Blurring the Line.

As a new Space Jam film beams down to Earth, Kambole Campbell argues that a commitment to silliness and a sincere love for the medium is what it takes to make a great live-action/animation hybrid.

The live-action and animation hybrid movie is something of a dicey prospect. It’s tricky to create believable interaction between what’s real and what’s drawn, puppeteered or rendered—and blending the live and the animated has so far resulted in wild swings in quality. It is a highly specific and technically demanding niche, one with only a select few major hits, though plenty of cult oddities. So what makes a good live-action/animation hybrid?

To borrow words from Hayao Miyazaki, “live action is becoming part of that whole soup called animation”. Characters distinct from the humans they interact with, but rendered as though they were real creatures (or ghosts), are everywhere lately; in Paddington, in Scooby Doo, in David Lowery’s (wonderful) update of Pete’s Dragon.

The original ‘Pete’s Dragon’ (1977) alongside the 2016 remake.

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Ha, the letterboxd news page is a tumblr. This is great.

Discovering that Cool World was supposed to be an R rated horror film has changed my entire day. What! I want to see that version. It explains why every scene is so offputting and unpleasant. I’m intrigued.

just… Goro Miyazaki starting his animation career with having a son kill his father, the king of kingdom where magic is disappearing, and run away and Hayao (possibly ending) his career with a young boy refusing to take on his family’s powerful legacy over a magical world, knowing the world would die without him in favor of not abandoning his family and choosing to live contentedly in the mundane world…

Goro Miyazaki wrote and directed Tales from Earthsea (2006), a project his father Hayao Miyazaki had long wanted to adapt. Hayao didn’t approve of his son leading the project due to his inexperience and they allegedly didn’t speak while his son adapted the series into a movie. Goro had been reluctant to follow in his father’s footsteps and worked in landscaping for years before joining Studio Ghibli. During Tales from Earthsea production, Goro said that his dad “gets zero marks as a father but full marks as a director of animated films.”

Goro begins the movie with Prince Arren killing his father, the king.

This does not happen in the book series.

Hayao announced plans to retire four separate times since 1997, but continued to work - compelled to share poignant and internationally acclaimed stories with the world. His latest movie, The Boy and the Heron (2023), centers on themes of family ties and legacy and feels like a public acknowledgment of and reply to his and Goro’s relationship and their history with the animation studio.

In The Boy and the Heron, the main character, young Mahito, is drawn into a magical and fantastic other world while searching for his step-mother and is drawn by claims that his deceased mother is still alive in this other world. While he is there, the powerful wizard who rules the dimension (who happens to be Mahito’s grand-uncle) has chosen Mahito to be his heir in magically maintaining the world’s existence and its power.

Mahito refuses. He chooses to leave the fantasy realm to return to his own world with his step-mother despite the hardships he had been experiencing there. This decision sentences the other world to immediate destruction, but Mahito and his step-mother safely escape back to their own world and happily reunite with Mahito’s father.

Studio Ghibli does not have a successor to Hayao Miyazaki’s role and legacy.

I just… I got a lot of feelings about this.

To be clear, I feel like this movie is Hayao acknowledging his poor relationship with his son regarding his legacy and absolving him of any obligation or guilt to take on his mantle. Mahito is not condemned or framed poorly for his choice in leaving and thereby destroying the other world. Mahito’s return to his family on the mundane world is framed positively.

Mahito’s young mother in the movie happily embraces him and praises him before sending him off. We don’t know what drew Mahito’s grand uncle, representing Hayao, to the world aside from wonder, but if he had a mother to chase we can assume he stayed in part because of her. Hayao was allegedly very close to his mother and she greatly influenced his work — this in contrast to how he looked down on his father after his passing.

This movie is Hayao is acknowledging that he and his son grew up in very lives.

Hayao did not have an inspiring father, but became unmatched in animation. Goro barely felt any allure for his father’s role however and Hayao punished him for it. The Boy and the Heron feels like a release, telling both Goro and the world that Hayao accepts his son not carrying on his legacy and that the world he created was beautiful and inspiring while it lasted.

The corridor of doors presumedly leading to our world (and maybe others) and multiple points in time tells us that we may visit and revisit that magical place (ie, the stories Studio Ghibli told) time and time again and feel the magic even if it that era is finite and nothing new comes of it.

I’m thinking about Mahito’s great great uncle maintaining and preserving a peaceful and beautiful thing in a way that to an outside observer looks tedious and unimportant, hoping to pass the duty off to a successor but ultimately he cannot find one and dies with it.

I’m thinking about the specificity of the blocks being made and handled with care, not with malice or ill intent.

I’m thinking about Hayao Miyazaki, a bastion of beautiful 2d hand drawn animation who refuses to retire.

I’m thinking about a world where animation is so rarely made with love over profit and efficiency.

I’m thinking about how, though the old man didn’t see it, the next generation still hangs onto a piece of that beautiful, tedious thing and takes it with them because it feels important.

I’m thinking about Mahito being told he should forget, but no. He shouldn’t.

Plus in the end, he ultimately sees the collapse of his beautiful world come from greedy and short-sighted tyrants. The parakeet king and his subjects, animals historically valued as decorations in cages, seem to represent the corporate encroachment onto his artistic projects like them and how they limit artistic expression. The parakeet subjects, ardent followers of a brand, the people who value the aesthetics of his films over the messaging.

One thing for those who have watched The Boy and The Heron or will watch it. The Japanese title for it is How Do You Live? And Miyazaki stated he was leaving it for his grandson, saying, "Grandpa is moving onto the next world soon but he is leaving behind this film".

The deaths of contemporaries and friends such as Satoshi Kon and Isao Takahata and also the expected successor of Yoshifumi Kondo were things that have always weighed heavily on the back of Miyazaki's mind.

He recognizes the industry and the occupation for how soul crushing it was, grinding up either the spirit or the physical body of those who work in it. He loves and hates the industry he stands on the peak of and fully recognizes how it will probably be the death of him. And he knows it'll leave him unable to say a lot of things to his Grandson.

So How Do You Live? is a lesson. For his grandson. For himself. For his two sons. And probably for anyone else willing to pay attention.

Hayao Miyazaki is a flawed man that makes things so important to so many people. And I think more than any other film of his, in this you get to pull back the curtain a bit and see him at work. And what should be this giant unblemished titan can be seen for what he is, a sad old man who had higher hopes for himself and has even higher hopes for the people he makes his work for.

It's a beautiful thing to see another's humanity in their work. To look past the artifice and glam of commercialized art and find humans behind it. And humans willing to show their humanity and mortality is even rarer. And something to be celebrated. So when you watch it. Or if you've watched it already. Understand that this film is Miyazaki kneeling down, weary after years of weaving dreams and making mistakes, reaching out and saying to you that he hopes you can do better. It's an old man who's made all the mistakes of the world passing it on to you, hoping you do better, and making sure you know it's okay if you don't.

How do you Live? By making mistakes. By messing up. But still moving forward. And still reaching out.

his best running gag

I truly feel like The Boy and The Heron is Miyazaki’s apology letter to his son Goro.

Not in a “your my precious son and I love you so much, here a movie to make you for my failures” kind of way

but in a “I’ve built this incredible empire and legacy that’s given magic to millions of people, and in that time you’ve lived in that same world, and so naturally it’s expected that you’d take it over in my place, but I know that you’ll never succeed me or that you’ll be able to recreate the magic. This magical world will die with me, this company will die with me, and that’s okay. You don’t have to be me.”

With The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki really said: I accept that my legacy is out of my control, that my children may not be my successors, that this tremendous monument I've built with a lifetime of toil, this fiery blessing that simply fell out of the sky, may not continue without me, In fact, it may crumble to dust, I accept it because my children and their children are alive and well, in this imperfect world, and thats enough. Yes, I accept that this is the end, but God damn, I'll go out with a bang.

Oh I never thought about it in that way! What an interesting way to read the movie!

There will be plenty who are inspired by Ghibli to continue the legacy he built over the years. It may not be the same as it ever was but as long as the spirit remains. Good on Hayao Miyazaki for letting his kids decide their own futures.

Indiewire has just called Hayao Miyazaki 'the movie world's least convincing retiree' I am CACKLING

Christian Bale -> Howl

Michael Keaton -> Porco Rosso

Robert Pattinson -> the Heron

so if you play Batman, at some point you will also be a titular Ghibli character

They are not in a creative rut. They are a very well funded propaganda machine filled with pedos and retarded mediocre ideologues who could never live up to the shoulders they stand on.

Disney: our primary creators died and we no longer have the same beliefs as them, so we are copying their stuff, changing it to fit our own moral ethos and then wondering why it sucks

Ghibli: our primary creator Cannot Be Restrained but we are okay with that because he makes good movies we love

his best running gag

Miyazaki teaches us that learning is a lifelong metamorphosis; a continuous act of trying, failing, growing, becoming, and searching for moving castles.

For anyone who’s already seen Boy and the Heron i found this really interesting article where Ghibli Boss/Producer Suzuki was interviewed recently by indie wire and explains the background of the characters from the new Ghibli film, I’ve copied the full article below or you can click the link to go to the interview but once again it contains so many spoilers

cosplayers are insane 👏

"Many of my movies have strong female leads," Miyazaki said in an interview with The Guardian in 2013, "brave, self-sufficient girls that don't think twice about fighting for what they believe with all their heart.

They'll need a friend, or a supporter, but never a savior. Any woman is just as capable of being a hero as any man."

I did some extra research on Mamoru Oshii’s Lupin III project and found a Japanese article about it that shed some light on both Oshii’s intents with it as well as Miyazaki’s intents with Castle of Cagliostro.

Apparently, the reasoning behind Oshii’s pitch, especially the ending where it’s revealed that everything is fake, was that both Oshii and Miyazaki felt that Lupin as a character could no longer fit in the world of the present day (back then, that was the mid-1980s). Miyazaki purposefully made Lupin more of a matured swashbuckling character who stole Clarisse’s heart at the end of his movie because he felt that Lupin’s character worked back during the Japanese post-war economic miracle when people shared the romantic dream that there were still rare things that could never be bought, but not so much in a present-day Japan where you can buy absolutely anything if you have the money to spend. Whereas Miyazaki addressed this supposed problem by having Lupin ending the film stealing someone’s heart, Oshii’s planned approach was to have Lupin steal the fiction.

The angel’s fossil, the macguffin that this never-to-be caper was going to revolve around, was supposed to represent fiction itself. Oshii’s plan was to have Lupin steal his own existence within fiction, making it so that Lupin had never existed to begin with. He was essentially trying to make Lupin pull a “death of the author” on himself.

Thinking this over, I can see where both Miyazaki and Oshii come from but, in my own personal opinion, both of them (but especially Oshii) unfortunately missed a few things that the past few decades of the franchise have proven. Firstly, the world is constantly changing, sometimes in ways we don’t expect, and throughout all that, Lupin has always adapted. Secondly, as much as they have lamented that their efforts to shake up the franchise went fruitless, those efforts haven’t really failed. As a matter of fact, I believe that they’ve managed to help deepen the franchise’s identity in ways that allowed it to adapt with the times in the first place. Thirdly, even people who can only look at the world through a cynical, jaded, or otherwise pessimistic lens are in need of something hopeful once in a while. Lupin has provided that spark of hope for quite a lot of people, and I’m not just talking about the people Lupin meets on his adventures.

I can’t imagine a film where Lupin purposefully erases his own existence would have gone over all that well, even back then, but that’s just how I see it. What do you think? I’m curious as to what other fans think about this.

This is so interesting! God the more I find out about this project the more fascinated I am by it and the more annoyed I am it never got made! (Where did you find this article by the way?)

If done well, the idea that Lupin steals his own existence within the realm of fiction could’ve been really cool and interesting, or at least fun to analyze and discuss (similar to how people still talk about End of Evangelion over 20 years later). Especially since I found out recently that Oshii apparently wanted the movie’s animation to be very detailed and fluid (he did reportedly bring Hideaki Anno and some animators that would go on to work on Akira on board), if this movie got made I could see it being a beautiful and fascinating take on the franchise and, again, an analysis gold mine (again, similar to End of Eva).

I said earlier that I’m not a fan of these meta takes on Lupin where it’s implied the character we follow isn’t the “real” Lupin (i.e. Mystery of Mamo, Green Vs Red, the goddamn mask scene from Part 5), but I’m also a sucker for deep character studies and I feel like we could’ve gotten that here if the goal was to examine how Lupin fits into the then-modern world. I personally love Miyazaki’s take on Lupin and since Oshii’s idea is from the same source it could’ve worked really well.

Or it could’ve failed spectacularly (like Miyazaki’s did at first) and we could’ve gone back to how the franchise was before like nothing ever happened! I guess we’ll never really know.

This is the article I found (http://www.style.fm/as/13_special/oshii008.shtml). As I said before, it’s in Japanese. It even confirms the connection between this project and Angel’s Egg outright, as it quotes a statement from Oshii that he took the idea of an angel’s fossil from there and made the OVA to avenge his take on Lupin that didn’t come to be. Several other elements from the pitch also ended up in future Oshii films: The tower architect’s suicide, a side character (Fujiko in this case) going off on her own to expose the truth behind the macguffin, and a climactic tower-climbing scene would end up in the first Patlabor movie, its sequel would have the destruction of a fictional version of Tokyo, and Oshii would finally get to have a main character going through an existential crisis in his take on Ghost In The Shell.

I can’t deny that the idea of Lupin stealing the story itself is a fascinating concept that deserves to be explored. With Lupin having broken the fourth wall several times in the original manga for comedic effect, it would add an additional layer of loyalty to the source material. However, it’s the reasoning behind Oshii’s idea that I found a little iffy, maybe even too fatalistic. As harsh as it is to say about a celebrated director (both Miyazaki and Oshii), it sounds a bit like their vision of the character at the time was stuck in the past. As I’ve mentioned, Lupin’s character has adapted with the times, and Miyazaki’s take helped broaden the scope from stealing literal treasures to stealing metaphorical treasures, which arguably bestowed the franchise with even more possibilities to evolve. It’s kind of hard to argue that his character doesn’t work anymore for the world of today when he has constantly evolved in ways that accommodate for exactly that.

But yeah, the article also pretty much speculates that the reception and ripple effect of Oshii’s Lupin, had it actually seen the light of day, could’ve gone either way. Plus, if it had actually come to fruition, then Angel’s Egg and the Patlabor films probably wouldn’t have existed at all.

This is such a cool concept but I find it utterly strange that many people who’ve worked on Lupin III find the idea of a gentleman thief outdated. I haven’t read the linked article — going to once I move to where my translation software is — but I’m guessing it was written before Part 5, the series that points out this concept specifically, and then flips it on its head, because Lupin changes with the times, just like all of us.

(The “who IS Lupin III?”/Dread Pirate Roberts/mask-type situation has been a constant in Lupin canon since the comic [which is what the mask is referencing in Part 5; it’s a direct nod to the manga], and I like the idea that he is both infinite and the same but ever-changing both literally and otherwise, but I can understand why it bugs people.)

We need our Robin Hoods, our Goemon Ishikawas (the first one), our rogueish thieves fighting for the powerless…though Lupin III generally doesn’t do it intentionally, he almost always ends up a hero one way or another. And maybe it feels like the world has outgrown needing gentleman thieves, but we definitely haven’t outgrown needing heroes.

— Carl Gustav Horn on Clarisse’s character