One could sum up these half-dozen jewels scattered by Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki by suggesting that they take their great beauty and narrative tension from two unreconcilable principles: first, that Japan is a sacred land, with a still-living animistic tradition; second, that Japan has been savaged by industry to the point where some reckon it as the most polluted island on the globe. Camera Cinemas’ current six-film series, which runs Jan. 11–17, begins with the introduction many of the West had to Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli: Princess Mononoke, a brilliant, narratively tricky fairy tale of a wounded warrior’s recovery and a wolf-princess’ intervention.
Spirited Away, perhaps the best and most enigmatic of his films, won the 2002 Oscar for best animated film. It’s an Alice in Wonderland pastiche, rich with psychological tensions. A daughter’s trespassing parents are turned into swine; thus she’s forced to work as a menial in a traditional spa for ghosts who need R&R. It is a most exquisite meditation on the holiness of water. No one who sees Spirited Away will ever forget the train sequence—a ride on a causeway with a masked spirit sitting nearby; Japanese cinema is rich with scenes of significant trains and train journeys, but this is one of the most poignant of them all.
Castle in the Sky is Miyazaki’s version of Swift’s Laputa from Gulliver’s Travels, the floating kingdom that hovers over the Earth. My Neighbor Totoro features the biggest star of Ghibli’s glorious menagerie: the colossal, cat-shaped protective forest spirit that aids a child whose mother is in the hospital (the balance in Miyazaki is often not of good and evil but of sickness and health).
Porco Rosso relates the adventures of a dashing pig who is a biplane aviator in Italy. The early Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is a post-apocalyptic fantasy about a princess holding off a coming war. Six films in 35mm prints, dubbed in English. The subtitled versions are preferable, but most children will be too amazed and delighted to mind.
Studio Ghibli Series
Jan. 11-17
