My girlfriend has recently exposed me to amazing work of Hayao Miyazaki and his films. I am in awe of his films and have seen about 8 of them so far. If I get the chance to run the next Straight Dope mafia game, I plan on making the them around his characters, so hopefully it turns out to be fun.
So what about you guys? Any fans out there for Miyazaki? Let’s discuss…
I think you’ll find quite a few fans here, based on earlier threads about Miyazaki, e.g., Best Miyazaki Film?, from about 5 years ago.
I love Spirited Away
Oh, yeah! I adore his architecture: he does wondrous things with staircases.
My very first exposure to him was in Toei’s “Puss in Boots,” a lovely 1960’s interpretation of the fable. The English dub was done by many of the same voice actors as were doing Kimba the White Lion at the time. Here is a link to a three-minute trailer (in Japanese.)
Much of the action takes place in a huge, rambling fantasy castle, right up to the climax which takes place in a tower with a distinctive staircase spiraling around the inside and then the outside.
Imagine my joy, then, many years later, seeing Miyazaki’s The Cat Returns. (Link to two-minute trailer.) The climax at the end comes in an almost-identical tower with very similar staircases – and the rescue of the protagonists comes from an almost-identical deus ex machina! He was offering a small homage to the earlier movie!
I took my kids to see The Wind Rises on a big screen, in Japanese with subtitles (their first such). Really great.
And he’s no slouch either when it comes to various and sundry flying machines.
The second exposure I ever had to Miyazaki was “Castle Cagliostro,” the “Lupin III” movie. Castle architecture and flying machines! Can’t be beat!
(How much does an autogyro go for these days?)
Love Miyazaki’s stuff.
I think the first film of his I saw was Castle of Cagliostro which was on TV here one night. I love the detail and richness of his animation and I think he captures the *thrill *of flight better than any other movie maker out there.
If I was to rank his stuff:
[ol]
[li]Princess Mononoke[/li][li]Spirited Away [/li][li]My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle*[/li][li]Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind [/li][li]Castle of Cagliostro, Castle in the Sky, Porco Rosso [/li][li]Kiki’s Delivery Service, Ponyo[/li][/ol]
Haven’t had a chance to see *The Wind Rises * yet. I’ve got it but I’m waiting for the right day to settle in and watch it.
I’ve slowly been introducing my two boys to Miyazaki/Ghibli and they’re both confirmed fans as well.
*Saw Howl’s at a local independent cinema when it was released. Quite a treat.
His films are hit and miss for me. The ones that miss are just “too weird”. The much-loved Princess Mononoke falls into that category, for me.
When I love them, I *love *them, though. Ponyo was the first one I saw and still my favorite. Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and The Secret World of Arrietty are also in heavy rotation with my young daughter.
Arriety is a masterpiece that it seems like few have seen. It’s not Miyazaki, but it is Ghibli and it is one of my daughter’s favorites.
Ohhh, Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli is awesome. My first exposure to uncut, unsubbed Japanese animation was Kiki’s Delivery Service. We were visiting a comic book shop and I guess it was anime night. That was sometime in the early 90s.
The end of My Neighbor Totoro always makes me cry. I don’t know why!
A few years ago my friends surprised me with a showing of fansubbed Spirited Away (this was well before it was released in the US). I was so happy I clapped like a little kid. 
Howl’s Moving Castle showed that Ghibli could animate handsome guys as well as cute and beautiful women and girls. Not that Ghibli hadn’t done good-looking men before, but damn, is Howl a bishonen (pretty boy). My best friend let me borrow her copy several times so I could sigh over how gorgeous Howl is. 
I really like most of Ghibli’s stuff. The only ones that I am kind of “meh” on are Porco Rosso, Pom Poko, Princess Mononoke, and the Earthsea thing. I could take or leave the Lupin series. I recognize it as a classic, but it’s not my thing.
Have not seen The Wind Rises yet. Deliberately staying away from Grave of the Fireflies. 
Yeah, my girlfriend has seen that one, but she doesn’t know if she can sit through it again to watch it with me. I’m interested in it, even though I know its a tearjerker that threatens to make me cry man tears. I’m up for the challenge!
Am I the only one who found The Wind Rises to…kind of suck? I thought it was a poor potentially final film from Miyazaki.
I’ve heard a lot of people describe it as “the best movie I never want to see again” and I think that’s a pretty good summary (though I wouldn’t mind seeing it again to analyze it, personally). It’s a legitimately amazing film on many, many levels, but it is soul crushing. I think it’s a movie that is extremely worth watching, but I can’t fault anyone for not wanting to.
It really goes beyond “tear jerker”, I don’t want to play it up as much as some people do. It didn’t change my life or fling me into a week long bout of listlessness and depression or anything. But it goes way beyond what most people think of “tear jerker” movies. It doesn’t make you sad in the way the ending of Toy Story 3 makes people sad.
Without spoiling too much, it’s also an interesting film in the context of how we view children and teenagers. You’d expect a movie where kids starve to death* to just be a sad tale, but there’s a very good argument (and one the creator would agree with) that the whole “starving to death” thing is absolutely the older one’s fault. When as a culture we generally don’t assign blame to kids for terrible things happening to them.
I’d also like to add that one of the things that makes it so effective is that despite the common refrain I used myself about it being “a movie about kids starving to death”, the thing that makes it effective is that it’s not one huge depressing slog. There are actually a lot of really good, endearing moments of hope and levity sprinkled throughout. It can be a downright fun movie that puts a smile on your face sometimes.
“Suck” is kind of strong, but I didn’t like it much either. But I didn’t like Grave of the Fireflies either, so my taste is obviously suspect.
This one was my absolute least favorite of his films, I couldn’t wait for it to end. The animation was perfect and was the only thing that kept me interested but the story was just boring to me. I guess I just like his magical type stories better.
I love all Miyazaki’s stuff.
No mention of Future Boy Conan, or is this thread movies-only? FBC is a 26 part TV series from the late 70’s. I have watched it a dozen times, but you can’t get it commercially for less than a couple of hundred bucks.
Also Porco Rosso, his I think most cinematic fil. You forget you are watching an anime.
Architecture was mentioned. One thing I love about Miyazaki is his attention to layout as if the locations really existed and you can picture it in your head. In Porco Rosso you can follow air battles, for example, by watching where characters are looking, even when the other plane is off-screen.
pmwgreen: Superb point! Miyazaki at least presents the illusion that the entire scene/castle/island/aircraft is modeled out somewhere. We viewers have the sense that it all adds up, that the compartments inside the craft don’t exceed the total volume outside. We feel as if the entire castle has been mapped out somewhere in a set of production drawings.
(Contrast this to Daniel Craig’s second Bond film, Quantum of Solace, where the chase scenes had no internal logical consistency. They were all random assemblages of characters running, but there was no conceivable way to perceive it all as being connected. The bad guy would break right, Bond would continue straight ahead; the bad guy would stay on the level, Bond would run up a level of stairs; yet they stayed close to each other. It was dynamic, but it had a dreamlike sense of unreality: it didn’t have any geometric cohesion. Miyazaki gives us a masterful sense of geometric solidity.)