| 1. | (12 posts) | Subversive Miyazaki Influence Within Disney |
| 2. | (9 posts) | Miyazaki on the BBC |
We looked at 99 posts by 53 different contributors.
A thread titled "porco rosso ending" caused the most traffic (17 posts), but as I haven't seen the film yet I avoided that thread.
Several threads about "Lilo & Stitch" and various Miyazaki connections. Marc Hairston posted a long message about how he played a small roll in the look of "Lilo & Stitch", "So my fansub copy of "Porco" got shown to some of the art staff and passed around to most of the rest. Rumor has it that some of the top management folks on the film also saw it, but my friend was never able to find out for sure. Turns out what the art staff were interested in was how Miyazaki and his staff had done the water in "Porco". (Since "Lilo and Stitch" is set in Hawaii, there are a lot of water scenes in the film.) "See how they do the water here?" my friend's friend told the rest of the art staff. "That's what I want it to look like in our film." My friend wrote me about walking by the effects department a few weeks later and seeing a board on the wall there with about 12 screen shots from "Porco" showing water scenes (some with Porco's red plane in the picture) pinned up there. . .
And before anyone cry foul and claim that Disney is "ripping off" Miyazaki, don't bother. This isn't a case of "copying" or stealing
from Miyazaki, but the age old tradition of holding up the work of a master as the example of something to strive to match. And now, at
least in the art department of the Florida Studios of Disney Feature Animation, most folks now know about Miyazaki and several of them
are hardcore fans.
Yakko Hudson Saotome (which after two years I finally realize is a pseudonym) posted another huge message detailing his experience with Disney animators and Studio Ghibli, "Roughly around that time (maybe around '91 to '93 I think) I started attending a church in the Burbank area because a buddy of mine's uncle-in-law was a pastor there. During one potluck lunch there, I was telling him about this new "Japanese animation series" I discovered called Ranma. He then mentioned that one of the church members (in fact he's a church elder) happened to be an animator for Disney. Thus I was introduced to Hendel Butoy. At the time, I didn't know what sort of role he played in Disney animation. He mentioned being involved in "The Rescuers Down Under" and "The Great Mouse Detective." But, of course it didn't take long for me to look his name up and find out after I got home that day, and then marvel at the fortuity of the situation." Click here for his entire message.
Cynthia posted an excerpt from a "Time" magazine review, "Writer-director Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois give the film a lush, pastel look and rounded, black-eyed characters closer to Smurfs than to the keenly defined types of most Disney cartoons. They also borrow roughly from Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki, who in My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service plopped adorable kids into magical situations. (In tribute, the film has Nani open a business called Kiki's Coffee House)."
Marc noted a Miyazaki mention in "USA Today", "Today (Friday's) edition has a review of Lilo and Stitch and a sidebar of the in-jokes in the movie. The third entry is:
Lilo was influenced by Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki (My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service). Says DeBlois, ''He creates genuine relationships in the realm of fantasy.'' Kiki's Coffee House is a tribute.
More praise about "Porco Rosso" from Bill Plympton (as posted by Steven Ng), "The interviewer from The Perfect Vision Fall 1993 asks: "Is there one scene in all of animation that you would single out in terms of both skill and state-of-the-art? Yours or someone else's."
Plympton: "In "The Red Pig" there's a scene where this little flying boat is in a harbor, just floating on water that's almost crystal clear. So we see the shadow on the land at the bottom of the water, and the color is very exquisite and the reality is just beautiful"
In another answer, Plympton says of Porco Rosso: "Beautifully animated. I wish I could do stuff like that. I was at a Film Festival in France where "The Tune" was in competition, and the "The Red Pig" was up against it.""
Joe Curzon wrote up a (not-so-brief) synopsis of Miyazaki's interview on the BBC with Jonathan Ross, "Ross is such a suitable candidate to interview Miyazaki because as mentioned before on this list he really does love Miyazaki's work and it shows. . . After Totoro footage was shown (when Mei first finds Totoro). Ross started by asking Miyazaki what he thinks about being called the
Japanese Disney. Miyazaki replied saying he doesn't really like that, since Disney was a producer not a director, then he said something about Disney being a very big company. . . Ross mentioned that Mononoke did disappointing in the USA, and Miyazaki wasn't surprised by this, since he knew it was quite complex and not as easy to understand as other films. . . The bus stop scene in Totoro was shown and Ross highlighted the slow pace compared to American animation and said this is what made it wonderful. Miyazaki replied saying that originally this scene was going to be shorter, but because of the importance of the scene he wanted to make it longer.
They also showed footage of Pom-Poco, Laputa, Kikim Nausicaa, Mononoke and some fantastic footage of Spirited Away. . . At the end of the interview Ross expressed what a great animator Miyazaki was, although I can't remember the exact wording, (again something I will need to rewatch).
James Clover put up a QuickTime version of the interview, which somehow caused eight additional messages about the encoding. As a special value-add for reading this issue, here's a local (streamed) version in Windows Media format.
The (nearly) final word on "Laputa" from Ryoko Toyama. Wayne Unten spotted the upcoming English release of "The Art of Spirited Away".
On time, in spec.