Split Decision: Ani-May
Welcome to MovieJawn’s Split Decision! Each week, Ryan will pose a question to our staff of knowledgable and passionate film lovers and share the responses. Chime in on Twitter, Facebook, our Instagram, or in the comments below.
This week’s question:
This month, we’re celebrating animation from around the world by looking at some of our favorite works or ones we hope will provide new perspective. This also ties into our upcoming Spring issue of the zine, which is all about gaining new insights through films that are ‘foreign to us.’ See all the articles here.
What is an animated film you love that is not in English?
I love animation so much, and there are so many favorites I have from Studio Ghibli’s output especially, but for this I am going to have to pick Porco Rosso. It’s a movie about a pilot who has been turned into a pig fighting sky pirates and greenshirts in 1930s Italy. It’s also full of great life advice. In the words of the pig man himself, ”I’d rather be pig than a fascist!” –Ryan Silberstein, The Red Herring
Waltz with Bashir is an extraordinary animated documentary from Israel opens with a pack of dogs barking and giving chase. The dogs are part of a nightmare that a friend shares with Ari, a filmmaker, who describes this haunting dream. The conversation prompts Ari to reflect back on his experiences as a soldier, fighting in Lebanon twenty years prior. Ari, it seems, is unable to remember details from a massacre he witnessed, and the film recounts the conversations he has with his fellow soldiers. The monologues, which are clues unlocking Ari’s mystery, are uniformly gripping. When someone describes the safety of a tank, potent scenes depict the vehicle rolling down the street, crushing everything in its path. Likewise, emotional oral histories, such as the “terrible silence” that follows a brutal machine gun massacre is eerily poignant. Many of these elements are made more vivid by the noir-ish use of light and shadow as well as the incredible sound design. No matter how much or how little viewers know about the situation, what is undeniable is the emotional power of this film in the brief moment when it switches from animation to documentary footage.–Gary M. Kramer, Staff Writer
Roujin Z by Katsuhiro Otomo, directed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo. I watched it while… chemically-induced, and it was everything you would want from an anime--action-packed, funny, apocalyptic, and from the mind of the man who brought you Akira. –Anthony Glassman, Contributor
End of Evangelion. Where do I begin with this movie? Everything in that movie works so well. All of the storylines were leading up to this. All of the characters were complex and had great motivations. The film compliments the series, and gave us, the fans, exactly what we wanted. It wraps nearly everything up in a nice bow, and artistically didn’t hold back. The world basically ends, and our hero has the ultimate choice. Restart humanity, or let third impact be our ultimate evolution. Neon Genesis Evangelion is one half mech fights, and the other half a philosophical debate, and the film ends with the debate coming to its ultimate end. Shinji is left with a choice that most people wouldn’t have the answer to, and left with a woman who sees him as disgusting. It’s a film that is both frightening and honest at the same time. –Miguel Alejandro Marquez, Staff Writer
Don’t let Javier Mariscal’s deceptively simple animation fool you - Chico and Rita is a sweeping, bittersweet love story for the ages. Directors Fernando Trueba, Tono Errando, and Mariscal’s bolero-inspired movie spans decades and continents but focuses on the titular Chico and Rita, a pianist and a singer, respectively, who first meet in 1940s Havana and whose passion for each other creates beautiful music but isn’t enough to shield them from prejudice and jealousy. The film’s many locations come to life (a vibrant and bustling Cuba, a nearly grayscale and seedy New York), but the true star of the movie is its music - Idania Valdes and Bebo Valdes’s rendition of “Besame Mucho” is transportive, and an On the Town and Casablanca-referencing “going to New York” montage sheds any pretense of realism, letting music and color tell the whole story. –Ryan Smillie, Staff Writer
I’d like to pull an obscure thing out or at least not name the first thing any number of listicles online would point you toward, but I can’t. My answer is Akira. I’ve never fully connected with anime (I know it isn’t a genre, but the tropes often don’t work for me), but Akira has blown me away since I watched it in 30 minute lunch break chunks at the middle school anime club I went to with my more invested friends. I loved it so much that, once I had bought it for myself, I felt the need to show it to my dad. He stopped watching ten minutes in because it was too violent. But Akira had the effect on me that it has had on so many people. It was so different and felt so cool that I needed to share it with somebody once it had been shared with me, even if that person was the parent who often stopped me from watching R rated movies. From that opening motorcycle fight, with the Geinoh Yamashirogumi soundtrack and the massive buildings and the brake light trails, I knew I was seeing something special. Following up with what little Katsuhiro Otomo work I could find in English (the Domo manga Dark Horse localized and let slip out of print two decades ago, Memories), I went down an unfortunate hole with Otomo. He’s so obsessive about his work and takes so long to make it that there just isn’t much of it. I wanted more movies like Akira, and there weren’t any. There’s still nothing like it.–Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer
Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro was my least favorite Miyazaki film until I had kids and it became not only my favorite Miyazaki, but one of my Top 10 favorite movies of all time. Though it’s not as flashy as many of his other films, I feel like that is a strength rather than a weakness. It’s a beautiful story about the resilience of kids, the interconnectedness of Japanese spiritualism and nature, and how everything joyful about life can be found in the smallest places. Plus there’s a bus that also happens to be a cat and even on my first watch I recognized that as pure movie magic. –Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer
The Girl Without Hands (FR: La Jeune Fille Sans Mains) (2016) is a minimalist French film based off of a German folktale about - you guessed it - a girl who supernaturally loses her hands. It's visually beautiful in a very sketchy, watercolor-y kind of way with moody music and threadbare dialogue. Yes, it has the same deal-with-the-Devil and rags-to-riches angles that you would expect from a fairy tale. But it also has some surprisingly accessible moments that humanize and add emotional definition to what would otherwise be very stock characters. It's old-school Brother's Grimm, so if the non-Disney-ified stories still seem child-appropriate to you, then maybe this is a family flick? But I'm inclined to suggest screening this for your jaded teens to show them that fairy tales are edgy, after any younger ones are already tucked in bed. –Allison Yakulis, Staff Writer
I remember receiving a VHS tape as a gift from a faraway land when I was a child with work by Norway’s Ivo Caprino. It is long gone now, so I don’t remember everything that was on it, but the one short film that sticks with me the most is Reve-enke (The Fox’s Widow). I found a clip in english, and it brought back great memories, but I wish I still had that tape. It’s beautiful and I remember really bonding with it as a very sensitive lil kid. –Ashley Jane Davis, Staff Writer
The first film that comes to mind for me is Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s Persepolis. I devoured Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novels about coming of age during the Iranian Revolution and was just awed by the animated film adaptation and how closely it resembled the artistry of the original. Another animated film I love is Ernest & Celestine from France, Belgium, and Luxembourg - also based on books, this one hit my heart pretty hard and I remember crying quite a bit. I’m a movie crier. –Jaime Davis, The Fixer