#173: My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999)

 

Director: Isao Takahata

Screenplay: Isao Takahata

Based on the manga by Hisaichi Ishii

Voice Cast: Hayato Isobata as Noboru; Masako Araki as Shige; Naomi Uno as Nonoko; Touru Masuoka as Takashi; Yukiji Asaoka as Matsuko

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Returning to Studio Ghibli, what you have for My Neighbours the Yamadas is if the American comic, like Peanuts, was adapted into a feature film, but also happened to have a director known for pushing his work so hard, like the late Isao Takahata here, into something beautiful. This is not a strange parallel to make as this is based on a "yonkoma" manga or "four panel/koma", where like a newspaper strip, you have four equally sized panels ordered from top to bottom. Naturally, as has been an unfortunate part of his career, this film despite being a wholesome series of vignettes, about a regular Japanese nuclear family, was not a commercial success; Takahata, whilst the other huge figure with Hayao Miyazaki at Studio Ghibli, has always felt the cult director of the duo and here you have another example of why, because in vast contrast to the fantasies Miyazaki has done a lot of, Takahata did the equivalent of making a Peanuts film without even the fantasies of a dog riding a miniature Red Baron plane.

The one factor which does make Yamadas unconventional is that it has no plot, just vignettes of the Yamada family - Takashi (the father), Matsuko (the mother), Shige (her mother), Noboru (their son, a teenager), Nonoko (their daughter, youngest child, primary school age, and the occasional narrator), and in an occasional scene Pochi (the family dog). They are a family with no real crisis transpiring, no trauma or drama ever including in this theatrical film, just a series of follies and banalities of life they have, from forgetting your umbrella, or the father accidentally oversleeping for a business trip. It is innocuous and fun, though Takahata as the director and writer of the script does not sugar-coat this world. The world is full of petty things, like trying to find a missing sock for the washing, and one joke, like Only Yesterday (1991) explicitly tackling menstruation for teen girls, proves a reoccurring gag in anime may actually have real roots in reality, that our teen male Noboru is at the age to try to buy a nude modelling or art book at a store for naughty pictures, only for the unfortunate coincidence that a girl he has a crush on greets him in the bookstore there and then. This film does not hide, despite its characters looking cartoonish and broad, the fact that this is about a middle aged couple with two children, a grandmother who at one points meets a friend in the hospital with mortality evoked, and that trying to figure out what to cook each night is a pain.

To talk about My Neighbours the Yamadas means also talking about the art style. Unsuspected modern, like the unexpected use of drum n' bass in this film's score by Akiko Yano¹ when most of it is wholesome, this looks a deceptively simple production in its art replicating watercolour drawings, with simplistic character designs and even some of the background in scenes merely a colour. This, ironically, required innovation to animate this simplistic aesthetic, making this the first Studio Ghibli film entirely animated on computers to be able to capture this at all. This in itself is fascinating to even consider, although the film when it does become elaborate is extravagant. Just into the film, it already has arguably the most profound moment of its content as a set piece, a wonderful metaphor for marriage involving a bobsled ride down a wedding cake, and life represented by as an ocean one travels over. (Even referencing the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, a Japanese folktale that would become Takahata's final film, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013)).

It is also funny, contrasting Miyazaki for how silly this can be and the amount of belly laughs you get from the banality of life of this dysfunctional family, where something as normal as who washes the dishes becomes a sequence. You would be surprised if Disney ever commissioned a film like this, tackling a regular family as a comedy with no stakes whatsoever, merely humoured reflections of life which at times even directly quotes poetry from famous Japanese poets like Bashō in connection to the modern day. It also has no qualms with reflecting on a world that, honestly, looks old and even conservative without any insidious messages to the content, only that here in with family life, as Takashi tries to explain to a young couple in his wedding speech, there are challenges you have to put up with.

This is also not a film for children, despite having nothing within it that is very adult, which has likely been both part of Takahata's uniqueness but also been an albatross in terms of his films having a limited accessibility, as he does not try to ignore how much of the film is a reflection of ordinary life of middle aged couples like this family. It even goes as far as having a reference to Gekkō Kamen ("Moonlight Mask): with Go Nagai's lewd parody Kekko Kamen of the character a weird bedfellow, Gekkō Kamen was an early pioneering Japanese superhero if not one of the first, with the first adaptations in 1958, he was a masked vigilante who wore white and rode a motorbike, the patriarch of the family turning into him in a dream sequence where, contrasted an elaborate and playful pastiche, we have a softly sad comparison that he cannot say boo to a trio of surly male motorbikers in real life just beforehand.

The film is a gem, so quiet and restrained that it could be forgotten due to how low its stakes are, how quiet the drama is and that there is none at all to be honest, which even next to other Takahata films like Only Yesterday is itself an extreme considering how quiet that film was. Again, in mind to its origins, about a look at the eccentric life of a family who love each other regardless, this is a world where the most dynamic scene is accidentally leaving a member of the family miles away in a store which is more of a joke about their worrying. Knowing as well that there is a 2001-2 animated series based on Nono-chan adds an additional bow that, if it was able to be seen, you have an enticing contrast in wanting to see, over sixty episodes, how that show adapted material which works perfectly here. Revisiting the film, it has just increased my admiration in Isao Takahata more as a result.

 

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1) Akiko Yano herself is now a figure of interest, even with a miniscule amount of credits in anime where the most significant work after this is the obscure Rintaro OVA Take the X Train (1987). Once married to Ryuichi Sakamoto, her musical career as a singer and musical by herself is a long and very productive one, where even if it was proven to be a patronising comparison, the reference to her musical style to Kate Bush immediately entices.