Sunday, November 9, 2014 at 4:16PM What did Tilda Swinton say to Hayao Miyazaki?
Amuse us with your best guess in the comments.
Swinton, Lasseter, and MIyazaki at the Governors Awards
Bonus Round Competition: Correctly guess / make a case for what her favorite Miyazaki movie is.
I'll name two winners on Wednesday.
Sunday, November 9, 2014 at 1:40AM Updated with Acceptance Speech Videos!
The Governors Awards are in swing in Los Angeles and though I am in sweatpants typing from my rented apartment and not in a tux (maybe next year if the cinematic gods shine down on The Film Experience?) just being in the same zip code is somehow comforting. Maybe that's because I feel more invested after our Honorary Oscar miniseries. We should have been doing this every year at TFE! It's a shame that at nearly every corner of the internet, the Honorary winners are basically just as neglected as they are by the Academy on the big night. So I feel proud of our efforts at paying them homage just as awards season explodes. Which is does tonight, in fact; basically anyone hoping for an Oscar nomination is in that room tonight... but more on the attendees soon.
This is the lady we're most happy is there ... Maureen O'Hara. She just turned 94 so it took the Academy long enough!
Saturday, November 8, 2014 at 2:00PM In "The Honoraries" we're looking at the careers of this year's Honorary Oscar recipients (O'Hara, Miyazaki, Carrière) and the Jean Hersholt winner (Belafonte). Here's abstew on an Irish fav...
I have often said that "The Quiet Man" is my personal favourite of all the pictures I have made. It is the one I am most proud of and I tend to be very protective of it. I loved Mary Kate Danaher.
-Maureen O'Hara 'Tis Herself
The making of John Ford's Oscar-winning film The Quiet Man was a labor of love for all involved. Despite having already won the Best Director Oscar three times, Ford found it difficult to get his passion project off the ground. As far back as 1944, John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara had agreed to star in Ford's love letter to Ireland. And it eventually found a home at the most unusual of places. B-movie studio Republic only agreed to make the film (which they thought would lose them money) if Ford, Wayne, and O'Hara first made a guaranteed money-generating Western together first. After 1950's Rio Grande for the studio, they headed to shoot on location among the lush emerald fields of Ireland itself and the affection for the country and its people is apparent in every frame.
Friday, November 7, 2014 at 3:00PM In "The Honoraries" we're looking at the careers of this year's Honorary Oscar recipients (O'Hara, Miyazaki, Carriere) and the Jean Hersholt winner (Belafonte). Here's Glenn on a Belafonte hip-hop musical gem…
Harry Belafonte brought hip-hop culture to the world with Beat Street. This rather unassuming musical from 1984, made in the shadow of Style Wars and Wild Style, might not strike you as an important film, but it very much is for the way it influenced a lifestyle and popularized it around the globe. Belafonte was a producer on the film as well as the soundtrack (the first film to ever release two soundtracks – I have part one on vinyl!) and his influence shows. His time-tested ability to spin niche into cultural touchstones is yet again on display with this, the first mainstream film to focus on hip-hop, graffiti art and breakdancing into a hit. Giving the under-heard voice of the youth an audience.
I also just happen to think it is a wildly entertaining film, and the kind of which we rarely get.
Thursday, November 6, 2014 at 3:09PM In "The Honoraries" we're looking at the careers of this year's Honorary Oscar recipients including Hayao Miyazaki. Here's Manuel on an animated gem...
Spirited Away, Ponyo, Howl’s Moving Castle and My Neighbor Totoro all wowed me on first viewing. In that sense, I agree with Tim, to choose just one Miyazaki is close to impossible. I know it will date me (more on that in a minute), but while I love what 3D animation can (and has!) done, to me, there’s nothing more exhilarating than traditional, hand-drawn animation. This may be because I come from a household where animation is the family business (little do people know that my mother owns the longest-running animation studio in Colombia) so I pretty much grew up around animators, scanners, and spent many a weekend waiting for a certain scene or episode to finish ‘rendering’ before we could head home, while perusing the “Art of” books that lined the shelves at the office.
So to commemorate Miyazaki’s Honorary Oscar I thought I’d treat myself and look at one of his films I’d never seen before. I ended up choosing Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind which turned (like yours truly) 30 this year and boy is it a beauty.
Nausicaä soars on the back of its eponymous protagonist. Catching it in 2014, it’s hard to gage whetherNausicaä was ahead of its time or whether pop culture has been slowly feeling its influence since its premiere. Probably both. I mean, here we have an environmentally-conscious plot about a strong-willed and empathetic teenage girl set in a post-apocalyptic world who refuses to engage in the needless killing and destruction that adults around her seem committed to as a way to survive; hard to deny that that sounds familiar no? But to say that Nausicaä is a precursor to Katniss Everdeen (and her fellow YA kickass dystopian gals) is to sell Miyazaki’s film and protagonist short. This is not only because, as Tim noted last week, Miyazaki is less interested in ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ (there’s no President Snow and The Capitol to hate here), but because his Nausicaä wouldn’t be caught dead in a love triangle, sadly still a staple whenever we’re granted a female-led action adventure franchise. Indeed, Nausicaä may be an even greater feminist film than that dystopian trilogy for the way it presents its protagonist’s strengths as both born out of but not tethered to her own gender.
Nausicaä, attuned to the natural world around her (including the seemingly hostile ‘toxic jungle’, home of the dangerously angered Ohm), spends the entire movie presenting empathy as her strongest asset, even when this is constantly demeaned by those around her as mere naïveté. In that, she seems both a throwback as well as a novel protagonist. It may seem outmoded to praise a film for playing into cultural tropes about the connection between women and the earth but Miyazaki is keen to position Nausicaä’s intuition as a source of strength not nearly as incompatible with her physical prowess as we might think. At a critical moment, she’s so blinded by grief and rage (so overwhelmed with feelings) that she lashes out and knocks many a soldier down. A scene that might normally lead to a lecture about “controlling one’s anger” (because it leads to the dark side, remember?) instead quickly taps instead into Nausicaä’s own loyalty and affinity for her people, getting her to privilege pragmatism over her own blinding rage. But it is also that ability to feel and empathize with those most unlike her that ends up saving the day. Like I said, it’s both oddly quaint but also quietly transgressive.
It helps that this type of gender politics becomes a part of Miyazaki’s storytelling fabric rather than its central thread. The film is a classic because it is both a thrill-ride as well as a meditation on mankind’s relationship with nature; it’s an entertaining adventure that doesn’t shy away from Big Themes, it is surprisingly rich in world-building without ever feeling bogged down in exposition; it is kinetic even in quiet moments of reflection; it is beautiful in its simplicity, Miyazaki’s clean lines equally capable of sketching an in-flight action set-piece as well as an almost-forgotten tender childhood memory.
This is all a way of saying that if you haven’t sought Miyazaki’s work, you should do yourself a favor and watch a clear example “they don’t make ‘em like they used to, but also no one ever did ’em like this anyway.”
Previously in The Honoraries: Maureen O'Hara, Jean-Claude Carrière, and Harry Belafonte
