbacks the Israeli soldiers are clearly almost on top of the camps, they stand and watch as the Phalangist militia enter the refugee camps, and there are regular mortar flares fired into the sky by Israelis: illumination by which the massacre is carried out. I was unclear as to whether Folman was in denial as to the crime, or whether the mise en scène subverts the claims of ignorance. And who was being subverted – the filmmakers, the audience, or both?

In fact, what the viewers see is not a record of events, but recovered memories of the events. Our final glimpse of Folman is at the end of the last flashback, as his face shows shock as he [apparently] realises the horror that has occurred. The psychologists [or psychiatrists] offer some analysis of these memories. At one point there is a reference to the Holocaust in Germany in World War II. This seems to be one of those automatic and defensive references that Israelis offer when their actions are criticised. The psychologist suggests that Folman could be taking on the role of a Nazi: a type of sublimation? This would seem to miss the point, because the parallels are not with Nazi Germany but with the Apartheid [settler] regime in South Africa. So the absence of the settler ideology, a cause and a factor, reinforces the sense of nameless horror.

Once again the parallel with Apocalypse Now is apparent. The latter film totally fails to deal with the factors for the US presence in Vietnam. Folman’s film never attempts to explain the Israeli presence in Lebanon. And, like Apocalypse Now, the ‘enemy’ is shadowy and predominately depersonalised. There are no Palestinians or Lebanese in the contemporary sequences. And in the flashbacks, for most of the time, we see only fighters, termed ‘terrorists’: and victims of the Israeli actions. Andrew Briton also critically comments on the source novella for Apocalypse Now, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Whilst that novella does detail some of the crimes against the Congolese, [fictionalising actual historical horrors], the title indicates how Conrad failed to overcome the ‘otherness’ that the colonialists attribute to the natives.

Real Palestinians do appear at the end of the film when the animated flashback is transformed into actual footage as the survivors of the massacre finally leave and then return to the camp. This is shocking horror. Unfortunately whilst powerful, I find it [as Britton did in the Vietnam films] ‘both ‘intolerable’ but ‘irremediable’. As is so often the case, even in liberal Israeli films, we never hear the voice of the Palestinians. They are either terrorists or victims: they remain the other. 

The problem with this is highlighted in a stanza by the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish:

            You standing at the doorstep, enter

            And drink Arabic coffee with us

            (you might sense you’re human like us)

            you standing at the doorstep of houses,

            get out of our mornings,

            we need reassurance that we

            are human like you!                       

[State of Siege, translation Fady Joudah, 2007].

How rare is any sense of Palestinian humanity in the dominant discourses of Israeli society. Apparently Folman’s liberalism and guilt do not extend that far. In fairness they do extend some way beyond that of most Israeli artworks. Whatever its limitations, Waltz with Bashir shows a welcome confrontation with one of the darker passages in Israel’s occupation of Arab lands. So this is definitely a film to see and to ponder.

Princess Mononoke (Japan 1997)

Mononoke hime (Princess Mononoke) is perhaps Miyazaki Hayao’s masterpiece. It combines his two main themes – support for feminist ideas and concern over the ecological disaster that faces the planet. It is also the Miyazaki film with the most direct relationship with Japanese history and culture.

Setting
The setting is during the late Muromachi period in Japan, possibly in the early 16th century. Most of Miyazaki’s other films are set in indeterminate historical periods with various anachronisms (e.g. flying ships in Victorian Europe etc.) Princess Mononoke is by contrast remarkably consistent. The chosen period is the ‘pre-modern’, a time of great change when the Japanese population was growing rapidly and local wars over land and resources were quite common. But it pre-dates the first appearance of the Europeans and also the major wars of the end of the 16th century when the Tokugawa shogunate gained control and stabilised/stratified Japanese society. Miyazaki argues that in some ways this period was similar to our contemporary world – in which we still have a chance to change before the future is mapped out for us.

The setting also has a meaning in terms of Japanese cinema in which films have traditionally been defined as ‘contemporary’ (gendaigeki) or ‘period films’ (jedaigeki). Princess Mononoke is clearly a jedaigeki, but unlike many such films it doesn’t focus on the slightly later Tokugawa period and it doesn’t focus on samurai warriors and their lords (daimyo). Instead it gives precedence to artisans and to confrontations with the natural world.

“The reason for these settings is to depict characters more freely, without being bounded by the existing commonsense, preconceived notion, or prejudice in the existing period dramas.” (Miyazaki Hayao on www.nausicaa.net)

Characters
One feature of the Muromachi period that interested Miyazaki was the greater freedom for women in these more anarchic times. In this respect, the film is similar to the jedaigeki of the great master Mizoguchi Kenji, whose women are active in films like Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), but generally suffering. Miyazaki’s women are often both active and successful achievers. Although Princess Mononoke (‘Princess Ghost/Spirit’) is the named character of the title, the protagonist of the story is actually the young prince, Ashitaka, a rare example of a male protagonist in a Miyazaki film.

Ashitaka is a prince of the Emishi, one of the original peoples of the main Japanese island, Honshu, who were eventually conquered and assimilated by the Japanese around the 10th century AD. However, the history of the Emishi and their relationship to the Ainu, the other group of indigenous people of the most Northerly Japanese island, Hokkaido, has still not been resolved. Perhaps for Miyazaki what is important is that Japan was once a much less ‘mono-ethnic’ culture.

There are several groups of characters with various inter-relationships in Princess Mononoke. This is one of the great strengths of the film. There are no absolute heroes or villains. The humans are fighting the spirits and the gods of the forest. They are of course also fighting each other. The iron workers in the forest are led by women and are in many ways progressive, yet they threaten the natural world. The ‘princess’, San is quite unlike the the feisty but generally pleasant young women (shōjo) of most other Miyazaki films. Instead she is violent and angry, but also loyal and protective towards her adoptive mother, the dog/wolf god, Moro. In his early discussions about the film, Miyazaki suggested that San would be resemble a clay doll figure from the pre-agricultural period.  With her blood-stained face she is clearly not a ‘princess’ from Western stories.

Japanese culture
Western commentators have sometimes referred to The Lord of the Rings or the Tales of Narnia in trying to introduce Princess Mononoke. I’m not sure that this helps. Japanese culture is much more accepting of spirits as part of everyday life and although the action in Princess Mononoke may be fantastical, it is rooted in a much more realistic context (only the Shishi – the spirit of the forest – is a Miyazaki invention). The film has a universal appeal certainly, but this doesn’t mean that we can view it in the same way as Western mythological stories. Miyazaki has created a story that should concern us all, but it takes place firmly within the context of Japanese history and popular culture.

Roy Stafford, 27/10/06

(These notes were written for a screening of the film during the 2006 Bradford Animation Festival.)