February
28, 2005
Isao
Takahata is not a name most Americans will recognize. Mention his
name, and more often than not, you will be greeted with shrugs.
But make no mistake: Takahata is a poet who has revolutionized animation
as an art form. If you see his Grave
of the Fireflies, you will be tempted to call it his masterpiece.
I felt the same way myself, but I was wrong. Omohide Poro Poro
is his masterpiece.
I'll
be even bolder and declare this to be the finest animated picture
ever made; a grand achievement of animation as art form. It proves
to be deeply moving, at many times overwhelming; yet is also close,
small, intimate. This is one of the great movies of our lives.
Takahata
only made one fantasy adventure picture, his first, The Adventure
of Hols, Prince of the Sun, in 1968 with Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki
fell in love with adventure movies; Takahata moved in the opposite
direction, towards realism. He strove to create animation influenced
by neo-realism, a naturalism in the style of Jean Renoir and Yasujiro
Ozu.
Omohide
Poro Poro best incorporates the traits and skills Takahata developed
during the 1970's, when he revolutionized animation in Japan with
World Masterpiece Theatre, presenting television renditions of Heidi
and Anne of Green Gables, and then
in 1982 with his great Goshu the Cellist.
His
style is reflective and deeply personal, very much like Ozu, but
Takahata's greatest gift, for me at least, is his ability to take
us inside the heads of his characters as their imaginations take
flight. That trait is what made his version of Anne so
memorable; here, he takes one story and molds an entirely different
story from within.
Omohide
Poro Poro is the story of a Tokyo office worker named Taeko.
At age 27, she feels dissatisfied, unhappy with her life. She slowly
begins to question some of her life decisions, her choice in careers.
When we first see her, she has decided to spend a week with her
sister's in-laws who live out in the country.
Taeko
puts on a happy face and gets along well with others, but we discover
that much of this is a shell, a cover. Over the course of the movie,
she wonders out loud if her whole life has been a front to pacify
the outside world. Perhaps she is entering another moment of growth
in her life, and she begins to reflect upon another similar time,
her childhood and early adolescence.
The
movie dances about, from the present day (1982) to Taeko-chan's
tenth year (1966), and back again. For almost anyone's first viewing,
it's the flashbacks in Poro Poro that leap out in our minds.
These scenes are drawn in a style I've never seen before in an animated
film. The screen is drawn very sparsly, with colors and details
fading away at the edges of the screen. The amount of visual detail
is striking, almost like sketches from a beloved children's book,
painted with spring-tone watercolors.
The
1966 episodes capture that painterly sense of nostalgia better than
just about any other movie I've seen. One obvious comparison I could
make is Wild Strawberries; imagine Bergman's classic, drowned
in Warhol pop, echoing song lyrics like Bob Dylan in his prime.
It's a thing of beauty to watch the past and present intertwine,
commenting on one another, dancing in grand celebration of the joys
and sorrows of life.
How
can I describe this to someone in America who only knows animation
in the language of Walt Disney and Chuck Jones? Our first time watching
Grave of the Fireflies is a lot like being hit in the chest
with a cinder block. It's impossible not to be deeply moved, and
I've discovered that Takahata achieves that feat in all his work.
Fireflies, of course, has its poetic tragedy; this film
affects me far more with its beauty and grace.
Looking
at the life of this woman, we identify with her awkwordness and
tragedies. Taeko-chan's life is a series of setbacks, losses great
and small. Granted, she is on a path to her self-discovery, but
it isn't until the very end that you realize the great unspoken
conflict in the movie. Namely, how did this precocious, curious
child become the polite woman in a stale desk job? Her story is
much like the Japanese saying that the upright nail gets the hammer;
it's Takahata's thinly-disguised stab at his country's conformist
culture.
There
are so many brilliant moments in the 1966 scenes that describing
them would mean reciting the entire plot. I love the episode involving
Taeko's crush on another boy in school; a baseball game is skillfully
played as duel, chase, and showdown that captures all the magic
and fear of first loves. I love the sequence involving the girls'
emerging puberty and emergence into womanhood; it's both endearingly
funny and sobering from a boy's point-of-view. I'm endlessly enamored
with Taeko's short stab at acting, which leads to interest by the
local college theatre group; it's a masterpiece of editing and pop
montage, it turns horribly tragic, all set against the backdrop
of a popular children's show called Hyokkori Hyoutan Jima. The final
moment is a redemptive triumph that beautifully sums up Taeko's
whole life, and maybe Takahata's, too. It may be the best scene
he's ever filmed.
By
contrast, Poro Poro's other half - the story set in the
present - exchanges the faded pop nostalgia for luminous, bold colors,
family drama, and an almost documentary realism. Taeko's arrival
in the country brings her in the company of Toshio, a young man
who walked away from the punishing city life for the simple life
of a farmer. "Do you like this music?" he asks Taeko as
he walks her to his car. "It's music for peasants. I like it
because I'm a peasant, too." His cheery demenor and thoughtful
disposition begin a series of conversations between the two, very
often in that tiny car.
Toshio's
conversion to a more traditional rural life fits in with much of
the nostalgia in Studio Ghibli's films; I strongly suspect this
may also be a direct conversation with the audience. By 1991, Japan's
bubble economy had burst, plunging the nation into a cycle of endless
recession that only now is ending. Takahata (who doesn't quite share
Hayao Miyazaki's legendary work ethic) has little respect for the
unrelenting corporate culture. His world resides in the quieter,
rural Japan of the past.
This
life is neither shown to be light or trivial; it is hard work at
long hours and little pay. A brilliantly moving sequence goes into
great detail showing the process of picking safflowers to make cosmetic
dyes, and then brings us to the fields at dawn as Taeko and her
relatives pick flowers. Now maybe I was mistaken before; maybe this
is the greatest scene Takahata has ever filmed.
This
moment is so sparse, so perfectly zen, that we almost think we're
watching nothing at all. But watch them pick flowers. Listen to
that majestic Hungarian folk and choir music - such marvelous music!
- and just wait, enjoy the moment. Gradually, slowly, almost in
real-time, we see the sun peak behind the mountains, and it dawns
on us: we're watching the sunrise. It's just about the most beautiful
scene I've ever witnessed.
When
you look at Isao Takahata's greatest works, you find a crucial common
denominator: Yoshifumi Kondo. Kondo served as the charcter designer
and animation director on Anne of Green Gables, a role
he reprised faithfully for years at Studio Ghibli. His drawing style
is superb, absolutely perfect for a naturalist style. His sensibility
is also close to Takahata's, who later remarked that both Grave
of the Firefles and Poro Poro could never be made
without him. I say Kondo was the best character artist in the business,
and his death in 1998 remains a terrible loss.
The
official western title to this film is Only Yesterday,
though I confess I much prefer the original Japanese title. It translates
as "Memories of Falling Teardrops," which is far more
poetic and betrays its strong Ozu influence. It seems fitting to
me that both Japanese filmmakers should be mentioned in the same
breath. This is a work of genius - Ozu painted with watercolors. |
