Disney’s descendants: Essential animation from the last 20 years
iView Author: PRIYANKAR BHUNIA (Mumbai, India)
Email: bpriyankar@gmail.com
Disney’s descendants: Essential animation from the last 20 years
Since Walt Disney introduced audiences to Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in the 1930s, animation has been associated by default with children’s entertainment. Disney’s brand of squeaky clean stories with fairytale endings meant that these movies were never considered at par with supposedly serious live-action features. At the most, they could appeal to the child within a grown-up. Making a good children’s movie is no child’s play. However this approach meant that the potential of animation as a medium was never fully explored. It is the ideal channel for giving free rein to the human imagination. For delving into the dreams and nightmares which shape us, for bringing out the dark horror at the heart of all fairy tales.
Of course, following the advent of Pixar, you don’t need to have a kid as an excuse for catching the latest animated feature at the multiplex. Movies like The Incredibles, Ratatouille and Wall-E can be enjoyed on multiple levels. These three could be viewed as a superhero action-adventure, a coming of age story and a simple romance respectively. Dig deeper and you will see a biting satire on the culture of mediocrity, a tale of an individual who chooses to be an outsider and a cautionary fable on the perils of consumerism. But I guess everyone here has seen and savored the Pixar movies. So, I am going to devote my article to discussing a different category of animation altogether. The following features are some of my favorite films from across genres and regions. The years in which these movies released are mentioned in brackets.
Waltz with Bashir (2008): I am starting with the one I saw most recently. It starts with a pack of ferocious wild dogs, straight out of the Hound of Baskervilles, running down a city street, scaring passers-by and finally stopping beneath a highrise window. It is a recurring nightmare of Boaz, an Israeli veteran from the 1982 Lebanese war. He is narrating it to his friend, Ari Folman, who is the director of the movie.
It opens a locked door in Ari’s mind and he has his first flashback of the war in more than 20 years. But the only image he can recall is a surreal sequence where he rises naked out of the sea with two of his mates, dresses up in army fatigues on the beach and walks ahead into a crowd of silently wailing women. He can’t remember any other details. And now he is haunted by this sequence constantly, which he feels is somehow related to the massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Phalangists during the war. To exorcise his demons, he decides to seek out and talk with his former army colleagues. As he tries to fill in the gaping holes in his memory, an indelible picture of the hysterical madness of war emerges. Utilizing an unique visually stunning animation style and blending brutal, graphic battle-scenes with surreal beautiful imagery, this movie is reminiscent of stuff like Slaughterhouse-5 and Catch-22. For once the foreign film Oscars got it right when Waltz with Bashir made it to the nominations.
Persepolis (2007): Based on Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical underground French graphic novel, it tells the story of Marjane’s childhood in late 1970s Iran. In 1978, the despot but secular Shah is overthrown and the tyrannical regime of Ayatollah Khomeini takes over. Religion and revolution create a deadly cocktail. Women are pushed behind veils. Political dissidents start disappearing in the middle of the night. Marjane grows up to be a normal rebellious teenager listening to Iron Maiden and inscribing ‘Punk is not ded’ on the back of her burkha. Small stolen moments of freedom, tiny acts of defiance help keep Marjane’s spirit alive. Rendered in beautiful black and white, 2-D animation, this movie is a must watch for its pure story-telling prowess.
Waking Life (2001): Richard Linklater (of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset fame) has the gift of writing fascinating conversation pieces for his movies, unencumbered by the constraints of plot. In Waking Life he outdoes himself by creating a work which is unabashedly intellectual and stimulating. The young protagonist keeps on waking up from one dream into another one. In these never-ending dreams, he has conversations with an assorted bunch of characters on everything from free will to collective memory, from evolution to revolution.
Greek philosophy, existentialism, post-modernism, theory over action, quantum physics, reincarnation, societal decadence, politics, human expression…the list goes on and on. If it sounds disjointed, it is. It is the kind of dialogue you might have with your friends over a Friday night beer session. Jumping haphazardly from one point to another, the overall picture is one of ordered chaos. The central character is aware constantly that he’s in a dream and some of the most interesting exchanges are on the paradox of the situation. In this movie, a technique called rotoscopy was used, where animators painstaking trace lines over live-action footage, creating likenesses of the actors. The advantage- you get the performances of real actors with the freedom of animation. Waking Life is a truly avant-garde creation which is guaranteed to fire up the synapses in your brain.
A scanner darkly (2006): Another movie by Linklater using the same animation style as Waking Life. Philip K. Dick investigated the nature of reality and consciousness in his science-fiction as few others have done. He explores mind-bending implications of technological advancement on individuals as well as society as a whole, rather than merely gazing with awe at the marvels of science. Set in a dystopian future California, Keanu Reeves plays Fred, an undercover narcotics agent trying to find out the source of Substance D, a powerful new psychoactive drug. In his undercover life as Arctor, he lives with junkies in a rundown house in the suburbs. As he gradually gets addicted to the drug, he starts losing his sense of identity.. He can no longer distinguish between his two selves, two parallel lives. His breakdown is shown in unsparing, graphic detail. The movie also explores the duality of good and evil, cop and criminal. The unexpected climax brings into glaring focus the poignant dilemma of the individual, his helplessness in the face of the system. (Minority Report and Blade Runner are two other outstanding features based on Philip K. Dick’s novels.)
Princess Mononoke (1997): Hayao Miyazaki, worshiped as an idol by the geniuses at Pixar, is one of the greatest animators ever. Drawing heavily from Japanese folk history and mythology, he crafts superbly entertaining, layered meaningful movies. Princess Mononoke is an epic tale of the never-ending battle between man and nature. Nature here is pulsatingly alive. From the thousands of cute little wood-sprites to the majestic forest spirit and its sad, magnificent guardians, the old wolf and the blind giant boar. She has been grievously wounded and she is fully capable of retaliating back. While man strides forth in his quest for betterment of his life, trampling upon whatever comes in the way. There’s no clear differentiation between good and evil here. The anti-war and environmentalism themes are subtly interwoven into the fabric of the story. Together with the fluidity of the mostly hand-drawn animation, it makes for a richly satisfying experience.
Spirited Away (2002): Yet another Hayao Miyazaki offering. Winner of the Golden Bear at Berlin film festival and the 2002 Oscar for best animated film, this is the kind of movie which kids of all ages deserve and they seldom get. Chihiro, a bratty 10 year old, is going to their new house with her parents. En route they lose their way and stumble upon what looks like an abandoned amusement park. Her parents spot piles of delicious-looking food and soon turn into pigs for hogging on the food of the spirits.
Chihiro discovers that she is now trapped in a fantasy world. At times mesmerizing and at times as unexpectedly dangerous and grotesque as the rabbit-hole in Alice in wonderland. The witch Yubaba takes Chihiro’s real name in exchange for a job. If she can’t get back the name, she will be stuck in Yubaba’s clutches for ever. As she learns to survive in this unfamiliar world, she makes friends and learns to care about them. As in most of Miyazaki’s works, there is no explicit dichotomy between black and white. The multi-faceted, shape-shifting characters are never what they appear to be. All in all, a perfect introduction to Miyazaki’s work.
Grave of the fireflies (1988) : A critic called this movie one of the most profoundly humane films he had ever seen. And it is a masterpiece, comparable to the great wartime tragedies. It is directed by Isao Takahata, who co-founded Studio Ghibli together with Miyazaki. Eschewing relaisitc animation in favor of simple 2-D drawings, it focuses on the survival struggle of a pair of siblings in Japan during WW2. Their father has gone off to the imperial navy and their mother dies of burn injuries during a bombing raid. Subsequently, the elder brother, Seita, has to take care of his 5-year sister, Setsuko. And Seita himself is only a 12-year old kid. Initially they go to live with an aunt, who has been hardened by the difficulties of wartime and treats them cruelly. Seita and Setusuko leave the house and start living in an old abandoned bomb-shelter. As getting food for the two of them becomes tougher and tougher, Seita resorts to stealing from farmers.
In the first scene itself, where we see a bedraggled, emaciated Seita dying at a railway station, we know how this is going to end. Adapted from a semi-autobiographical novel by Akiyuki Nosaka, it is an incredibly affecting and unbearably gut-wrenching movie.By keeping it simple and intimate, Grave of the fireflies successfully illuminates the impact of war on ordinary lives. Get back to me if watching this movie doesn’t bring tears to your eyes.
Ghost in the shell (1995): This was the first full-length anime feature that I saw and I was absolutely blown by it. For its time, the animation techniques are dazzling. And I had no clue what cyberpunk was till I watched it (it is a combination of traditional noir elements and science-fiction, set in an usually dystopian future). Directed from a Japanese manga of the same name by Mamoru Oshi, it is structured as a thriller. The credit sequence shows the creation of Major Motoko, a cyborg who works as cop in the fictional Public Security Section. The plot involves a sentient computer program, known as the puppet master, going rogue.
The ghost in the title refers to the equivalent of the human soul for machines. Cybernetic bodies without the ghost are merely robots or zombies in human terms. What makes this movie different from The Terminator series or any of the dozens of movies involving cyborgs or androids is its contemplation on what makes us human. If we create sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence, conscious of its own existence, what is to differentiate it from us. (The green numbers rolling down the computer screen in The Matrix is lifted straight from this movie.) A sequel called Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, with a haunting atmosphere and a somewhat muddled plot, was released in 2004. A fantastic Japanese series also exists of which this movie was an offshoot.
Akira (1988): One of the landmark anime films, it is another instance of cyberpunk sci-fi, based on a manga. Tokyo is destroyed in a nuclear explosion in WW3 in 1988. The story is centered around a teenager Tetsuo, who is part of a motorcycle gang and is inadvertently found to have powerful psychic abilities similar to those of Akira, who could have the cause of the explosion in 1988. Government officials try to control Tetsuo’s powers by capturing him with the help of three other psychics, who look like children with old men’s features (the look is similar to Brad Pitt as an aged kid in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). As Tetsuo begins to use his powers which he can’t yet control properly, things go awry big time. You could watch it just as a fantasy action movie with glorious visuals. But it’s a lot more than that. It is about the destruction of a society and its precarious rebirth and the hubris of power.
Here I conclude this long article. I had not intended to write so much when I started out. But then it happens. The last five movies in the list turned out to be Japanese ones and that was unavoidable considering the fact that in Japan, animation developed much earlier into a serious art form. And this entire list is but a small sampling of what animation could offer.
Tags: A Scanner darkly, Akira (1988), Ghost in the shell (1995), Grave of the fireflies (1988), Persipolis, Pixar, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Waking Life, Walt Disney, Waltz with Bashir
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Some great stuff here. Quite a refreshing look at the genre. Love scanner darkly, miyazaki, waking life. yet to see persepolis and waltz. have you seen chicago 10?
Its good to see Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke in this list..
Since you have mentioned Miyazaki, I adored his Castle in the Sky, Nausicaa Valley of the Wind, and My Neighbour Totoro.. Personally I believe Castle in the Sky was his best..
Another one is 5 Centimeters Per Second. Santoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress was masterpieces too..
Anime stuff is supeb article.I has insisted my cousins to watch Spirited away and Mononoke Hime for their flawless rhytmic poetry style movie.I had watched thousand of movies full of melodrama, emotion and tragedy.I did not have enough courage to watch ‘grave of fireflies’ completely. After watching half an hour,I become so emotional from inside that i cannot proceed till end.Hayao Miyazaki is real master of this animation movies.He is no less than Kurosawa or Traffaut. For reminder,Howl’s Moving Castle and ‘tonari-na-totoro’ is missing from the list.
I have not seen Chicago 10 yet…want to watch it..and of course there are lots of very good animated movies missing from the list…looking at Miyazaki’s oeuvre itself will yield 4 or 5 more…these are just the names which came to my mind first while writing the article
A good write-up Priyankar!
Grave Of The Fireflies is indeed one of the most moving work of art ever made. I really love Totoro too and I recommend Porco Rosso as well. Its quite hilarious.
Since we are talking animation, I’d like you folks to check out Eb Hu’s work at
http://www.hybworks.co.uk/
face to face and josie’s lalaland are must watch. Let me know if you like his work.
Nice article…Miyazaki’s movies are like dreamscapes….Spirited away’s 6th station sequence is one of the best sequence I have evah seen…the splashing of the water and the music..the stations passing by….
I also enjoyed Kiki’s delivery service….waiting to see his Ponyo on a Cliff
Just saw Coraline in 3-D….awesome….
@ tushar
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animation is NOT a genre!! i suppose THAT was the purpose of this article.