They Ain’t Got No Ocean A Tall
Porco Rosso (1992)
directed by Hayao Miyazaki
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Carnegie Library
Porco Rosso is in many ways a minor film premised on an odd contrivance: the hero is cursed to look like a pig. The mythical settings of Princess Mononoke or Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind make room for strange sights, but everything here, except for the swine, is more or less familiar. Set along the Adriatic after World War I, the film's architecture and interiors look like postcards from a European vacation.
Miyazaki loves planes but also the look of summer clouds, and his modern cities grow in harmony with a restless natural world. A beach chair beneath the sun becomes a small tableaux of man at peace with the sea and sky. Clear water is a way to watch the refraction of light across a foot as it moves through sand. Even the villains come around, as if no one can resist such picturesque co-existence.
Still, Porco Rosso is the director's most adult picture, and subsequently his saddest. It is also his most romantic, since its protagonist is a well-traveled man in love with an experienced woman. The only kid is a girl with a big crush, but unlike the usual Miyazaki heroine, she helps without inadvertently making herself the star of the movie. The pig simply foists her into the care of his lover after his last big fight, and eventually the girl returns to run the family business back home.
These Ghibli movies hold up where some others I first watched in my early twenties have not. I'm not sure that a child would necessarily understand Casablanca, but isn't this the same feeling, cast with a wider net? I think so.
directed by Hayao Miyazaki
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Carnegie Library
Porco Rosso is in many ways a minor film premised on an odd contrivance: the hero is cursed to look like a pig. The mythical settings of Princess Mononoke or Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind make room for strange sights, but everything here, except for the swine, is more or less familiar. Set along the Adriatic after World War I, the film's architecture and interiors look like postcards from a European vacation.
Miyazaki loves planes but also the look of summer clouds, and his modern cities grow in harmony with a restless natural world. A beach chair beneath the sun becomes a small tableaux of man at peace with the sea and sky. Clear water is a way to watch the refraction of light across a foot as it moves through sand. Even the villains come around, as if no one can resist such picturesque co-existence.
Still, Porco Rosso is the director's most adult picture, and subsequently his saddest. It is also his most romantic, since its protagonist is a well-traveled man in love with an experienced woman. The only kid is a girl with a big crush, but unlike the usual Miyazaki heroine, she helps without inadvertently making herself the star of the movie. The pig simply foists her into the care of his lover after his last big fight, and eventually the girl returns to run the family business back home.
These Ghibli movies hold up where some others I first watched in my early twenties have not. I'm not sure that a child would necessarily understand Casablanca, but isn't this the same feeling, cast with a wider net? I think so.
posted by NPK at 7:05 AM
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