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RE: When Marnie Was There - Farewell to Studio Ghibli
Is it ever the last one with Studio Ghilbi? I don't know if it was translated into the English media or not, but last year there were several reports of Miyazaki coming out of retirement yet again for another film. The future has not yet been written.
Your review is good and makes me want to see it. I have this film on my list to watch. I haven't seen any of their movies since Howl's Moving Castle, so I am a bit behind. On that note there was a pretty good piece on "howl" at Kottke recently. If you didn't see it, here it is: https://kottke.org/17/10/the-hidden-heart-of-howls-moving-castle
Oh, there are many dedicated anime news sites in English, and even when things don't get translated by the professional scene, they'll get picked up by reddit and such. Yes, Miyazaki is never really done, but this was a good narrative to tie into this film in particular.
I've gone over Kottke's piece. I must say I did not like Howl's Moving Castle much, which is probably due to me reading the book first. I rarely enjoy watching or reading adaptations after I've gone over the original, but I can make it work the other way around. With Howl in particular, I feel the book is not just slightly better, but much better.
It is interesting how he notes, "In this film Miyazaki resists his resistance," when, well, it's not an original story.
As for Marnie. It's not my favourite Ghibli film (that'll always be Princess Mononoke), but it's so touching and bare in ways most of the others only touch at, but don't actually embrace fully.
Though yes, that was a nice piece by Kottke, even if a bit shallow to my liking, heh. He too, did not dive fully into the emotional impact he described.
Hmm... see I liked both the book and the movie of Howl. They were different, with Miyazaki bending the story for his own ideas, but that is ok. It worked for Kubrick when he stole and more or less rewrote "The Shining", and I think it works for Miyazaki. Having said that, I do agree with you that the book was better. But I like them both.
Mononoke was great. I'm more partial to Spirited Away (or Porco Rosso), but they are all great. I have to take back what I said—I have seen one other Ghilbi film after Howl. I saw Earthsea, which again was not as good as the book but was still good in its own right.
Earthsea is notorious for how bad it was. Even if I hadn't read Earthsea, that one was just so bad.
They also copy-pasted characters from other movies in that one. It was just a phoned-in mess :(
There's a reason Miyazaki Goro did not direct anything for years afterwards :-/
But, I'm glad you liked it! I felt so bad about that film after I watched it in a big theatre...
haha I know that was the common belief. Sure it isn't even on the same level as other Ghibli films, but I didn't think it was that bad. I always felt sorry for Goro. Because of his name, everyone expected him to just instantly and magically be amazing. But I say that without knowing any of the behind the scenes story.
I'll say this - I don't think I knew it was Goro behind Earthsea till later. Much later.
All I knew was that the film was terrible. And then it later made sense when I found out. Marnie is the director's second offering, didn't care too much for the first, but it was ok. Earthsea is one of the worst anime films I watched, from my perspective, at least, heh.
And it's definitely not easy to follow up in Hayao's footsteps, and as his son to boot. No doubt about that.