Shinobu Yaguchi’s breakout movie, Waterboys, was a commercial and critical smash, elevating its writer/director from low-budget indie flicks to the big league. But the zany tale of a group of schoolboy losers who form a synchronized swimming team didn’t do his creative muse much good. When it came time to make a proper follow-up (after the little-seen anthology Parco Fiction), he did the obvious thing: he made the same film again. 2004’s Swing Girls was a much more polished piece of work, but there was no escaping the fact that its zany tale of a group of schoolgirl losers who form a swing band was kind of… familiar.
Based on the name alone, you could be forgiven for expecting Happy Flight, Yaguchi’s latest feature, to be the zany tale of a group of university drop-outs who form a budget airline company. It isn’t, thankfully. Breaking from the template of the films that made his name, Yaguchi’s gone and made an ensemble piece. The end result might appropriately be subtitled “A Day at the Airport”: centering around a flight from Tokyo’s Haneda airport to Honolulu, it follows the work of the flight crew and the people on the ground, from air traffic control to the old geezer tasked with scaring birds with a shotgun so they don’t fly into the engines of planes during take-off. On a purely educational level, it’s fascinating stuff. (And on another level, it’s a darn good advert for ANA, whose fleet is shown in quite loving detail.)
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The genial grandpa of Japanese anime, Hayao Miyazaki gives interviews about as often as he turns out new films - which is to say, not nearly often enough. He made a rare appearance last Thursday at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo, where he fielded a wide range of questions from domestic and international media. Though visibly uncomfortable when getting mobbed by photographers at the start of the talk, Miyazaki-sensei (as the Japanese media call him) soon warmed to the occasion, proving an amusing, rambling and occasionally provocative speaker. He also proved very adept at dodging questions, as you’ll see.
Full disclosure: my MP3 recorder ran out of space early into the talk, meaning that I missed the half hour or so devoted to the future of Japan’s children and Prime Minister Taro Aso’s much-touted love of manga. (Okay, the latter subject occupied about 10 seconds of the running time.) The following, then, is just some excerpts from the press conference, as opposed to a complete transcript. This is all based on the consecutive interpretation provided during the event, but I’ve tidied up the translation to make it read better.
On Ponyo...
When we got together with our staff members to produce Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (Gake no ue no ponyo), we found that one of them had just had a child. Therefore, in the production of this film, the members of staff were motivated to make something that would be the first film that that child would want to see.
On nationalism…
The problems of the world come from the fact that nationalism feels that the world’s problems are due to multi-ethnicity. So in my case, at least, I won’t create films where peace comes about when people destroy evil. I feel that, when making films, you need to be well aware of the fact that all problems that exist, exist inherently within yourself, within your society and among your family members. It’s possible that the towns or the country that we love may turn into something that’s not good for the world as a whole. This is something which we learned from the past war, and it’s a lesson which we should not forget.
Read on after the break for Miyazaki’s views on commercial success, inspiration and Pixar.
Continue Reading "The Sensei Speaks: A press conference with Hayao Miyazaki"...
