Logo handmade by Bannister
Column by Scott Green
Tonight, January 19th, Turner Classic Movie will air the new Disney produced English dubs of Hayao Miyazaki's master work My Neighbor Totoro and Studio Ghibli's Yoshifumi Kondo directed Whisper of The Heart.
This will be an early opportunity to hear Disney's new English of Totoro, starring the Fanning sisters, and see a quality, but lesser recognized Ghibli work. Both features, along with Miyazaki's latest, Howl's Moving Castle will be released on DVD March 7, 2006th.
Totoro was previously dubbed by Carl Macek of Robotech fame. That version was distributed theatrically through Troma and on video by Fox. When Disney acquired the rights in the 1996 Disney-Tokuma Deal a new dub of the classic was almost inevitable.
My Neighbor Totoro is a lightly plotted story featuring Hayao Miyazki's scene of wonder and nature along with his brilliantly beautiful storytelling. Two young girls move into the county with their busy father, waiting for their ill mother to sufficiently recovery to join them. Wandering in the woods they meet Totoro, a big, fuzzy kindof bear-rabbit-cat-owl forest spirit. Thanks to Miyazaki's mastery of the animated craft and discernable world view, what isn't obviously an interesting story becomes something magical. Younger children are transfixed by the lovable creature. Older audiences marvel in the beauty.
Whisper of the Heart features the spirit and humanity you would expect from a Ghibli movie and the quality, but it's a bit of a departure from most of the Miyazaki works. It's more of a teenage story with a junior-high student figuring out how to relate to people and plotting her course. It follows the progression from listless, formless youth to the efforts of a directed life. Manga fans with recognize some of the conventions of shoujo (where the story originated) at work in the movie’s attention to her relationships and dilemmas.
Working, artistic creation plays a large role in the movie. The girl discovers she'd like to be a writer, while the boy to whom she connects is a violin maker and musician. There's a take on artistry in the movie that credits hard work and commitment that adds a deeper level of beauty to the results it displayed.
The movie was produced, written and storyboarded by Miyazaki, but there's a harder divide between the concrete world and the imagined/magical world than many of his stories. There are wood carvings created by the characters that hint at otherworldliness, but there is one scene completely breaks out of the normal world with Ghibli’s first digitally animate scene, featuring characters floating through a kaleidoscope bent landscape. It's a breathtaking experiment with the technology that's out of place in the rest of the movie, but fitting in with perfect logic.
Thursday, January 19th night's schedule is
8:00 PM My Neighbor Totoro (English dub)
Cast: Voices of Dakota Fanning, Elle Fanning, Timothy Daly, Lea Salonga.
9:30 PM Porco Rosso (English dub)
Cast: Voices of Michael Keaton, Cary Elwes, Kimberly Williams.
11:15 PM Whisper of the Heart (English dub)
Cast: Voices of Brittany Snow, Cary Elwes, Harold Gould.
20 Friday
1:15 AM
My Neighbor Totoro (Japanese audio, subtitled)
2:45 AM Porco Rosso (Japanese audio, subtitled)
4:30 AM Whisper of the Heart (Japanese audio, subtitled)
