The Secret World of Arrietty

Nothing will keep me away from a new movie by Studio Ghibli on opening weekend. Like Pixar, they've earned that trust. One after another, they have released movies with lush, beautifully animated, fully realized fantasy worlds, and relatable, human stories.

The newest Ghibli film, The Secret World of Arrietty, is a little different. Written by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, Arrietty takes our own daily home environment and resizes it into a vast, dangerous world full of adventure and peril.

Based on the classic series of children's novels The Borrowers, The Secret World of Arrietty is the story of Arrietty, a tiny girl who lives under the floorboards of a country house with her stern, protective father, and her jumpy, fearful mother. They are Borrowers, a secret race of bug-sized people who live off of the items that human beings, or Beans, as they call them, don't need or will never miss.

On her first Borrowing outing with her father, Arrietty is mistakenly seen by Sean, a sickly Bean boy her own age, staying at the country home with his aunts while awaiting a heart surgery. Sean has long been told of the little people in the floor by his mother, who never stopped believing in them.

As Sean reaches out to befriend Arrietty, her parents realize that they've been made, and knowing the two worlds can never meet, opt to pack up and leave before Arrietty's curiosity gets the best of them all. Meanwhile, they must contend with Sean's aunt, who has been trying to prove their existence for years, and is believed to be a bit off her rocker.

My favorite scenes were just watching the way the Borrowers navigated the human world. Arrietty's first Borrowing was a lot of fun, because we got to see the way they utilized strips of tape to scale tables, and old lost earrings as grappling hooks, and so on. I also really enjoyed the house cat. Ghibli always does great work when animating realistic animal behavior, and the cat has some really funny moments.

Though not my favorite of Studio Ghibli's films, Arrietty is still quite good. It drags on a little bit too long, but a lot of Hayao Miyazaki's films have a slower pace than American kids are used to. I think American kids and Japanese kids might have different attention spans. Or maybe the kids in our audience were just particularly squirmy.

I would recommend The Secret Life of Arrietty as a good movie for the whole family, though if your kid is impatient or the type that wants something noisier, you might want to just wait to show it to them on home video. Still, I don't have any kids, I just like movies. My wife and I saw it on our own and we both enjoyed it a great deal.

Alakazam the Great (Boku No Son Goku)

This is one of those instances where Netflix really came through for me. It recommended this movie, of which I had no prior knowledge, but turns out contains a lot of my deepest interests.

The movie is Daisaku Shirakawa's "Boku No Son Goku", ridiculously titled Alakazam the Great in order to market to the American children of 50 years ago. One reason it is historically interesting is this is one of, if not the first, Japanese animations ever to be released in the states. It was dubbed by the same people who would later do Speed Racer, with Speed himself, Peter Fernandez, voicing the title character. This was before they actually translated what the characters were saying. The people didn't speak Japanese, they just watched the movie and adapted it based on what it looked like was happening. The studio that put it out also tacked on a couple of familiar voices, with Frankie Avalon as Alakazam's singing voice, Jonathan Winters, and the guy who did the voice of Winnie the Pooh narrating.

Another point of interest for me? It is an adaptation of Journey to the West, an ancient Chinese legend of Monkey, a clever, mischievous monkey on an action-packed pilgrimage to India. I've read the translated book of it, and it is one of the most fun books I've ever read. It has been adapted countless times in Asia, in all forms of media, and even a few times in the western world, most recently as a Chinese opera composed by Damon Albarn of The Gorillaz.



Sooo cool.

Now, this particular adaptation of Journey to the West is based on a Manga by the great Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy, and considered the founding father of Japanese comics. I've been a huge fan of his works for some time now. I would hold him up to any of the great 20th century visual storytellers; Kubrick (who was also a fan), Kurosawa, Jack Kirby, etc. From what I've read, Tezuka's actual involvement in the movie was limited, but you can still see his influence in the character designs and the story itself.

The story goes as such: Alakazam (or just Monkey in the folklore) is a brash, mischievous little monkey who becomes king of his people. He's maybe not a very good king right away. When told that humans are the smartest of the animals, he seeks out Merlin (once again, an artifact of the translation) and tricks him into teaching him his magic. Once he learns this, he goes up and challenges the heavens, and is punished for his insolence by being trapped in a mountain. He is given a second chance by being allowed to act as bodyguard to Prince Amat (Tripitaka in the version I read) on his pilgrimage to India, in order to bring Buddhist scriptures back to China (this part isn't mentioned in the movie). On their way, they have many adventures (only a couple featured in the movie), and join up with a pig named Quigley (Pigsy in the version I read) and "Max Lulipopo" (known as Sandy in the book).

The movie holds up pretty well, and plays like the Japanese equivalent of a Disney fairy tale classic. The animation, especially, is very influenced by Disney. There are shades of Bambi in the animals, and the Chernobog sequence from Fantasia in some of the creatures. A really cool scene is when Alakazam goes to heaven and battles Hercules. They morph into various animals and duke it out, before ultimately becoming a dragon and a dinosaur. I have a 3 year old nephew who would love it. Alakazam is a great character, tricky in the tradition of Bugs Bunny, and kids will have an easy time liking him.

The voice work is your typical early anime dub, with the really fast talking and trying to fit the lines into the mouth movements. If you're familiar with how Speed Racer talked, it's like that. The movie was given a new, more western score, with songs very befitting of cartoons from 1960. I would be curious to hear what the songs were like in Japan. A lot of early anime (heck, even more recent stuff) was edited down for U.S. consumption, for time, or often for content. I couldn't tell if this was cut down at all. It felt pretty coherent, and there was nothing too violent, so I assume the length of the movie is pretty much intact.

The video quality on Netflix was pretty crappy; I assume there's probably not much money to be had in a DVD release of something like this, and a remastering was probably deemed not worth it by whatever studio owns the rights. Personally, I'd love to see a nice version of the movie in its original Japanese, and I'm sure a high quality DVD version of it exists over there that could easily be transferred to a stateside release. Just, you know, they don't want to spend the money.

If you love folklore and animation history like I do, or if you have younger kids and want to show them a fun story from another culture, look up Alakazam the Great on Netflix.

Summer Wars

Mamoru Hosoda is quickly cementing himself as one of the best anime directors in Japan. Besides some movies best on cartoon series like Digimon and One Piece, he has directed two of his own films. First came an animated adaptation of a novel called The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, which took Japanese moviegoers by surprise upon release, and actually beat a Studio Ghibli film for the top spot in the box office. Now comes Summer Wars, his second feature.

Summer Wars begins by establishing the concept of OZ, which is basically a super-internet, where people have their own avatars and can do anything they want on it. Basically, it's the regular internet, made much more visually interesting. It follows Kenji, a teenaged math genius, who agrees to go on a long weekend trip with Natsuki, to see her extremely large, old, and respected family on her grandmother's 90th birthday. While there, using OZ on his phone, he is tricked into giving his avatar to an experimental virus, who then uses it to take over the internet, and wreak havoc on the world outside. Kenji and Natsuki's family must work together with their not inconsiderable resources (one happens to sell powerful computers, one is a government agent, etc.) to contain or defeat this virus that Kenji mistakenly let loose on the world.

Don't let the poster mislead you. More of the movie takes place in the real world than with the avatars in OZ. In fact, the Japanese poster is, unsurprisingly, a much more accurate representation of the movie.



Something I really like about Hosoda's first two films is that he takes these out there science fiction concepts and imbues them with emotional realism. The fate of the world depends on what goes down on OZ, basically an abstract dimension, and while Kenji and a few members of Natsuki's family spend much of the movie trying to solve this, the rest of the family continues going on with their day to day life. The OZ situation just feels like a game to them. One member can't tear herself away from a televised high school championship baseball game that her son is pitching in; to her, the fate of the world depends on this. In the end, the movie is a pretty good, uncynical portrayal of the way a family comes together and supports each other in a time of both emotional and external crisis.

The OZ stuff is visually spectacular. The world is populated with all kinds of avatars, from two-dimensional 8-bit people to animal people to floating logos. It's moderated by two giant floating whales named John and Yoko. There are all kinds of things to do, like games, shops, and classes. Very cool world-within-a-world. I also like that it's not one of those sci-fi movie where the characters jack their brain into the net and experience it first hand. What we're seeing as viewers is just a more vivid cinematic representation of what these characters are doing on their computers.

I liked Summer Wars about just as much as I liked The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Mamoru Hosoda is a filmmaker worth looking into. Both of his films so far are pleasant, positive science fiction metaphors for how we deal with the obstacles we encounter every day.