Interview: Mamoru Hosoda on his animated Oscar hopeful "Mirai"

by Nathaniel R

If Americans outside of the subculture of anime enthusiasts know anything about Japanese animation it's generally only related to Studio Ghibli. That legendary studio has been mostly dormant these last few years considering the on-again / off-again retirement of Hayao Miyazaki. It's long past time that American audiences start familiarizing themselves with other giants of the huge Japanese industry. One such artist is Mamoru Hosoda of Studio Chizu. The filmmaker, just 51, has already directed four films which won the Japanese equivalent of the Best Animated Feature Oscar: The Girl Who Lept Through Time, Summer Wars, Wolf Children, and The Boy and the Beast. He's yet to break through with Oscar but his latest feature, Mirai, is eligible this year and was among the nominees at the Golden Globes. It remains to be seen whether Mirai can repeat that trick to become an Oscar nominee (the new Academy rules allow non-animators to participate in the nomination process now, which will theoretically make it harder for the lower profile titles to score)  but we're hopeful.

We had the opportunity to speak to the filmmaker through a translater recently about his beautiful new film about childhood...

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Fresh Globe-to-Oscar Stats

by Abe Fried-Tanzer

A collection of quick interesting stats for you given that the 76th annual Golden Globe ceremony is now part of history.

• This is only the second time in documented Globes history that the winner of Best Motion Picture –Drama (Bohemian Rhapsody) didn't have a corresponding Best Director (Bryan Singer) nomination. In 1992, Scent of a Woman took the top award at the Globes, but Martin Brest wasn't nominated in Director (though he did go on to an Oscar nomination!). Clint Eastwood collected the Best Director prize at the Globes instead for Unforgiven before that film went on to win both Director and Picture at the Oscars. If history literally repeated itself here, Bryan Singer would be nominated for an Oscar (!!!) and Roma would be our eventual Oscar winner for Best Picture and Director.

More after the jump...

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The 2018 Animation Contenders: On Happiness Road

Each weekend, Tim has been taking a look at one of the films submitted for the Best Animated Feature Oscar.

Taiwan's animation industry does not have a particularly strong reputation, to put it gently. For many years, the country's animation studios have largely served as inexpensive places to farm out work from other, more well-heeled companies, or to produce short films and clips that are largely ephemeral and quickly forgotten. So perhaps the first impressive thing about On Happiness Road is that it exists at all: a Taiwanese-produced feature-length animated film, about Taiwanese history and the cultural position of Taiwan in the wide world. That it is largely good is even more impressive.

The film is the brainchild of writer-director Sung Hsin-Yin, making her first feature after a handful of short films. It tells the life story of Chi (voiced by Kwei Lun-Mi) a thirtysomething expatriate who returns from America to Taipei, where we immediately intuit she'd rather not be... 

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The 2018 Animation Contenders: Two films by Masaaki Yuasa

Each Saturday, Tim has been taking a look at one of the films submitted for the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Today, two of them by the same artist.

Masaaki Yuasa is, to my mind, the most interesting director working in animation today. Ever since his first feature, 2004's Mind Game, he has subjected himself to a nearly constant process of self-reinvention, with every one of his major projects shifting to a new style, genre, or most likely both. He's mostly worked in television, but he had a very phenomenal 2017 with two extremely well-received features. Both of those were released in the United States in 2018 by distributor GKIDS, and both are among the most stunning, even radical pieces of animation available on any screen of any size in the past twelve months.

The first one produced, though the second one released by GKIDS, The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl is also the more openly startling in pretty much every way. Stylistically and thematically, the film is a successor to Yuasa's 2010 television series The Tatami Galaxy, but this is no mere retread. It's a story of two nameless college students in Kyoto: an anxious boy who has a crush on a girl just starting to find her footing in the adult world. The film tells their stories using highly expressionistic animation, in which everything about the whole world bends itself around their subjective experiences of one incredible night that seems to stretch on for months...

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The 2018 Animation Contenders: MFKZ

Every Saturday this month, Tim will be taking a look at one of the films submitted for the Best Animated Feature Oscar.

For lack of a better place to start, it must surely be the case that MFKZ is the most globally-minded animated film released in the United States in 2018. The screenplay was adapted by French writer Guillaume "Run" Renaud, from his own 2015 comic book. The animation was done by Japanese company Studio 4°C, under the co-direction of Renaud and Shojiro Nishimi. The setting is saturated in a pop culture vision of Los Angeles that feels influenced more by the Grand Theft Auto video game series, the Fast & Furious movie series, and rap videos than the actual life of the city's black and Latino communities, and the story is a criticism of systemic racism in the U.S. and the worldwide corporate greed that has led to the impending climate crisis. Plus it's a crypto-remake of John Carpenter's They Live.

All of which is to say that the movie sure is… something. Something that is, frankly, quite a bit messy and confusing, possibly racist, and also exciting and startling in its originality.

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