#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.

#124: Pom Poko (1994)

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Director: Isao Takahata

Screenplay: Isao Takahata

Voice Cast: Makoto Nonomura as Shoukich; Shinchou Kokontei as Narrator; Yuriko Ishida as Okiyo; Akira Fukuzawa as Ryutarou; Beichou Katsura as Rokudaime Kinchou; Bunshi Katsura as Tasaburou Hage-tanuki; Gannosuke Ashiya as Inugami-gyoubu; Kobuhei Hayashiya as Ponkichi; Kosan Yanagiya as Tsurukame-oshou; Nijiko Kiyokawa as Oroku-baba; Norihei Miki as Seizaemon; Shigeru Izumiya as Gonta; Takehiro Murata as Bunta; Yorie Yamashita as Otama

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

With this, I have my first Studio Ghibli film review on the blog. It's taken a while, but I had a sense of trepidation to tell an embarrassing truth, unsure how exactly I'd cover work from a studio many people much more professional as writers have covered in far greater detail and at length. As a result, I've sadly not watched a Studio Ghibli film in such a long time, to which this obscurer title in their back catalogue makes a nice beginning to change this.

This is important in itself in terms of what exactly I choose as, when most people think of Studio Ghibli, they're probably thinking of Hayao Miyazaki and his films, whose reputation exists outside of even anime fandom. Studio Ghibli had, to put it bluntly, tent poled itself around only two directors, a history of figures who were one offs, one in Yoshifumi Kondōwho sadly died prematurely after his film Whisper of the Heart (1995) only a year later, and even Miyazaki's own son Goro, who worked as a director at the Ghibli Museum, before he worked on two films so far. Miyazaki himself is a great film, a man whose tendency to retire only to return and his grumpy opinions not denying him as one of the great auteurs in anime behind gems like Kiki's Delivery Service (1989). The other, less praised as he should be, is the late Isao Takahata whose filmography in Ghibli is idiosyncratic. His films are much more unconventional, even Pom Poko as his most accessible for the company, and the one whose was arguably the most "adult" in that he tackled very serious themes which might have gone over children's heads even in a comedy like My Neighbour The Yamadas (1999). He's known above all else for Grave of the Fireflies (1988) as devastating as you could get live action or animated in dealing with Japan's place in World War II/The Pacific War from the innocent bystanders' place, and for myself, Only Yesterday (1991) is one of my favourite films of any country or form, an animated drama about a woman in her late twenties going back to the countryside so idiosyncratic it took until 2016 to finally get a proper American release when most of the company's back catalogue was already out.

Pom Poko envisions a premise we've probably had as a live action film in which the animals in the wild decide to protect their land from the development of human expansion. Here it takes a fascinating direction, especially as he tells this environmental message from the perspective of Japanese folklore. In Japan, foxes and tanuki (raccoon dogs) native to their land were seen as shape shifters, to which Pom Poko imagines the inevitable when said tanuki clash with the development of Japan after it grew out of the ashes after losing the war to becoming continually urbanised into the modern day. Told with a narrator, it doesn't go the direction many would expect, where these tanuki first get acclimatised to television and the joys of McDonald burgers when, to begin their war, they have to relearn their ability to shape shift and learn what the human culture is now.

That and, whilst we sympathise on their side, their first initial acts involve causing vehicular accidents with construction vehicles that lead to humans actually dying. This is taken further into a level of complexity you'd never expect as the elders, upon their first wins, still want to pray for the lost human souls that died in their war, even if the young ones want to just celebrate. Takahata, even for a film suitable for families, doesn't hide any of the issues that arise in this subject, to imagine if the beasts of his country's folklore actually exist and imagine them trying to adapt to the new era, the matter-of-factness that they are of a different dying culture, a different lore, but not negating the human characters either. Its poignant, not jumping too far ahead but wanting to still reference much later, that one of the most poignant scenes is two older men recounting drunk how they once believed in such creatures, and no longer believe in them, even when the raccoons eventually escalate to full scale yōkai mass haunting in the entire city of Tokyo just behind them.

Even Hayao Miyazaki, whilst still an idiosyncratic filmmaker, worked in territory that could gain mainstream acceptance more often, whilst it was a common habit for Takahata to tackle unconventional subject matters, the film not belying that these raccoons can be killed on the roads or being caught in traps like regular animals, even in a whimsical tone with plenty of slapstick humour. It can just also be frank; a lot of its humour managing a delicate line in terms of the adult content without being explicit, jokes about mating season and forced vows to keep the population under control the most prominent example of this. It's a film complex in its message, an environmental message thrown in the front and centre, but with a light hearted tone still streaks it in darkness. It's not a spoiler to reveal that the raccoons will not succeed, because the world has already changed, but how they adapt over the feature length to a very different, vastly growing world of human metropolis is the real story at hand, right down to the foxes having monopolised hostess bars when one is introduced. It's a literalisation that can even be found in real life in how even normal non-magical animals like crocodiles to badgers have had to adapt to human civilisation, be it in the streets or under the waterways, and have done so with success in adaptation.

From https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTk
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In terms of production, it's a very handsome one, contrasting beautiful idyllic countryside and urban environments with the best in elastic physics. Studio Ghibli are always held as giants for animation quality let alone the quality of their stories with very good reason, this a bar higher than most I have reviewed so far. When transformation is introduced, the raccoons already able to turn into regular raccoons are now learning to turn into almost everything, seeing the best of hand drawn animation as a result.

And of course, this film is explicitly about mythology, especially as the tanuki are lead to deciding to scare off the humans with hauntings, a new playfulness found throughout the film. The entire aspect of folklore involved is in depth, the variety of ghosts and goblins they turn into over vignettes enough to be almost horror at points, like for the poor police officer chased by faceless ghosts, whilst never becoming indulgent. It is esoteric without knowledge of the country's folklore but worthwhile nonetheless. It also has a serious edge, as mentioned, of the environmental message being intertwined in a past lost to urbanism - which might've come off as conservative weren't it not for the 2010s bringing about a lot of ideas, even fads, for past ideals in behaviour regardless of politics.

A huge aspect of the film is in knowledge, whilst made after the economic bubble crash, that this is made in a country which went through a rapid growth after World War II to a huge industrial giant, the sense here that the scenes of countryside literally being removed by god-like deities for new towers a poignant one of the potential loss at hand, or at least a coldness to the new world. It's expressed  in a scene near the end where probably the most effective thing that can be done, when a mass haunting get hijacked as an amusement park advertisement, is to conjure the past where Tokyo was more green with wooden houses, evoking a past even lost to nostalgia and distorted to it without the bustle of the current day. Even the fact the film ends with a tanuki talking directly to the audience, to not harm creatures like them, is a poignant one, coupled with a character going through a human existential crisis about urban drudgery, emphasising this nuisance with the message.  

The lack of simplistic to this message was probably why the film is much more obscure than other Ghibli titles. There was of course the entire issue that, part of Japanese folklore, that the tanuki have giant testicles, which is shown and means we have a Studio Ghibli film in existence with genital humour, as they can be expanded, inflated to gigantic proportions and at one point used to crush police during a night skirmish between the sides. It's certainly a cultural tick that doesn't translate but stands out as fascinating as everything else. In general, Pom Poko is apt for Isao Takahata's reputation, of more adult work which could still be shown to children, even if Grave of the Fireflies would traumatise adults as much, with incredible animation that could also experiment with new forms, the time My Neighbours the Yamadas took to be made from having to create a watercolour aesthetic with digital. This is neither to dismiss Miyazaki, or the rest of Studio Ghibli's output either, but in lieu to how most of the studio's work was fantasy or more adventure based, whilst Takahata baring a few exceptions was always more likely to follow drama. Even this, a fantasy film, is a very dialogue heavy, funny and methodical work.

As the first Studio Ghibli film I have covered, it offers a perfect introduction. It comes in a curious place where, as of 2014, Ghibli self-retired in a temporary way, Miyazaki claiming he was finally going to retire with The Wind Rises (2013), his dramatic film, and Takahata passing in 2018. It is on hiatus but still working on projects, connected to The Red Turtle (2016), a French-Japanese co-production and Ronia the Robber's Daughter (2014-5), 3D cel shaded animated series helmed by Goro Miyazaki. Where the future lies with the company is yet known, but as this is the first of their films I have covered, I have at least three decades or so of Studio Ghibli films to see so I have plenty of time to catch up, and a lot that I've never seen, making this a huge area now I'm finally here to cover.

From https://static01.nyt.com/images/2012/01/06/
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