Great animation, very good foreign drama, better-than-expected war drama and one seriously disappointing ghost story—these are the choices. Let us help you with that.
Click the film title for the full review.
by Hope Madden
First note in my Isle of Dogs screening notebook: God damn it, I want a dog.
Second note: Wait, Scarlett Johansson and Tilda Swinton are in another film that appropriates Asian culture? Come on!
And that about sums up the conflicting emotions Wes Anderson generates with his latest stop-motion wonder.
Isle of Dogs is Anderson’s second animated effort, coming nearly a decade after another tactile amazement, 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. A millennia-long feud between the Kobayashis of Megasaki and dogs comes to a head when corrupt Mayor Kobayashi uses a dog flu outbreak to whip up anti-canine sentiment and banish all dogs to Trash Island.
But his orphaned ward Atari (Koyu Rankin) steals a miniature prop plane and crash lands on Trash Island looking for his beloved Spots (Liev Schreiber).
The little pilot is aided in his quest by a scruffy pack including Rex (Edward Norton), Boss (Bill Murray), gossipy Duke (Jeff Goldblum, a riot), King (Bob Balaban), and reluctant helper/lifelong stray, Chief (Bryan Cranston).
Other voice talent as concerned canines: Johansson, Swinton, F. Murray Abraham and Harvey Keitel.
Explained via onscreen script in typically Anderson fashion, dog barks have been translated into English and Japanese remains Japanese unless there’s an electronic, professional or exchange student translator handy. The choice shifts the film’s focus to the dogs (in much the way Peanuts shows remained focused on children by having adults speak in squawks). It also means that moviegoers who speak Japanese are afforded an enviably richer experience.
But for a large number of American audiences, it means that Japanese characters are sidelined and the only human we can understand is the white foreign exchange student, Tracy (Greta Gerwig). From Ohio, no less.
Between an affectionate if uncomfortably disrespectful representation of Japanese culture and Gerwig’s white savior role, Anderson’s privilege is tough to look past here, even with the scruffy and lovable cast.
The animation is beyond spectacular, with deep backdrops and meticulously crafted characters. Atari’s little teeth killed me. The voice talent is impeccable and the story itself a joy, toying with our dictatorial nature, the need to rebel and to submit, and how entirely awesome dogs are.
Set to an affecting taiko drum score with odes to anime, Ishiro Honda, Akira Kurosawa and every other Japanese movie Anderson watched as a kid, the film is clearly an homage to so much of what he loves. His skill remains uniquely his own and nearly unparalleled in modern film.
And Isle of Dogs is a touching, flawlessly crafted animated dream. That probably should have been set in America.
Busy week! Loads covered on this week’s podcast: 12 Strong, Den of Thieves, Phantom Thread, Call Me By Your Name, Mom and Dad, The Road Movie, The Final Year and Mary and the Witch’s Flower, plus a quick look at what’s new in home entertainment.
Listen in HERE.
by Matt Weiner
There’s something about the helpless awkwardness of growing up that guarantees the enduring appeal of magic. Mary and the Witch’s Flower taps into that spirit with appealing grace. And it’s a promising first feature from Studio Ponoc, home to a Studio Ghibli diaspora that formed after the venerable Japanese animation studio announced a production break back in 2014.
When a walk in the woods leads to a chance encounter with special flowers, Mary (voiced by Ruby Barnhill in the English language version) gains temporary magical powers. Her broomstick whisks her away to the magical college Endor, which looks about like if Hogwarts put down stakes in Spirited Away.
Mistaken for a witch and propped up by the magical flowers (apparently the PEDs of the wizarding world), Mary is deemed a prodigy by the excited school faculty. She soon learns she’s not the only one interested in those flowers, and outsider or not it will be up to her to save magic for everyone.
Director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, Ghibli veteran and Oscar nominee for When Marnie Was There, keeps the visual charm turned up throughout the film—a good thing, given that his script (co-written by Riko Sakaguchi and based on a children’s novel by Mary Stewart) lacks the heft of a typical Ghibli film.
For adult viewers, Yonebayashi’s light touch can be a bit too light. Mary, with her wild hair and strong will, is a charming stand-in for kids, but her hero’s journey will be instantly familiar. Endor professors Madam Mumblechook and Doctor Dee (Kate Winslet and Jim Broadbent) exude sinister charm, but the rest of the sparse supporting roles don’t have much to add beyond perfunctory plot points.
These are minor complaints though. And the animation, especially the magical set pieces that test Mary’s mettle, makes up the difference. The film offers up a fully-formed magical world with smart visual economy over exposition (cough Fantastic Beasts cough). Mary’s determination is contagious, and even if her saving the day is inevitable it’s impossible not to feel moved by the choices she makes to get there.
For all the magic that infuses Endor, Doctor Dee was on the right track when he told Mary that electricity is just another form of magic. If Mary and the Witch’s Flower doesn’t always have the preternatural spirit that animates the best of Studio Ghibli, it’s a delightful visual successor even when it’s working a little harder to keep the spark alive.
by Matt Weiner
The animated film In This Corner of the World contrasts one of the single most destructive acts of war—the United States dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima—alongside a decade of daily life for the inhabitants of Hiroshima and the neighboring port city of Kure.
Suzu (Rena Nounen) is a free-spirited young girl with a talent for art that gets reflected in the film’s beautifully drawn seascapes and pre-war countryside. Suzu’s recollections, emotions and eventual tragedies are inextricably tied to the fantastical watercolors that make up the animated film’s palette.
The effect is beautiful—and unsettling. Writer-director Sunao Katabuchi centers a war movie around non-combatants. Loved ones die and faceless air raids bombard Kure. But Katabuchi grounds the Japan’s participation in World War II around Suzu’s family and other townspeople, blending uneventful tedium, Suzu’s vibrant drawings and matter-of-fact catastrophe to convey a routinization of horror that’s far more emotionally devastating than most war movies.
So when Suzu moves from Hiroshima to live with her new husband Shusaku (Yoshimasa Hosoya) and his family, it’s disarmingly easy to keep the effects of war on the periphery—as Suzu herself does. The film allows the escalating seriousness to insert itself into Suzu’s colorful idylls more and more as the date of the fateful bombing nears. But even then, these moments are deftly handled as impressionistic memories from a quiet domestic life: a rationing here, a death there—just more brushstrokes, some thicker than others.
When Suzu’s way of life is permanently shattered, she seems to be one of the last to realize that the life she thought she’d be growing into died long ago at the start of the war. It’s fitting that deeply personal violence is the emotional climax for Suzu. The bombing of Hiroshima and all its horrors are an almost perverse falling action, but Katabuchi’s focus on Suzu keeps things poignant and utterly free of sentimentality.
At times, the film’s languorous advance feels a little too at odds with everything going on outside their corner of the world. When coupled with the loose plot, some stretches veer closer to deadweight than emotional weight. But the editing mostly works, with the war on domestic bliss feeling as meaningful as any battle.
This is war under the influence of Ozu—a quiet but singularly focused attention to the ordinary in extraordinary times.
by George Wolf
For all the celebrated vision of the 1995 Japanese anime standard Ghost in the Shell, it resembled the inspirations of a teenage boy hopped up on the works of Phillip K. Dick and Hugh Hefner. There was warmed-over sci-fi pondering, and there was plenty of gratuitous boobage.
Director Rupert Sanders delivers the live action remake as a visually rich feast, bringing a welcome upgrade to both character and storytelling.
In a technically dizzying future where the line between human and machine is growing constantly thinner, Major (Scarlett Johansson) emerges as the first true “ghost in the shell”: human brain in a cyber body.
She’s viewed as the perfect weapon, but her mission to locate Kuze (Michael Pitt), a cyber-terrorist capable of hacking into human minds, leads to some revelations that will have Major questioning her loyalties.
The studio defense of Johansson’s casting amounts to a weak tap dance around the truth: she’s a big star who looks the part and they think she’ll combine butts with seats. While the “whitewash” criticism is fair, Johansson also brings a necessary shift away from Major as merely a ridiculous adolescent fantasy.
Johansson conveys well the clash of mind and machine at work in Major, while Pilou Asbaek (A War) steals scenes as Batou, Major’s macho partner who’s sporting a nifty new set of cyber eyeballs.
Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman) and his visual team work wonders (the 3D version is worth the investment), re-creating various scenes from Mamoru Oshii’s original film with stunning new flourish. This future world pops with visual style in every corner while maintaining a cold, unforgiving and detached aesthetic that feels right.
Screenwriters Jamie Moss and William Wheeler do provide crisper dialogue and a more polished narrative than the original film, but it’s a tale still rooted in overwrought tropes and stale cliches. Ironically, with a moral so consumed by the preservation of humanity, Ghost in the Shell doesn’t give you much to think about.
This beautiful body needs more of a soul.
by Hope Madden
Who’s looking for a psychosexual acid trip? Well, it’s your lucky day because Belladonna of Sadness – Eiichi Yamamoto’s 1973 animated cult flick – gets new theatrical life thanks to a 4K restoration.
Based on Satanism and Witchcraft – a 19th Century text by Jules Michelet about seduction, witchcraft, and female empowerment – the film tells the story of a newly married couple and their troubles in feudal Europe.
Jean and Jeanne attempt to sidestep the law of the land allowing a baron to deflower a bride, but their pleas fall on sadistic ears. Yamamoto’s vivid depiction of the gang rape that follows is not only a sudden visual eruption in the dreamy watercolor style that precedes the scene, but a hint at the unsettling imagery that will punctuate the entire balance of the film.
The story pits feminine power against the systemic misogyny of the time as an allegory of modern feminism – well, modern in 1973. Jeanne slowly comes to the realization that embracing Satan to break from the repressive nature of bureaucratized Christianity may be her only road to personal power.
On one hand, this particular theme of revolution is older than Michelet’s work and as contemporary as Robert Eggers’s modern genre masterpiece The Witch. And yet, it’s a startling revelation, subversive in many ways, most of which are depicted in this film with wild abandon. As genitalia morphs into lion mouths and giraffe heads during extended, orgiastic sequences, Yamamoto equates sexual liberation with personal empowerment.
And yet, this is a Nineteenth Century text penned by a man, which has been reimagined and rendered – animated, written, directed, and scored – by men. It may be less than surprising to find that Satan (the empowerer) is depicted as a small but growing anthropomorphic penis.
Though Belladonna of Sadness finds tragedy in the repression and objectification of women, the film seems at a loss as to how to express its themes without objectifying Jeanne.
The film certainly can’t be dismissed entirely because of its somewhat conflicted sense of female empowerment, though. Yamamoto’s hypnotic yet jarring visual style, rupturing panoramic still drawings with bursts of movement and color, looks like nothing else onscreen. The aesthetic meshes with Masahiko Sato’s psychedelic score to create the trippiest film to open on national screens since the Age of Aquarius.
It’s a fascinating, disturbing, imaginative piece of animation that looks and feels like nothing else.
by Hope Madden
The Wind Rises – the Oscar nominated, animated, fantastical biopic of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi – may be genius filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki’s final film.
A body of work like his – Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Ponyo, Princess Mononoke and so many more – deserves a unique capstone, and The Wind Rises is certainly unique. This film is not only unlike anything else Miyazaki has crafted, but unlike anything else period.
Set in Japan in the early 1920s, the film offers a fictionalized account of a nearsighted boy who dreams – literally – of aircraft. In Jiro’s dreams, Italian aeronautical pioneer Gianni Caproni enlightens the boy to the elegant, creative possibilities of airplanes. Unable to become a pilot because of his eyesight, Jiro determines to design planes.
Like everything Miyazaki does, Wind is a visual glory. Whether crowded city streets, mountainside locales, or cloud-speckled heavens, the scenery in this film is breathtaking. Touching, intimate moments and catastrophic acts of God or of war, Miyazaki treats them with the same poetic brushstroke.
The subject matter here proves more adult than his previous efforts, though, and he limits the fantastical elements because of it. Though the dream sequences are a joy, don’t expect to find unusual creatures or outright feats of magic in this one.
Rather, Miyazaki attends to some of Japan’s most epic historic moments, contextualized behind the journey of one quiet, delicate young man’s voyage through life. The result is less giddily entertaining than what you might expect from the filmmaker, but no less captivating.
Maybe we can hope for just one more?
