Whisper of the Heart: The Least Anime Anime

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Yoshifumi Kondo's Whisper of the Heart, and it has to be the least "anime" anime I have seen. I mean this in the sense that little of this movie needed to be done in animation. What makes it jarring: its screenplay was penned by Hayao Miyazaki, auteur of the fantastical (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Porco Rosso), but it's an humble, earth-bound story. It's not like the box (or Netflix envelope summary) or any description elsewhere ever promised me another exemplary tale of strange creatures and worlds that can only be done in an animated medium; I apparently have a Pavlov dog-like effect whenever Miyazaki's Studio Gibli logo shows up in front of me: Yes! Ghosts and myths and imaginative creations! Wonder!

So imagine my surprise when the movie unfolded and spent almost all of its time focusing on a simple story of first love before shifting into a tale of maturation-via-writing. This approach isn't refreshing, or novel; for much of the first half I found it slow (the second half was probably the same pace, but my head adjusted). "Pleasant," I think, is the most apt word to describe Whisper of the Heart. There aren't any antagonists, per se, nor is its central conflict presented in a grandly dramatic way. It's never cutesy, nor funny, like a romantic comedy. Despite all the things it doesn't have or do, thought, it's still incredibly warm. So... "pleasant."

The movie concerns Shizuku Tsukishima, a girl in middle school taking exams to get into a good high school. She's an avid reader and lyricist who one day notices that one guy has checked out all of her library books immediately before her. Based on this, she develops a crush on him, and of course, they meet. There's also subplot about her friend receiving an anonymous love letter while having a crush on a school athlete. The movie sits in its place and plays with these elements for its first two acts. Along the way, there's a small shop run by a grandfather, a bossy older sister, busy loving parents and teasing voyeuristic classmates. All of these characters populate the world without adding any conflict; just a warm supporting cast.

It takes a dramatic shift late in development, though. The boy leaves to take up a two-week apprenticeship in Italy, making Shizuku feels inadequate and unprepared for her future. During his absence, she focuses her energy on writing her first story to prove herself to herself. When all this happens (somewhat rapidly), it feels like things just started. In reality, it only has twenty minutes to go. It's a testament that the film breezes by so effortlessly up to that point, but it creates a strange momentum. The emotional crescendo is only a high relative to what came before it. At this point, too, it stops being an observational story about schoolkid crushes and sets its sights wholly on Shizuku developing as a story writer.

This shift is sudden and unnatural, and it brings with it the movie's only fantasy elements. Shizuku's story concerns a cat baron who's lost his love and a young girl he brings to his world. We see some of this story - with floating planetoids, caves that glow, people with cat ears - as she's writing, but it's a tease. According to Wikipedia (master of all knowledge for unpaid bloggers), these fantasy elements were the seeds that eventually became The Cat Returns. In Whisper of the Heart, though, these segments are seconds long. Structurally, it feels like this cat world will parallel Shizuku's real life, and both stories will come to a parallel resolution. Except that doesn't happen. Instead, the story-within-the-story winds up being yet a distraction, albeit a fun one.

So little happens - the struggles and victories are so internal - it almost seems incomplete, somehow, but it's not. Despite this, there are a subtleties here in its emotional tone and relationships that make its protagonist worth watching as she develop in tiny ways. The movie is genial; it's fun to watch. Pleasant.

Burden of Dreams and Avatar: For the Love of Jungle

Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's documentary about the filming of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, is shocking in its hardships and its compassion for Herzog's vision. It's a testament to either Herzog's brilliance or his stubbornness in this project. The film's narrative - of a man determined to beat great forces far out of his reach to accomplish a seemingly benign goal - parallels the story of Fitzcarraldo itself. But with hindsight, it also sharply contrasts with James Cameron's Avatar, its drippy nature-worship still fresh in my memory from less than a week ago.

Going in, I knew the Fitzcarraldo shoot was difficult. Jason Robards and Mick Jagger, original stars in the picture, had to leave with the film 40% completed. Robards was replaced by probable lunatic Klaus Kinski. Herzog insisted that the film's centerpiece, a boat being dragged over a mountain, be a real boat. Couple those factors with filming in the dense Amazonian jungle, and you have the recipe for a turbulent ride.

It's a surprise, then, that the film barely focuses on most of these things. Instead, most of Burden of Dreams is mostly concerned with the Native extras and their relationship to the film. The personnel issues with this film boggle my mind. There's political issues, propaganda and forces the crew to relocate. A few extras get shot with arrows, and everyone involved risks their lives bringing the boat over the mountain.

Bringing the steamship over the mountain is the issue that makes the film blur the line between fiction and reality. Herzog's insistence - several years into this project already - that the boat must overcome a 45 degree slope is absurd (his engineer prefers they flatten it to 30 degrees; Herzog insists this would ruin the power of his film's "central metaphor."). This is even after the film crew clears some forestation and discovers that the ground is feet-deep with watery mud. Their bulldozer, a luxury the film's protagonist doesn't have, is a second-hand purchase that breaks down frequently. It requires that fuel must be flown into the forest and shipped down river, and it burns more gas because it cannot get traction on the mud.

Before seeing Burden of Dreams, I was already lukewarm on Avatar (and I still am; new perspective doesn't affect the good things about it). Its central message is that nature is to be revered, like a god or goddess. It's slammed into our heads in the following ways:

• in order for blue people to enter adulthood and fly dragons,they must create a bond
• an impassioned speech about how killing a creature in self defense is "a sad thing"
• a montage of its protagonist learning to become one with nature
  
• another impassioned speech: Sigourney Weaver about why shooting missiles at a big tree is bad
  
• another montage: people crying at a big tree that has been shot with missiles
  

So James Cameron wants you to know: nature is a beautiful thing to be revered and loved. Also, it might be a good idea to build your civilization around it.

Except Cameron's "nature," is mostly computer generated, shot in LA and New Zealand. The message rings false on the surface to anyone who's so much as had a dog growl at them, but then begins to slide into heinous idiocy when you have real-life examples of films that actually have to film in nature (the storied production of Apocalypse Now being another example). All coverage of the creation of Avatar focuses on its computer generated effects (check Wikipedia), and its resulting film is a ham-fisted screed about the wonders and beauty of plant life.

In some ways, it is an absolute wonder that technology to do this exists at all. Burden of Dreams features a scene showing the crew filming, over and again, a large group of Native Americans canoeing toward the protagonist's ship. Sometimes, one of the extras would be in a wrong position; often they had only two hours a day (golden hour!) to film this sequence. It took days. The resulting footage in the final film is astonishing, but brief compared to the time it took to get it right. Avatar's computer-generated nature is just plain easier. But "easier" doesn't require the same kinds of sacrifice as the old approach to film making.

At one point, Herzog shares his impression of the jungle (edited):

Kinski always says it's full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just - Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and... growing and... just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they - they sing. They just screech in pain. [...] But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.

Notably in the film, this monologue is intercut with shots of the creatures around him. The death of a bird feeding the bugs, a frog breathing rhythmically on a tree, etc. It shows the true natural world, and in its way, is beautiful in its continual cycles. When he says that "[he loves] nature... but against [his] better judgement," it shows a level of self reflection impossible for a director whose greatest successes are in the realm of big-money special effects demos (which is not meant as an insult to James Cameron; his films require an entire skillset Herzog doesn't have).

The main takeaway I got from Burden of Dreams was probably unforeseeable by its subjects and creators. There was an entire era of film making that has been lost with the advent of CGI effects that look so realistic you can almost imagine they're real. I don't demand that every film's production is the equivalent of pulling a plastic spork through the palm of your hand, but there is something great to be said about the arts and entertainments that are completed despite setbacks that are seemiingly impossible. And that's also not to imply that CGI special effects work is not fraught with its own challenges (though I doubt anyone at ILM has ever been shot with a freaking arrow), and I definitely don't mean to imply that challenging on-location filming is dead (The Hurt Locker, for one). But there's a point now where a film's very production and its methods for coming into existence can clash fully with its deliberate. Or when the a focus on special effects can lead to a director completely missing the point of a film's source material (as Ebert points out in his review of The Lovely Bones). It's all a matter of hard-earned self-awareness, something Burden of Dreams illustrates fantastically.