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YouTube essayist and documentary filmmaker Steven McCarthy returns once again with another look at Studio Ghibli, this time examining the career of Goro Miyazaki, the son of founding director Hayao Miyazaki who was responsible for Tales From Earthsea, From Up on Poppy Hill and Ronja the Robber's Daughter. This video goes into detail on these films, including production, overarching themes and public reception. Goro Miyazaki doesn't get enough love from the fans. Part of that is due to the family name and the curse of having a famous father (ask Julian Lennon), and part of that is simply experience, as we have so few works to examine and study. If he continues to create animated films and television series and develop his own unique voice as an artist, those qualities will begin to dominate the conversation. McCarthy does an excellent job moving that discussion forward, highlighting his strengths and weaknesses, his difficult relationship with his father, and the qualities that ...

Artist and illustrator Sarah O'Donald has crafted this vibrant illustration of Totoro and No-Face sharing a tea time. I really enjoy this piece, the colors and details are superb and demonstrate the artist's skills at composition. You can visit Sarah O'Donald's Instagram page , which features dozens of illustrations that are absolutely brilliant. She has also made numerous appearances at art shows where her works are available for sale, featuring fantasy themes and characters from animation, comics and videogames. Her output is quite remarkable and I'm amazed at how much she has created. She must be spending every waking moment drawing and painting, which is, of course, the true goal of any artist. I'm very impressed and more than a little jealous. My artistic skills are nowhere near as refined and inspiring as these. Great work! Here's wishing for your success!

This week, Studio Ghibli formally unveiled their plans for an upcoming theme park in Japan. The designs were shown in a press event this week, including layouts and building illustrations. Visitors will enjoy walking through the worlds of Hayao Miyazaki's beloved animated movies including My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle. The theme park will be located near the city of Nagoya in Aichi Prefecture, and is expected to open in 2022. The park will include European building designs based on Miyazaki's films, as well as large sculptures of many famous characters that evoke Japan's mythic and cultural past. These illustrations are very fascinating and offer a glimpse into how the finished site will look. The park layout is largely forest, keeping as much of the natural environment in place as possible. Many of the locations also feel closer to an outdoor nature preserve than Disney World or Universal Studios. This is a very welcome ...

Continuing our series of "Ghibli Riffs," let's take a short look at the 2002 animated feature The Cat Returns (Neko no Ongaeshi), which was directed by Hiroyuki Morita and based on an idea by Hayao Miyazaki to feature a movie about the Baron character from Mimi wo Sumaseba. There are not many riffs in this movie, only a few, but they're very easy to spot. Let's take a look at the riffs in The Cat Returns: 1. The Baron's house, hidden away in a secret village in urban Tokyo, is actually the same house as used by Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Hound. 2. Haru chases the fat cat through an array of maze-like alleys, porches and rooftops in the city en route to The Baron. This sequence is an impressive urban spin on Mei's journey through the forest in My Neighbor Totoro (1988). 3. The image of the tunnel into another realm is a common Jungian archetype in fairy tales that symbolizes a journey into the unconscious. Hayao Miyazaki employed this image in Spirited Awa...

Tomorrow is your last chance to see Studio Ghibli's 2002 feature film The Cat Returns in theaters as part of Studio Ghibli Fest 2018. Be sure to grab your tickets if you haven't already done so. The Japanese title for this movie, Neko no Ongaeshi, translates as "The Cat Returns the Favor." I always enjoyed that title, it has a nice literary flair and it flows nicely. Most US movie titles are pre-packaged and sanitized for your protection by teams of lawyers and marketing weasels, resulting in something bland and boring and far too short. But Americans have notoriously short attention spans, which probably explains...something. What were we talking about? Here are some photos from this movie. It's not one of my favorites, it feels very much like a made-for-TV or OVA production. I much preferred Ghiblies Episode 2, which played alongside The Cat Returns on a double bill during its Japanese theatrical release. That short film had all the experienced artists, while th...

The ultimate test for any diehard Studio Ghibli fan is spotting all the "Ghibli Riffs," the shots and moments that directly quote earlier works. It is a staple of the Takahata-Miyazaki canon and is found in all of their films and television series. Today, we're taking a look at Takahata's 1999 masterwork My Neighbors the Yamadas. Watching our new Blu-Ray copy this weekend, I was struck by how few riffs appear in this movie. Most Ghibli movies contain well over a dozen riffs without breaking a sweat, while Yamada-kun only contains half that amount. Instead, there are a number of nods to classic cinema, which is a Takahata trademark that goes back years (Heidi and Anne of Green Gables both quote Citizen Kane, Horus cites Alexander Nevski). Let's take a look at all the riffs in Yamadas: 1. The opening scene portrays a number of images that directly quote Japan's hanafuda cards as the main characters are introduced. This very same thing appeared in Takahata's ...

I'm very sad to discover that Tom Sutpen's essential pop culture photo blog "If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger..." has closed down. I don't know exactly when this occurred, but the author's Twitter page was last updated on March 29. Every week, I am reminded that the golden age of movie and pop culture weblogs has now passed, as people have devolved from engaging with culture to merely consuming it. People once shared their love of movies and music and the arts, often sharing a spotlight to more obscure, left-of-the-dial subjects. It was always such a joy to discover these cultured, educated fans as they blossomed on the new online frontier of the 21st Century. Now it's nearly all gone extinct, and the few remaining holdouts are fighting over table scraps. It appears that most people today are perfectly fine with just clicking on images on social media sites. They're not really engaging or bonding or coming together in any meaningful way. They're...

Today marks the 30th anniversary of two of Studio Ghibli's most acclaimed movies, My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies. The two were offered as a double bill in Japanese theaters, which has always bemused and befuddled fans around the world. My understanding of the whole saga is that Hayao Miyazaki wanted to create his movie but couldn't convince Tokuma Shoten (the owners of Studio Ghibli in those days) to finance the project. So he convinced Isao Takahata to create a film adaptation of the famous novel Grave of the Fireflies and then piggyback Totoro onto that. It must have been an enormous strain on both the filmmakers and the studio's finances to create two feature animated films at the same time, but they successfully managed to release them on time (more or less). Unfortunately, the Japanese moviegoing public wasn't very interested that summer, or perhaps they just couldn't handle the emotional whiplash. I'd also like to think that Akira-mania also...

Out of curiosity, I checked Amazon to see if the 2005 Animal Treasure Island DVD was still available, and to my surprise, copies are still in stock. Yay! This Discotek Media release has been out-of-print for many years, so be sure to pick up a copy while you can. I see that Puss in Boots is more difficult to score, so don't dawdle. This DVD is pretty bare-bones, but does include both English subtitles and the original US English-language dub. The cover design is pretty good. I do wish Toei would reissue this movie on Blu-Ray, but they seem very reluctant to preserve their history. Horus remains the only "classic era" title on BD, and all of the movies on DVD were single-layer discs released around the year 2000. Oh, and they're all LaserDisc rips. I really can't explain that. Am I really the only one who cares about these classic animated feature films? Maybe. Anime fans, who are mostly high school and college students, won't touch anything older than a decad...

Since we recently looked at Hayao Miyazaki's newspaper comic adaptation of Toei Doga's Puss in Boots, I thought we should also look at his version of Toei's 1971 classic, Animal Treasure Island. I love this movie, a true cartoon classic full of slapstick humor and adventure like a warm box of sunshine. These newspaper scans are all in black-and-white. Judging by their quality, I have always assumed that the originals were in color, but that is only my personal speculation. These look like they were run off a photo copier long ago, and then later scanned into digital computer files. Thankfully, the page sizes are large enough so that you can read everything clearly (just click on the images to view at full size). I would be very happy if we could find originals, but these remain the only preserved copies of this 1971 comic. This Miyazaki comic appeared after People of the Desert, his original epic manga serial from 1969-70, and so we see his drawing style far more establishe...

The following screenshots come from episodes of Moretsu Ataro directed by Isao Takahata. The Toei Doga TV anime series ran from 1969-70 for 90 episodes. I found these screenshots from the Toei website while doing research. One thing I really enjoy about these Toei anime programs from the 1960s is how they still embrace a Western cartoon style that will almost completely disappear in the 1970s and beyond. As much as I embrace anime's evolution away from the Disney paradigm and towards new horizons, I do hope they wouldn't forget the joys of a simple gag cartoon with really inspired animation and goofy humor. Maybe I'm just feeling really nostalgic for Rocky & Bullwinkle and Hanna-Barbara these days. I'd really like to see this show. It looks really fun, the character designs are inspired in that classic-moderist fashion. And most importantly for this website, Paku-san directed these. What more do ya want?