Roving Thoughts archives

My (heretical) view of A Letter to Momo

When I watched the widely praised A Letter to Momo earlier this year (well, earlier in 2012), I had a rather different experience than what seems to be the usual one; I found the film pleasant enough in an anodyne way but kind of uninspiring. I mulled over this for a while, worrying that I was just being a grumpy sourpuss old fart in my reaction just because Momo didn't set me on fire (and perhaps wasn't from Ghibli). Then by coincidence and good fortune I saw Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror at the end of 2012. And I loved it. Haruka overcame major drawbacks (such as rather basic 3-d animation) to be an absorbing and compelling experience, one that sucked me in and left me smiling. Haruka and Momo are not the same film or story, but they share quite a lot of core similarities and the differences between the two illuminates the problem with Momo.

Put simply, A Letter to Momo is at its heart a lazy film. Like every anime involving a young girl having a heartwarming encounter with the supernatural, it exists under the long shadow of Ghibli's work, but unfortunately Momo makes no real effort to escape that shadow and do something interesting and novel. A lot of the time it's quite predictable, sometimes painfully so, and not particularly exciting; it only genuinely surprised me a few times and it only has one interesting and well done action set piece (and even that seemed obligatory). A fair amount of the writing and plotting also felt, well, flabby in various ways.

(For the curious who've seen it, my largest moment of surprise can be summarized as 'wait, there actually are wild boars?' Note that I did not find the action set piece at the film's climax to be all that impressive.)

A Letter to Momo is technically well executed apart from all of this. It's not a bad film and it's genuinely good every so often, the characters are decently engaging, the situation is believable, it comes to a good and heartwarming resolution, in short it carefully pushes all of the necessary buttons in the expected order. You could do worse. People who haven't seen Ghibli films like Spirited Away or Kiki's Delivery Service will probably love it. People who have seen a lot of Ghibli films may, like me, find it kind of old hat and unimaginative.

(Ignoring the animation style, Haruka is not a film that you can easily imagine being made by Ghibli; it rapidly departs from any number of their usual tropes. Momo is, although if Ghibli had made it they would have figured out how to make it more interesting and more different from their existing work. Really this is the problem; A Letter to Momo feels like something turned out by a Ghibli alumnus who gets the forms but doesn't really understand the magic that makes them work so well (yes, I know that the director is not and earlier directed Jin-Roh, which I've seen, liked, and thought was well done; this was an analogy).)

Sidebar: a little bit on the pacing and the action set piece

It's difficult to put it coherently, but a certain amount of the pacing of A Letter to Momo felt not so much predictable as obligatory. The one nice action set piece was good, but as things were starting up towards it I found myself thinking that yep, it was about at the point where a Ghibli film would insert an exciting action sequence to stir things up. And right on schedule, there it was. Except, afterwards, it all felt somewhat pointless because the whole sequence hadn't moved the story much. It was like the sequence was there largely because it had to be there because the template said 'an action sequence goes here', not because the story demanded it.

And yes, I was thinking all of this while watching A Letter to Momo. It was not an absorbing experience.

Looking back at the Fall 2012 anime season

This season is atypical (or at least feels so) in that almost all of the series that I'm following are continuing into the new year (even if one of them, Girls und Panzer, has simply been postponed to March). This is going to make for an unusual retrospective but also gives me no reason (or excuse) to delay writing this. So, as before this is an attempt at an honest look back at the shows of the Fall 2012 season (as much as that's possible with most of them not finished yet), following on my early impressions and my midway views.

(The quick summary is that my midway views haven't changed much with two exceptions.)

In more or less the order of enjoyment and quality, shows that I finished or am still watching:

• Shin Sekai Yori: The show started out being a mystery, shifted for a bit to being horror, and now I feel that it's more or less become tragedy. With a lot of answers revealed from episode 10 onwards, what's going on has acquired the same sense of inevitability as an avalanche coming down a hill (and I think that poor Saki sees a lot of it coming, after what she's been told).

  SSY is (and remains) my favorite show of the season and, on the strength of the episodes so far, one of my favorite shows of the year. I'm not bothered by the sometimes odd art or the stylistic shifts and the more I see the ED sequence the more I like it.

  (Much like Star Driver, it could let me down during the remainder of its run and fall in my estimation. But the episodes so far are great.)

• K: I quite liked this in all of its oddity and peculiarity (and frequent use of colour filters and other tricks). It wrapped up with what I felt was an entirely satisfying conclusion. Yes, it doesn't answer all our questions and leaves things dangling, but then life is often like that. I'll be happy to watch the second season when it happens but at the same time I don't think a second season is necessary. K is a rare anime that said enough during its run and came to an actual conclusion.

  Many series would have stretched K's plot out over more episodes, focused on fewer characters, or explained things more; I feel that it's to K's benefit that it didn't make any of these missteps. The end result is something that feels like we're dropping in on the lives of these characters for a bit, even if it's a very eventful period for some of them; they all have pasts and futures that extend off the screen, ones that we are not magically privy to all of the important details of.

  (If you're watching K, this timeline (spoilers) (via) will help. See also and also.)

• Girls und Panzer: My midway views haven't changed; it remains great and a good sports anime. I just wish that it hadn't had scheduling problems so we could have gotten the last two episodes already; however, I'm confident that they'll be up to the standards of the rest of the show when they do show up.

• Zetsuen no Tempest: The show keeps surprising me and the characters remain great. I do wonder how it'll sustain all of this for another season but I feel fairly confidant that it's going to manage. I really liked the shock twist in episode 12 and how it now means that I've got no real idea of what's actually going on.

• Psycho-Pass: This has turned into a show that I can't tear myself away from without actually enjoying it (much like my experience with RideBack). It's wrenching, compelling watching without actually being, you know, pleasant; brutal things keep happening one after another and any successes that the protagonists have are very conditional and partial. It's almost horror and I suspect that people who have bad reactions to horror will actively hate it.

  I expect that at the end of Psycho-Pass I'll be happy that I watched it but also have absolutely no desire for a rewatch.

  (Psycho-Pass is probably a better constructed show than Tempest and Girls und Panzer, but for me it's clearly less enjoyable than either; given a choice I watch either of them before PP. Sometimes I'll watch anything else before PP, simply because PP is wrenching.)

• Robotics;Notes: It keeps moving slowly but getting places in the end. I have no idea what's really going on so I'm mostly watching to see the characters bounce off each other. I'm sure it's going to go all conspiracy theory and fate of the world on me at some point; I can only hope that it will be well executed when it happens.

• Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo: The first 12 episodes prospered on the strengths of periodic sharp edges and characters being brutally honest. The end of the 12th episode clearly marks a sea change in the overall plot direction but I'm going to trust that the show's team will keep things edged even with the new direction.

  (Translation: I could easily get let down here.)

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure #10-#12: Although I bounced hard off the first episode because it was too over the top for me at the time, the ongoing praise for the show has gotten me to try jumping into JoJo's starting with the second arc since it has a mostly new cast, new setting, and a timeskip (I may backfill part of the first arc later, since I understand it has internal breakpoints). I honestly don't know yet how I feel about it. It definitely still has that MANLY SHONEN ACTION thing going on and it's still painting with a roller, but I can also see how it's EPIC in an all-caps way. For now I'm taking it episode by episode.

• Sword Art Online: It ended. It's flawed. For the rest, I will just quote my tweet:

  In the end, for all that I said grumpy things about #SAO it did know how to be enjoyable and to craft likeable, watchable characters.

  (Okay, see also Evirus's comments.)

Right at the end of December I also finished up two shows from earlier in the year that I feel are worth mentioning:

• Aquarion EVOL: My views about this compared to the original Aquarion didn't change; I like the original's characters and plot more, but EVOL is far more gonzo. EVOL maintains this right through the end and it gave me a smile throughout; as I put it on twitter, the ending was cheesy but it was good cheese. I think it helps that I knew a certain amount of spoilers when I watched eps 18 to 26, because I could enjoy noticing certain things.

  Andy and Mix remain the best EVOL couple. The drama only improved their status and I'm glad Mix got a happy ending.

  Also, episode 23 is an epic troll. As someone who watched the original Aquarion, I can assure you that the big revelations in episode 23 were definitely not so much as hinted at in the original (at least as far as you'd notice).

• Joshiraku: This was fun to watch (generally in a low key way) but generally not something that I actively found funny. I enjoyed following the games of verbal tennis and keeping track of the topic shifts even when it didn't make me laugh. To a certain extent I appreciate the chance to see something like Joshiraku simply because it's different and strange; it's a facet of Japanese anime and writing that I don't have much exposure to.

  (The translation notes for gg's Joshiraku subs were also quite helpful and definitely increased my ability to enjoy the show.)

Now declared a miss:

• Magi (#10): I realized that Morgiana was the only character I actually cared about and she's not the focus of the show. Alibaba is terminally naive and stupid in the finest shonen tradition and I got tired of Aladin's 'I'm an innocent and don't know anything' schtick.

Overall Fall 2012 has been my strongest season of the year, even if I can't call most of the shows in it because they're only half over. Looking back at the other seasons of this year, there are only a handful of shows that I'd currently stack up against anything down to at least Psycho-Pass.

(As always I may be suffering from a recency bias, plus all of these shows except K could still blow their foot off.)

How Girls und Panzer is a genuine sports anime while Saki is not

I've always felt that there was something different between Girl und Panzer and Saki, which it's reasonably frequently compared to. Recently I realized how the two are different in a way that makes the former a genuine sports anime while the latter is not. I know, that sounds inflammatory; given that Saki involves people playing a sport, how is it not a sports anime and if it's not, what is it?

My answer is that Saki is actually a shonen fighting anime in the guise of a sports anime, where the 'fights' happen at the gaming table and (generally) do not involve the characters punching each other. What makes the difference between Saki and Girls und Panzer is the presence (in one) and the absence (in the other) of magic powers and crazy special moves.

In Girls und Panzer the wins and losses depend on the actual strategy, tactics, and skills involved in the sport in question (in the real world). This is not obvious in GaruPan because there is no actual sport of tankery, but it's there none the less; the battles in GaruPan turn on actual things that real tanks and real tank commanders can do. This is not what happens in Saki. Saki is not really about mahjong and actual mahjong strategy and tactics (and usually low level play) are almost always irrelevant, in much the same way that punches and kicks are irrelevant background noise in shonen fighting anime. What the games are about in Saki and what determines victory and loss is who has what magic mahjong hack (and can use it best), in the same way as Naruto's victories generally turn on a carefully timed Rasengan or the like.

This is a large part of why Girls und Panzer is much more interesting to me than things like Saki. The presence of magic mahjong powers robs Saki's narrative of a great deal of predictability and suspense because the story becomes a game of 'okay, so what magic power is going to appear this time?' Conversely, the absence of unpredictable special tricks gives the battles in Girls und Panzer genuine tension and interest, because we can actually understand, follow, and predict what's going on (and in the process understand the problems Miho faces and make our own guesses at solutions). The reality of the contests makes them meaningful to watch.

(This is not the only reason that the battles in Girls und Panzer are good, because even with this the director has to make sure that you can understand, follow, and anticipate the action instead of getting lost in a muddle. GaruPan is very good at this.)

Girls und Panzer is not the only genuine sports anime, of course; there are plenty of them (just as there are plenty of magic shonen fight sports anime to go with Saki). For example, Cross Game is a genuine sports anime since the baseball in it revolves around real tactics and plays (instead of, say, some magic super-pitch).

(It looks like I don't watch much sports anime so I can't name any other examples off the top of my head with confidence, although from what I've read about it Chihayafuru is probably another genuine sports anime.)

Update: it figures that immediately after publishing this I remembered the other 'genuine sports anime' example I had in mind: Initial D, at least through the first few seasons. The car racing is probably not strictly realistic but it's real enough to feel grounded and limited, so you can understand the challenges that the racers face.

An unconventional reading of a bit of Sakurasou episode 4

(There are some small spoilers here for bits of episode 4.)

For context, we'll start with my tweet to @vuc_: Speaking of Sakurasou, I think there's an interesting unconventional reading of Mashiro's tanabata wish that plays to her theme.

(By Mashiro's theme I meant her empowerment. See the sidebar for more background.)

In episode 4, the group has a little Tanabata festival of their own and everyone writes up their wishes. The next day, Sorata discovers that Mashiro has not wished for anything involving herself (such as for the success of the manga she's working on) but instead that he succeed at what he's doing. In a conventional show, such a non-self-focused wish would be a sign that Mashiro had fairly strong feelings for Sorata, enough so that she'd use her wish for his happiness instead of her own. The unconventional reading is that Mashiro doesn't wish for herself because it's unnecessary; she knows that she doesn't need the help of a wish to get what she wants or for her manga work to be a success. Instead she wishes for Sorata's success because she thinks he needs the help and she cares enough to give him some. She's not being selfless, she's merely being casually generous.

(All the other people's Tanabata wishes were self-focused ones.)

PS: Mashiro is right; Sorata needs all the help he can get. There are even some signs that the show agrees with this.

(The usual cautions about reading things into shows definitely apply to Sakurasou, especially since it's based on a light novel series. On the other hand the director could have decided to do something interesting with the raw materials to hand.)

Sidebar: two readings of Sakurasou

There's two ways to look at Sakurasou. You can read it as a conventional LN based anime with an otaku-bait premise, or you can read it as a disguised, sharp-edged story about things like the true nature of apparent 'genius talent' (ie that it actually involves a huge amount of work). In the second reading, Mashiro is not a cute helpless idiot savant space case but instead a very focused young woman who knows exactly what she wants and works extremely hard for it.

(Naturally the second reading is popular with much of the section of the anisphere that I follow because it makes the show much more interesting and worthwhile. If you follow the first reading, the show is pretty much exploitative cynicism.)

The perspectives of the anicamera

If the anicamera (the virtual camera that 'films' anime) was a real camera, I'd talk about the focal lengths of its lenses and there would be any number of them in subtle gradations beloved by photographers. But since the anicamera is entirely unconstrained by physical reality it doesn't really have focal lengths. Instead anime has pretty much just a few different general perspectives that it uses, although it often varies the framing from scene to scene.

(Some scenes may be framed narrowly to include only the characters talking; other scenes may be framed quite broadly to show the characters walking along a street with buildings and so on. Also, a little disclaimer; this is from the perspective of a still photographer, so a cinematographer may have a different opinion.)

The most common perspective in anime is what still photographers call the normal perspective. Normal perspective is how we see the world, or at least how we think we see it, and also the standard perspective of drawing and painting; everything looks about the right size relative to other things in the picture and nothing looks exaggerated. As a result it's the default perspective in anime, used almost all the time if characters are just standing around or doing stuff. Normal perspective is ordinary and neutral in that it doesn't emphasize any particular part of the scene by itself; emphasis must come from other aspects of cinematography such as people, what's in the foreground, colour and lighting, and selective focus.

(My impression is that anime often cheats a little bit in normal perspective by making characters the same size even though they are not quite the same distance from the nominal camera.)

The most common distinctive perspective in anime is probably fisheye perspective. The telltale sign of a fisheye perspective is a distinct central bulge, where things in the center of the frame are larger than things at the side of the frame that are the same distance from the camera; if a character moves sideways and gets smaller (or larger), you have a fisheye. Fisheyes also exaggerate the distance between near and far objects (far objects look much smaller). The classical place for fisheye perspective is when the scene is showing the view through a door's peephole or sometimes a security camera. When fisheye perspective is used as part of a regular scene (instead of simply for an artsy shot) it emphasizes what's in the center of the frame because the center will be (hyper-)enlarged relative to everything else.

(My suspicion is that fisheye perspective is popular in modern anime partly because it can be done automatically by the computer. Instead of having to painstakingly draw everything distorted, the animators can just draw the scene normally and then apply fisheye distortion during final compositing.)

Next is (ultra-)wide perspective (aka wide angle perspective). This exaggerates near to far distances, making near objects much larger than normal (and far objects and people small). While ultra-wide is quite distinctive, moderately wide angle blurs into normal perspective since it involves only small exaggerations that can be hard to tell from what a normal perspective would be; what I think of as the usual sign of moderate wide angles is that the scene is focusing on some foreground object or person while things happen in the background (generally in reduced size). Strong wide angle emphasizes whatever element of the scene is closest to the anicamera; an extreme wide angle pretty much insures that this close object is the focus of attention.

(This shot from Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! (via) is a good example of a strong wide angle perspective.)

The final general perspective is telephoto perspective, which I don't think I've ever seen used in anime. While anime has long shots of things far away, telephoto perspective itself is the inverse of wide angle; it compresses the distance between near and far things, making them look close together and stacked on top of each other. This may sound rather abstract and unclear, so let's show you an example. This picture of mine is only moderately telephoto, but at least to me it doesn't look particularly far from the lamp post in the foreground to the elevated roadway and then to the building behind it. In real life, it's probably several hundred feet for each step (the elevated roadway is eight lanes wide here, for example).

(It's entirely possible that I've overlooked cases of telephoto perspective in anime, or maybe it's a sufficiently subtle effect in practice that I haven't noticed it when it was in front of me. I'd sort of be surprised if anime has genuinely never used the perspective, even if it was just a director playing around with it. I welcome pointers to examples, either in comments here or on Twitter.)

(Note that using a telephoto lens doesn't necessarily create a telephoto perspective; for example, you can have only a single clear thing in the picture, such as in this or this. Both were taken with the same lens and focal length as my telephoto perspective example.)

Sidebar: framing and perspective

To put it in simplistic terms, the difference between framing and perspective is that framing is what and how much you include in the picture while perspective is how the things in the picture look like in relation to each other. With physical cameras, framing and perspective are at least partially coupled together so the choice of one can put relatively narrow constraints on your options for the other (less so for cinematography than for still photography). Since anime is entirely drawn, you can frame a scene and give it whatever perspective you want to draw; however, some combinations of framing and perspective will look distorted, wrong, impossible, or absurd.

I talk about perspective here rather than framing partly because I feel that perspective has the stronger influence on the look of a scene. In anime especially, it's possible to frame a scene in the same way (or more or less the same way) despite significantly different perspectives. This is not to say that framing is unimportant to a scene's look, of course; it's just that it's less blatant than general perspective.

(The choice of perspectives is also more clearly analogous to lens selection with physical cameras than framing is.)

Checking in on the Fall 2012 season midway through

This isn't quite 'midway' except by a somewhat stretched sense of time (even by my standards of delayed watching), but now that my watchlist has settled out I feel like writing it up to go along with my initial impressions. The big surprise for me this season has been how many shows I've wound up following. In contrast to spring, where I thought I was going to follow a bunch but didn't in the end , this has been the season where I thought many shows were going to drop out but they've stuck around.

Hits, more or less in order of how eager I am to watch new episodes:

• Shin Sekai Yori: This remains good and interesting but I have nothing compact to say about it. Oh, I do have one thing; it's consistently beautiful (although not always conventionally pretty) and visually well-realized. Whatever else you can say about it, I don't think SSY ever looks boring or plain.

  Now that I've read this analysis of the end credits, the SSY ED may be my favorite one of this season.

• Girls und Panzer: This continues to mix very well done sports action (yes, with tanks) with amusing events and decent characters. One of the things that make it work is that the creators are treating the whole premise not so much seriously (which would make it absurd) as respectfully; they're inviting us to enjoy it rather than laugh at it. One reason that the action works so well is that it actually makes sense and is presented so that we can follow it (sadly this is not anywhere near as common as it should be).

  I was pleased to find out that the protagonist's tragic past is far less tragic than initially hinted at. Well, not tragic at all, really. It's melodramatic but that's okay, this show is the kind of show where that fits. We're not supposed to take it completely seriously.

  (Grim tragic pasts are overdone.)

• K: Many aspects of this are quite well done but what's more and more sold me on the show has been the characters and their interactions. It's reduced the trolling lately (which I don't mind) and has started to give us decent answers to some of the outstanding questions.

  I feel that K is the second most visually impressive show that I'm watching, although it's carefully hidden behind all those blue and red filters.

• Psycho-Pass: Rather to my surprise the third episode turned my view of this show around by presenting an interesting situation and a decent mystery (and the show has sustained that momentum since then). I'm not entirely enthused about the horror tinges and how the show loves its violence against women but it remains interesting anyways. Akane gets great faces (her smug face in episode 3 helped sell me on the show) and great moments.

  The show has fortunately gotten a more interesting approach to its cinematography and setting than desperately trying to be Ghost in the Shell.

  (Violence against women is apparently the in thing this season, or maybe I'm just noticing it more this time around.)

• Robotics;Notes: I kind of would like this to keep its conspiracy plot out of my goofy mini-robots show, but I understand that I'm not going to get that. It's slowly but steadily picked up momentum and interest as it goes on. I find Kai less irritating than other people do.

• Zetsuen no Tempest: All of the main characters keep on being non-spuds. The spouting of Shakespeare lines may get irritating at some point but for now I remain interested in where this is all going. My one uncertainty is that right now I don't see how this is going to sustain itself for an apparent 22 episodes.

• Magi: I'm less enthused than I used to be, partly because it's been a bit slow moving and partly because I've learned that it's being adapted from a still-running shonen manga and thus we're probably not going to get a real ending. It would be much improved if Morgianna kicked more ass more often; she remains the best bit of the show (as she has been pretty much since her first appearance).

  Magi is a bit silly and shallow in a kids-show kind of way.

• Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo: This prospers on the alternate strengths of periodic sharp edges and brutal honesty (where the show carefully avoids the easy way out) mixed with well done and reasonably funny comedy, usually with the protagonist as the poor straight man. If you look beneath the surface I think the show is saying some interesting things (although I could be reading things into it that aren't really there).

  (By 'reasonably funny' I mean 'actually makes me laugh sometimes'.)

  I consider this show to be on the edge not so much because the current episodes are so-so but because it could very easily slip and lose the magic that's sustaining my interest so far.

• Sword Art Online: It is just as it ever was, a disappointing mixture of good and bad. If I was a smarter person I would stop watching because I'm not at all sure that I'm really enjoying it any more. See Evirus for more.

  (Sometimes I distract myself by coming up with ways to make it much better. Yes, this way lies doom .)

Finally ended:

• Eureka Seven AO: The last two episodes came out at last. I wasn't entirely happy, but it's over now.

Now declared a miss:

• Ixion Saga DT: writing up my initial impressions made me decide that this wasn't funny enough to continue watching. Since it apparently beat its cluster of related jokes into the ground in subsequent episodes, I feel justified in that decision.

Despite various (passive) sales efforts, I've continued to avoid the temptation of Busou Shinki. Apparently it's continued to be almost entirely about tiny robots doing housework and mooning over their owner rather than tiny robots kicking ass, so I don't regret this in the least.

My views on Eureka Seven AO's ending

On the one hand, AO did not have a bad ending. It gave us good answers to our questions, it was well made, it had a bunch of quite nice action sequences (easily up to or exceeding the standards of the show to date, which have not been low), it gave Ao himself several good scenes to show various aspects of his growth, and it wrapped things up in a satisfactory way.

The problem is that in the process of doing this, the show took the entire cast of interesting, complex characters that we'd become emotionally invested in over the course of the story and reduced them to bystanders and spear carriers. None of them had their stories and themes resolved, none of them were given endings the way Ao was; they were all just ignored and wiped away. Naru was particularly badly done by (partly because her storyline raised some of the most interesting questions and themes of the show).

In effect the ending rewrites what the entire show was about. If it was actually about all of those character conflicts and themes that we thought we saw in the show, the writers dropped the ball at the end. My standard use of Occam's Razor says that instead, I was reading all of this depth into the show when the writers didn't deliberately put it there.

This has the unfortunate effect of reducing the whole show in my eyes. First, the whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I liked those characters and it annoys me to see them treated so shabbily by the ending. Second, the ending kind of turns Eureka Seven AO into a show about spectacle and Ao and that's not really enough; Ao himself is not a strong enough character to carry the show alone.

(In retrospect I wish that the other characters had known what was at stake if the Quartz Gun was fired again and had told Ao to go ahead anyways. That would have made it their conscious sacrifice as well as Ao's. But see above about reading things into the series that probably weren't actually there intentionally.)

Liked: I don't regret watching it. In the end it was still a good series; it had good production values, various moments of awesomeness, and good characters and character interactions. It was just let down by the ending.

Rewatch: No, and I'd actively avoid one. I don't think I could rewatch it just for the spectacle and for Ao's character development, partly because the other characters are such an integral part of the show right up until the last two episodes change that almost completely.

(This is kind of an elaboration of my tweet about this.)

My favorite Miyazaki movies

This all started with The Cart Driver's top 30 anime list; I wound up both thinking about what my own top 30 list would look like and raising my eyebrows that they only included one Miyazaki movie (my untempered first reaction was that basically all Miyazaki movies would make my list). In the end, while I like all of Miyazaki's movies that I've seen and think that they're all very good I'll admit that I like some more than others. I'm not going to try to rank them against other anime (not right now at least), but I'm going to list the ones that I've decided are my current favorites and picks as the very best of his work.

First, I haven't seen any of Ghibli's films since Spirited Away, including both Howl's Moving Castle and Ponyo; however, based on commentary I've read about both, I doubt that seeing either would change this list. Given that, my choices today are:

• Tonari no Totoro: I can't possibly be objective about Totoro; I watched it at exactly the right time for it to settle firmly into my heart and as a result it's my emotional favorite of all Miyazaki movies. But beyond my personal attachment, Totoro is the Miyazaki movie that is most purely about joy and wonder, with essentially no plot or tension to distract you. The movie is all about Satsuki and Mei having a series of happy, joyful experiences, from discovering and chasing around the soot spots to Mei falling on Totoro's fuzzy stomach to waiting in the rain with Totoro to, well, almost every moment in the film. Even the ending climax is not really tense and is most memorable for the cat-bus's spectacular run (speeding across the fields with people not seeing it, trotting along the high-tension wires, and if you've seen Totoro your memories may be flooding back here too). It is sentimental in the best way.

  Or in short, Totoro is Miyazaki's love letter to the wonders of childhood, the distilled essence of wandering around and having marvelous things happen. And it is a very, very well written love letter.

  (Totoro also has what's probably my single most favorite moment of flight in all Miyazaki movies, and that's saying something given that Miyazaki movies are just full of spectacular flight sequences.)

• Porco Rosso: I might not have listed this without the Cart Driver's prompting, but they're right. This is Miyazaki's most grown up and adult movie and at the same time also his most numinous; while other Miyazaki movies have more magic and more fantasy, in them it is more mundane, routine, and explicable than the one restrained, transcendent scene in Porco Rosso. Porco Rosso makes no attempt to explain the things that are not real and in doing so makes them more powerful. As his most adult movie it's also the one that's the most indirect and restrained, deliberately not showing us things and not giving us direct, clear answers.

  (As a result of this, Porco Rosso is the least straightforward and accessible Miyazaki movie, which is why I might have skipped over it initially.)

  I feel that this is the movie where Miyazaki most wears his heart on his sleeve. Miyazaki loves flight in general, but this film is filled with so much love for a particular realistic sort of flight (ie, between-war small airplanes) and for its time and place. Miyazaki also does us the service of not forgetting or ignoring what is in the background of this time and place, the way that might have happened in the hands of a lesser filmmaker.

  (There is nothing in the straightforward plot of Porco Rosso that required us to be carefully reminded of the growth of Italian fascism.)

• Spirited Away: This is Miyazaki's best adventure story (Porco Rosso has an adventure but is more a meditation on Marco's situation) and best fantasy. It is about children (or at least a child) without being childish, and is not so much about growing up as about growing into yourself and into what you can do. As a fantasy it presents the best-realized, most interesting world of fantasy in any of Miyazaki's works, full with both beauty and terror, because Miyazaki understands that the fantastic is both; you cannot have the different without also having the disturbing and the dangerous.

Again, I like all of Miyazaki's films and think they're great. The other films are just not as great in various ways as these three; these are the ones that I think are the purest, most refined Miyazaki.

(I feel conflicted about Mononoke-Hime. There's a lot to like about it and maybe I'm underrating it, but somehow I feel that it doesn't completely click with me. Maybe I need to see it again. Call it something close to an honorable mention for now.)

PS: I don't think that Miyazaki's messages in Mononoke-Hime, Nausicaa, and Castle in the Sky are flaws in any of those films, although some people disagree with this view. I don't rate any of those as highly as these three for other reasons.

Sidebar: going outside of Miyazaki

I've deliberately confined myself to Miyazaki's films here. If I was to go outside of that to films by Studio Ghibli people in general I would immediately point you to Gauche the Cellist, an early work by Isao Takahata. If you like classical music (as I do), this is a beautiful 'sense of wonder' film that's well worth your time.

(That it's entirely built around classical music probably makes it inaccessible to people who don't at least somewhat like the music.)

Looking back at the Summer 2012 anime season

As before it's time I got around to taking an honest look back at the Summer 2012 season, to go with my early impressions and my midway update.

Shows that I actively watched (and finished where applicable), in descending order:

• Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita: My favorite show of the summer, which I've written a chunk about.

• Eureka Seven AO: My second most enjoyable show of the summer, only a little bit behind Jinrui. I don't have an overall opinion on the series yet since we're still waiting for the last two episodes.

  (I wrote some stuff about it at the end of here.)

• Moyashimon Returns: I take back my grumpyness from my midway update. The best way I can put it is that the final plotline of Returns shows the series growing up and maturing, shifting from a bunch of ultimately lightweight stuff to something more nuanced. I liked this tone shift but I understand not everyone did. Also, I enjoyed a seiyuu overlap.

  (It's not just that Returns got serious, although it did in a way. It's that things became more complex and nuanced and felt more real as a result. There were no easy answers or one-dimensional characters.)

• Campione!: I'm sure people are going to laugh at me, but I quite enjoyed this all through. Part of this I can attribute simply to its execution, but I argue that it's less recycled and cliched than it might look on the surface. I mentioned Erica Blandelli in my midway update and another example (per a tweet) is that victory in fights was about gaining knowledge and solving mysteries, not more power. All of this made it fun to watch, for all that it doesn't particularly aspire to be deep.

  (This sort of calls for an entire entry that I'll probably never have the time and energy to write.)

• Sword Art Online: My views turned out not to fit in a paragraph, so I put them in an entry of their own. Short version: I don't think it can really be called good but it was clearly watchable because I did and do. I attribute this more to good production values than anything else.

• Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon II: I wound up watching this all the way through, purely for the absurd spectacle. The advantage of Horizon as compared to, say, Aquarion EVOL is that the non-spectacle bits made so little sense and I cared so little about them that it was easy to tune them out. Also, there weren't that many of them since Horizon packed most of its exposition into the first season.

  If I'm a smart person, I will not watch any future seasons this gets.

• Dog Days': as I expected, nothing really happened in this season; it never went anywhere. The show wasn't boring exactly and it was idly enjoyable throughout, but I did wind up kind of feeling that watching it was wasted time. Light entertainment is not quite what I want out of my limited time. In retrospect I stuck with this mostly out of nostalgia for the first season (and the inability to let that nostalgia go).

  The thought of another season doesn't fill me with enthusiasm.

• Oda Nobuna no Yabou: In the end most of this was merely ordinarily entertaining and the show's complete inability to let Nobuna do anything got rather irritating. In retrospect I should have skipped it, but I got captured by my initial enthusiasm and it was never quite bad enough to push me to stop watching it.

  (It's not that this was bad; it was acceptably entertaining. It's just that I'm trying to do better than merely 'acceptably entertaining' these days.)

Watching slowly:

• Joshiraku: my views haven't changed: it's entertaining and amusing but I don't find it funny enough to watch very fast.

Declared as misses:

• Hagure Yuusha no Estetica: I dropped this right after I wrote my midway update, as I mused about in the update. I have no regrets, especially since apparently its ending is basically 'continued in the light novels'.

Overall there were four shows that I unapologetically enjoyed, one show that I found compulsively watchable but seriously flawed (SAO), one show that a smarter person might not have bothered with, and two shows that I probably should have dropped. Oh, and in retrospect I stuck with Hagure much longer than I should have; I could have bailed out in the second episode when it made its taste for excessive fanservice clear.

(In general I was, as usual, far too optimistic and willing to stick with shows.)

This season makes me happy in one specific way, after last season: my favorite show wasn't an action show. On the flipside, most of the rest are (I count Dog Days' as an action show, despite how little real action it had; it was more of an adventure show, but that's close enough).

(I could be happy that my third most favorite show is also not an action show, but not really; there's a big gap between my feelings for AO and my feelings for Return. Return was nice, AO was very good to great.)

My views on Sword Art Online

I have divided views on SAO. On the one hand, I don't think it's very good. On the other hand, I keep watching it anyways. There's at least two aspects to this.

The frustrating thing about SAO is that a great many of the small-scale details are nice, it's just that the large scale plot and characters are stupid, cliched in a bad way, and irritation-inducing. I like to fool myself that this is the sign of a good director being forced to closely follow not-great source material (presumably in order to appease the fans of the original light novels so that they buy the ever-important Blu-ray releases). These little things combined with the good production values are a large reason that I keep watching despite all the stupidity.

Another reason that the show is more interesting to me than you might expect is that SAO is very much about a game and it never loses sight of this. At the start of the show I expected that the 'trapped in a game' part of the premise would mostly be used to justify ye generic fantasy setting and you could just as well have transported all of the characters to some alternate dimension. This turns out to be not at all the case; that the characters are playing a game is a constant presence in the show and makes it far more interesting than yet another fantasy setting. I may grouse about the characters being stupid in how they approach SAO the game, but they're realistically stupid in that many of their behaviors feel like recognizable MMO gamer behaviors. I've seen plenty of fantasy shows, even plenty of shows about people from this world pulled into a fantasy world in various ways, but a show about a fantasy game is relatively novel.

(One of the frustrating things is that SAO shows flashes of having something interesting to say about the whole 'stuck in a game' premise but then generally drops or fumbles it immediately.)

Finally, it's clear by now that Sword Art Online is not a good adaptation. There are many nonsensical moments and when they happen it frequently turns out that the show has left out important information, dropped relevant scenes entirely, or made changes to a scene so it makes less sense (for example, see the comments on this summary of episode 19). At this point SAO is less a standalone adaptation and more of a highlights reel for fans of the original work, who have the context to fill in all of the missing pieces and make the characters less stupid. If you lack the context, the show remains comprehensible and watchable but it's periodically stupid and jarringly odd. This is clearly the fault of the studio and the core creative team for the anime.

(I'm sure that the SAO Blu-rays will sell like hotcakes anyways.)

Sidebar: on .hack

Speaking of shows about (fantasy) games: I know about the .hack franchise. I think I watched part of the first episode of .hack//Sign and stopped, and saw one episode of .hack//Roots and was very much not impressed (I actually just found my old capsule review of it, which is part of a personal historical artifact that I may revive someday). Maybe sometime I will take another run at the franchise but commentary about .hack//Sign being slow does not make me enthused.