Ponyo & The Sky Crawlers at Venice International Film Festival

Because I'm a true-blue Venetian I couldn't resist the temptation and went gleefully to the 65th International Venice Film Festival to watch two animated films. Ponyo by Hayao Miyazaki and The Sky Crawlers by Mamoru Oshii.

    

I think anyone who loves anime and manga has heard the name of Hayao Miyazaki at least once. But if there's any amoung you lovely readers who still doesn't recall the name... why... let me just tell you that he's considered the Oriental Walt Disney. He is the creator of the worldwide famous movies: Totoro, Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. Gake no ue no Ponyo (Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea) throws us into a fairy tale that represents a return to the origins of Studio Ghibli. The story begins with Sosuke, a 5 year old boy living with his mother on the top of a cliff by the sea. One day on the seashore he finds a cute female goldfish stuck in a glass jar. He helps her out of the jar and gives her a name: Ponyo. They soon develop a strong friendship, but her father will try anything to keep them apart; he is a sort of sea alchemist who refused his human nature because he is convinced of the nature of human beings and keeps Ponyo and her sisters segregated.

Ponyo is a fairy tale inspired by Andersen's Little Mermaid. it is directed towards a young audience, unlike previous Studio Ghibli films, full of different viewpoints not understandable by children. In a mere 3 weeks from its first airing in Japan, Ponyo earned 120 million dollars, an incredible amount if we consider that this is a cartoon entirely drawn by hand. "I have nothing against technology - Miyazaki says - but I'm beginning to fear the dictatorship of computer graphics. At the age of 67 I still want to draw and colour... I think that the possibilities of a pencil stroke are infinite, so some of them are still to explore". And let me add that this is the magic of Studio Ghibli :)

On Sunday the 31st of August, during the screening of the movie at Venice International Film Festival, there was also Hayao Miyazaki in the cinema, he recieved a lot of applauses before and after the film. A real "standing ovation", reserved only to the gratest Maestros! I took this picture while Miyazaki was entering the "Sala Grande". The person welcoming him is Marco Muller, the director of the Festival.

While this picture is one of the long applauses for the Maestro :) I'm sorry it is unfocused, I was too far from him to be able to take a better picture (and my hands were shaking out of the emotion :D)!

Exiting the cinema, the classic interviews (even to somebody of my group of Studio Ghibli lovers :D). I managed to take some pictures of Miyazaki during the interviews even though there were a lot of "vulture" reporters!

Oh... I guess I have to speak about The Sky Crawlers because of the article's title, huh? I saw it on Friday the 5th at "Giorgione" theatre in Venice. To be completely honest I don't know very much about Mamoru Oshii's filmography. I really enjoyed the two films that I've seen, though: Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor 2, but The Sky Crawlers deeply deluded me. It is a film of a peculiar boredom. The plot is about a group of Kildren, children (but they actually look teenagers to me) that pilot military aircrafts to conduct a war between two countries who aren't really identified, but the cause and the meaning of it are not very clear.

This film won the "Future Film Festival Digital Award 2008" of the 65th Venice Intermational Film Festival due to "the important use of computer graphics in a film that integrates the high quality of the animation of the japanese tradition with the realism of live-action scenes. Especially the aerial fights of Oshii's film offer an hyperrealistic representation of war and its horrors, made effective by the refined computer graphics". This award is assigned to the film that better uses animation and/or special effects, evaluating the technical quality and the creative and original use of them. In my opinion, that was not the right film to award because the use of computer graphic is even disturbing sometimes.

If you are going to see it, wait untill the end of the ending credits, there are a couple of minutes of epilogue :)