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Showing posts with label castle in the sky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label castle in the sky. Show all posts
US animation movie distributor GKIDS returns once again with Ghibli Fest 2018, a year-long retrospective of Studio Ghibli movies in theaters. Films will be shown in both English (dub) and Japanese (subtitled) soundtracks and will be screened at theaters nationwide, courtesy of Fathom Events.
On Tuesday, October 31, GKIDS released their "second wave" of Studio Ghibli Blu-Ray/DVD titles: Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind and Castle in the Sky. Both titles are part of the studio's catalog reissue series and will continue into early next year.
These titles are important for die-hard Ghibli Freaks. Both Nausicaa and Castle in the Sky were released by Disney some years ago, but with annoying issues such as English title burn-in (Nausicaa) and "dubtitles" (Castle). Hopefully, GKIDS has solved these problems, but at the time of publication, I was unable to confirm or deny any changes in the new versions.
Let's cross our fingers and hope that these new reissues have proper subtitles and title credits. That would make these titles a must-have for all fans. Stay tuned.
Update (11/4/17, 9:17pm): It has been confirmed that Nausicaa has clean credits, and Castle in the Sky has proper English subtitles. Thanks to our friends on Reddit for the confirmation. Now buy these movies!
Three years ago, artist Richard J. Evans embarked on an interesting project: a series of digital artworks based on the movies of Studio Ghibli, rendered entirely in "pixel art." This is an art style that is deliberately low-fi, low-resolution and quite blocky, inspired, one supposes, by the look of computer graphics from the 1980s. This sub-genre of art has become very popular in recent years and shows no signs of slowing down.
Evans successfully captures the hand-drawn animation style of the Ghibli films quite masterfully, with a very wide color palette at his disposal (much more than what was available on computers and videogamess of the 1980s), and everything is sharply detailed, which maintaining those large blocky pixels. The ones you see here are my personal favorites, but the artist has also paid tribute to nearly every Ghibli movie ever made, and they're all terrific.
Overall, great job. Creating art within very hard limitations can be quite challenging, but the results are equally rewarding.
This past Friday, Japanese television network Nippon TV aired Studio Ghibli's 1986 classic Laputa: Castle in the Sky. During the broadcast, the network's shared trivia and memorable quotes on Twitter. One fascinating revelation: the character of Dora, the leader of the pirate clan, was inspired by Hayao Miyazaki's mom. He wanted to portray his mother as a brave and rogue-ish-yet-heroic figure. He even remarked that she was a dominating figure, where even a family of four sons would never dare to challenge her. And, of course, he was motivated by the trauma of his mother's long battle with tuberculosis, which lasted nine years during the young Miyazaki's childhood.
Whenever I think of Miyazaki's references to his mother, I am reminded of the mothers in My Neighbor Totoro and Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, who were bedridden with illness. The Nausicaa books contain an especially haunting moment where Nausicaa discloses feelings of isolation and alienation as a result of her mother's ordeal, resulting in one of the most chilling lines of the entire novel: "My mother taught me that some wounds can never be healed. But she didn't love me."
How much of that was based on Miyazaki's own childhood? How much is invented solely for the story? Like all artists, he probably took a little from column "A" and a little from column "B". By all accounts, he remained deeply devoted to his mother throughout her life, and she lived to a very old age. His thoughts on the matter have remained private, however, leaving us to speculate and theorize by examining his art.
I like the idea of Dora as a heroic mother, and she's a great, curmudgeonly character who supplies great heart to Castle in the Sky. I can't imagine the picture without her or her bumbling sons. They're not so much pirates as a family on endless adventures.
You can find the Nippon TV Twitter messages here and here, in Japanese, of course. Thanks also to Geek for sharing the news on their site.
Ugh, look at that horrible logo! It look like Kermit the Frog exploded. My eyes, the goggles do nothing!
This is the original 1999 VHS promo for Disney's US release of Hayao Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky. It features an English dub that has aged very badly, a corny narration voice-over, and a low-resolution pan-and-scan picture that was a hallmark of the videotape era.
It's fascinating that Disney had originally planned to release Castle in the Sky on video in 1999, no doubt to tie in with Princess Mononoke. However, their shocked reaction to Miyazaki's 1997 film (which was far more violent and adult than they were expecting), as well as the subsequent difficulties with Studio Ghibli (cough, Miyazaki threatening Miramax head Harvey Weinstein with a samurai sword) left such plans in a holding pattern.
Perhaps Castle in the Sky was just too "anime" for the time. Even in the late '90s, Hollywood struggled with the difficulties in selling Japanese animation to a mainstream audience, who expected cartoons to follow in the traditions of Snow White, Mickey Mouse, and Bugs Bunny. An animated Steven Spielberg movie was not only unusual, it was entirely alien. Nobody could wrap their heads around it, and you can see this struggle in this film's movie reviews at the time.
By the turn of the century, Disney would only release one Ghibli catalog title: Kiki's Delivery Service. It was a much easier choice, far closer to the kind of children's fairy tales they wanted from Miyazaki. The home video rights to My Neighbor Totoro would remain in 20th Century Fox's hands for several more years. Mononoke was just too violent for children. The rest of the studio's movies were just too weird, too unconventional, too foreign. We would have to wait for Miyazaki's Spirited Away, and the relentless pushing by Pixar's John Lasseter, to finally end the impasse and move things forward.
Even then, Disney always seemed to be dragging their heels in regards to Studio Ghibli, never fully understanding these movies or how to sell them to the American public. To be fair, this is a daunting challenge, one we still grapple with today. We have more or less accepted that Ghibli will never achieve more than cult status in the United States. It's just what it is. We live in a country where reality show stars become Presidents and cartoons about talking poop become blockbuster hits.
Japanese artist Mocci Hajikura has spent the past four years recreating the environments and locations from Studio Ghibli's classic Laputa: Castle in the Sky. He has now completed his project, releasing several videos to YouTube. All of your favorite scenes from the movie have been rendered to scale, including the industrial town, the pirate ship, and most famously, the floating city of Laputa itself.
In 2015, he created a series of YouTube videos to correspond with the movie's television broadcast. These final 2017 videos also correspond to the latest Castle in the Sky broadcast presentation.
This is highly impressive. We have seen many Minecraft works based on Studio Ghibli movies, and this is easily the most ambitious yet. Most of Miyazaki's scenes and designs are rendered in painstaking detail; even the movie's title sequence has been recreated perfectly.
Courtesy of Hajikura, here are all seven Castle in the Sky Minecraft videos, complete and unabridged. Thankfully, there are no scary Creeper attacks. Those guys nearly gave me a heart attack in Minecraft Alpha. Enjoy and share!
Sad news for anime fans everywhere. Veteran Japanese voice actor Ryuji Saikachi died on September 29 from congestive heart failure. He was 89 years old. He was a fixture on more than 80 anime films and television series, dubbing American movies (including Disney's The Lion King), videogames and commercials.
His animation credits include the following: Dragon Ball Z, Tokyo Godfathers, Paranoia Agent, Night on the Galactic Railroad, Galaxy Express 999, Wolf's Rain, Unico in the Island of Magic, 3x3 Eyes Seima Densetsu, Roujin Z, Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise, Mermaid Forest and Tensai Bakabon.
For Ghibli Freaks, Saikachi is remembered for playing the train engineer in Laputa: Castle in the Sky, a member of the orchestra in Gauche the Cellist, and most famously, Matthew Cuthbert in Anne of Green Gables.
