April marked the beginning of the “Good Movie Film Festival” in Seoul, South Korea, and we featured an article depicting the festival’s popular outdoor movie screenings. The festival will continue screening movies under the stars until October, presenting local, independent, and popular Korean films. One of the films screened is “Gake no Ue no Ponyo” a revolutionary picture in the children’s genre. Director Hayao Miyazaki has yet again transcended the boundaries of juvenile cinema, presenting a film that is profound and enjoyable for children and adults alike. The following is a review of the film from The Japan Times. This film is just another gem not to be missed at The Good Movie Outdoor Film Festival. You can read the original blog post about the outdoor cinema event here.

Hayao Mizayaki is the reigning giant of Japanese animation — and the Japanese box office. Since “Majo no Takkyubin (Kiki’s Delivery Service)” in 1989, every Miyazaki film has been a smash hit, drawing the widest possible audience. In 2001, his coming-of-age fantasy “Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away)” set an all-time Japanese box-office record — ¥30.4 billion.

But this, and other Miyazaki megahits, including “Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke)” (1997) and “Howl no Ugoku Shiro (Howl’s Moving Castle)” (2004) are anything but lowest-common-denominator entertainment. Even though his heroines (rarely heroes) are usually in their early teens or younger, their adventures unfold in rich visual and narrative matrices, with everything from personal memories and contemporary environmental concerns to ancient Japanese mythologies and fantastic European cityscapes tossed into the mix, in combinations that would only occur to Miyazaki’s well-stocked, endlessly inventive mind. One reason his films keep the turnstiles spinning is that they repay — even require — repeated viewings.

But Miyazaki’s most beloved film in Japan — “Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro)” (1988) — is also among his easiest to understand. Even tots can thrill to the film’s epic ride on the Cat Bus — one of the coolest forms of transportation ever invented, as long as you’re not allergic to felines.

His latest feature animation, “Gake no Ue no Ponyo (Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea),” exceeds even “Totoro” in simplicity, with a core target audience about as old as its hero — 5. This is not to say that those who have mastered hiragana (or the alphabet) will be bored, as long as they leave their expectations for the usual Miyazaki film at the door.

Miyazaki has made what is for any adult — but especially a 67-year-old anime veteran — an extraordinary leap: In “Ponyo” he is not just telling a story to tikes, but imaginatively becoming one himself. I was reminded of the famous opening of James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” with its recital of the hero’s earliest memories in the language of infancy (“Once upon a time there was a moocow coming down along the road and . . .”), as if the author were re-inhabiting an earlier self.

At the same time, Miyazaki revisits themes from other, more adult-focused films, such as humanity’s destruction of the natural world, and nature’s revenge on its human tormentors. Also, the animation is Miyazaki’s familiar mix of the realistic and fantastic, with extinct sea creatures swimming contentedly alongside their contemporary — and accurately rendered — descendants. In other words, there is still plenty to engage the mind and eye, as well as keep the small army of Miyazaki explicators busy.

The title character, Ponyo (voice by Yuria Nara), is a girl fish with a human face who decides one day to leave her underwater home — and her school of smaller sisters — to see what lies on the surface. Riding on the back of a jellyfish, she is nearly trapped by a drift net, but escapes — with her head stuck in a glass jar. Sosuke (Hiroki Doi), a boy who lives on a house on a seaside cliff, spots Ponyo in the shallows and rescues her. He is delighted with his new pet — and Ponyo is delighted to be in the human world at last. She says her first words, to Sosuke’s astonishment — and begins a transformation from half-fish to human.

Outdoor Movie Screenings at the Good Movie Outdoor Film Festival

Meanwhile, her human father, Fujimoto (George Tokoro), who lives in an undersea manse with Ponyo’s sea-queen mother (Yuki Amami), starts to search for her. With his long hair, beaky nose and tormented, bags-under-the-eyes expression, Fujimoto looks like a decayed aristocrat from a shojo manga (girls’ comic), but he possesses magical powers over the waves, which become like living creatures under his command. What can a mere kid, if one with a feisty mom he calls Lisa (Tomoko Yamaguchi), and a good-natured, if mostly absent, ship-captain dad (Kazushige Nagashima), do to stop him?

“Ponyo” is not about a simplistic struggle between good and evil, however. Fujimoto is more of a worried father than a scarily powerful villain. Also, with the aid of her sisters, Ponyo unleashes powers of her own, with awesome, if unintended, consequences.

The film meanders into various byways, such as the day-care center for the elderly that Lisa runs, with a female clientele that runs the gamut from the cute to the cranky — and serves as a Greek chorus to the action.

The focus, though, stays mostly on Sosuke and Ponyo, whose relationship undergoes a change from master/pet to protective older brother/bubbly, if trouble-prone, younger sister. There is something dreamlike about their adventures in both the thrilling wish-fulfillment of them and their spooky shape-shifting. Small children, who naturally live on the borderline between reality and fantasy, will have no trouble following along.

As with most Miyazaki films, I walked out of “Ponyo” thinking less about the rambling story, based loosely on “The Little Mermaid,” than certain strangely gripping scenes, such as a grimly determined Lisa zipping along a seaside road in her mini car, with Sosuke at her side, as angry anthromorphic waves crash and lash around them, or Sosuke and Ponyo puttering idyllically over a submerged town in a toy boat powered by a burning candle, which has magically grown big enough to hold them.

No one but Miyazaki could have created anything like these moments, with anything like his mastery. If “Ponyo” is the start of his artistic second childhood, I say welcome to the sandbox.

Source: “It’s kids’ play for anime king” by Mark Schilling -The Japan Times. Read full article at: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ff20080711a1.html.

Two months ago we featured an article about the outdoor movie screenings at the Seoul Good Movie Festival. The outdoor film festival presented 280 movies at 690 free screenings including popular and arthouse films alike. One of the films shown was “The Good, the Bad, the Wierd”, a Korean take on spaghetti westerns. The following is a review of the film from The Hollywood Reporter. You can read the original blog post about Seoul’s outdoor cinema screenings here.

Costing not just a few dollars more than Serge Leone’s spaghetti westerns, Korean genre-twisting auteur Kim Jee-woon’s $17 million homage to Leone’s tour de force “The Good, The Bad, The Ugly” is a make-or-break venture that, given the precarious status of the Korean film business at the moment, could influence prospects of Korean mega-bucks film investments. Notwithstanding such pressure, the direction shows no signs of fluster, resulting in a jaunty, happy-go-lucky adventure that packs a fistful of dynamite in the spectacular showdown.

Unveiled at Cannes Out of Competition, key producer CJ Entertainment claimed it sold to selective European territories and reported more post-fest sales worldwide. Domestic and Asian (especially Japanese) audience response could be enthusiastic. Kim’s genre crossover may also prod the curiosity of those traditionally raised on the Western.

One line of dialogue sums up the action in a nutshell: “Life is about chasing and being chased.” The first half hour whizzes by like a stray bullet, taking in a railroad explosion, a train robbery, an ambush in the marketplace, followed by many forms of chases in exotic locations and costumes. A subplot about the legend of “The Finger Chopper” introduces fusion elements of stylishly shot martial arts stunts.

After about an hour of digressive comic relief, the film hurtles toward a grand finale at the pace of a galloping stagecoach. Lone riders, cavalry and jeeps rush against each other across a boundless arid plain in sweeping panoramic shots that proudly show off where the money went.

Outdoor Cinema Screenings at the Seoul Good Movie Festival

The film retains the outline of the original characters: a feral gangster, a wacko train robber and a bounty hunter. All are after a map of buried Manchurian dynastic treasure. Song does a cocky, charismatic turn as the Weird on autopilot, making his role less of a weasely buffoon as Leone’s Tuco than a resourceful man of mystery. But he lacks the “loser” qualities that made him so human and sympathetic in comic roles for Kim Jee-woon’s earlier “The Quiet Family” and “The Foul King.”

Cast against type but coming up tops is housewife heartthrob Lee Byung-hyun (“A Bitter Sweet Life”). As the Bad, he exudes villainy with a maniacal relish, like Jack Nicholson’s Joker, and better suits the energetic mood of this film than Lee Van Cleef’s inscrutable Angel Eyes. Leading romance actor Jung Woo-sung (“Daisy”, “A Moment to Remember”) holds his own as the Good, having grasped that his role is about poise rather than performance.

“The Good, The Bad, The Weird” fondly revisits a popular Korean subgenre in the ’60s known as “Manchurian Western,” set along the Chinese-Korean border in the ’30s, when Japanese colonialism made China’s Northeast a frontier land for resistance fighters, outlaws and carpetbaggers.

The meticulous recreation of this period backdrop is one of the film’s most fascinating elements. It gives a cultural-historical dimension to the archetypical Western plot of a treasure hunt, tracing the bounty hunters’ mercenary behavior to the psychological scars of lost nationhood. Location shooting is done in the Gobi Desert, China’s true Wild West, adding a further touch of authenticity.

Source: “Film Review: The Good, The Bad, The Weird” by Maggie Lee -The Hollywood Reporter. Read full article at: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/awards_festivals/fest_reviews/article_display.jsp?&rid=11262.