It didn't flummox the US. It flummoxed Miramax, which is what the article is saying. Miramax wanted Mononoke Hime to be a 90s Disney film, and when they couldn't cut the film into one, they gave up on it. It really highlights how badly Hollywood used to gatekeep entertainment by owning the distribution tools.
You can thank Netflix for changing that. I worked in Hollywood when Netflix rolled out House of Cards, and it was nothing less than a revolution for the execs at the time. Netflix terrified them. Before then, every entrenched name in Hollywood mocked the internet as something consumers would never prefer for movies. However, Netflix created a place for big budget, niche content in a way that forced Hollywood to sit up and take notice. If Netflix hadn't happened, nothing would've changed.
And thank God. I remember seeing Mononoke Hime in the theater, and it was my first introduction to anime. It was a breath of fresh air for me in terms of entertainment. I was so tired of western film at that point and it made me aware that there was so much more out there if I was willing to look for it. Nowadays, it hardly requires looking.
>Before then, every entrenched name in Hollywood mocked the internet as something consumers would never prefer for movies.
This was a big misjudgement in thinking that people cared more about the theatrical experience than just the consumption of the content. Going to the movies became a chore, which allowed for those "niche" theaters that sold tickets while allowing the specific seat to be selected, better experience of kicking out mobile device users, etc. That made movie going only tolerable for me, but still not required. Watching in the comfort of my home while avoiding crowds (even before covid) was well worth the smaller screen and less of an audio experience.
Sadly, it took a global pandemic for traditional studios to catch on to the simultaneous releases. Hopefully, they recognize that getting someone to watch at home doesn't mean that they prevented someone from seeing the theater, rather as someone that was not going to see it precisely because they weren't going to the theater and not seeing it at all (during those opening week numbers)
Way before pandemic -- House of Cards was 2013 -- another factor was probably cheaper, larger home displays.
Also around that time, "wire cutters" were massing, pissed at the cable mentality of curation: watching what they offered, on the device they permitted, on the schedule they dictated, and also forced to pay for channels you didn't want. Bit Torrent and Netflix together offered a far more pleasant alternative.
House of Cards was never a theatrical bit of content, so not quite the same thing for this discussion specifically. Episodic content was still "TV Programming" by the feature types. In 2013, episodics were still getting people used to the serial or limited series type of content. This has been my favorite format for some time now. More time to tell a story than a single feature, yet short enough to avoid filling time with cruft just to reach an arbitrary episode count. The 8-10 episode hour long series are great for really in-depth stories.
Princess Mononoke is one of my favorite movies of all time but Netflix is more or less straight up garbage. Even their flagship offerings like Stranger Things are creatively bankrupt references for bored millennial parents.
I can watch Stranger Things and Casablanca on the same night. ST is a fun, well produced drama with lots of American 1980s callbacks. It doesn't make it garbage - not everything needs to be arthouse.
Agree with this. Even if the story and writing are a bit twee, there are heaps of details in the cinematography, lighting, colour, audio, music, VFX etc to appreciate. On a related note, this video showed in my Youtube feed this morning:
My mind was blown when Stranger Things used a Tandy 2000 as a prop to represent a POS terminal in a video store. Very few people outside hardcore nerds and Charles Bukowski fans even remember the Tandy 2000. In addition to being on-brand for the series (which also featured Realistic and Micronta electronic equipment and a character who worked at Radio Shack in the first couple of seasons), it shows they did their homework, as by 1986 the PC ruled business and "POS terminal" was about the only viable use case left for the Tandy 2000.
In general the producers really did do their homework to capture the time and feel of the 1980s, instead of just shitting out low-effort vaporwave. And it's bored generation X/Xennial parents, you insensitive clod -- millennials were born too late to even remember half that stuff.
And C# code, but... yeah. At least they used an Amiga with its monitor set to green mode!
Even the Tandy 2000 wasn't shown completely accurately. It was shown with a monochrome monitor option, but the display was in color. And the font was wrong; this was the default Tandy 2000 font (it was reprogrammable, but almost nobody did that): https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/?4#tandy
There's a bit of wiggle room here for artistic license. "Just repeat to yourself it's just a show, I should really just relax..."
There is actually at least one good anime produced by Netflix, to my great surprise : she-ra and the princesses of power. Just discovered it and watching it with my two daughters (5 and 8 years old). Not saying it is comparable to Princess Mononoke, but certainly no garbage (especially compared to other cartoons intended for a similar audience)
It is mostly good but at some point turns to adult sexual relationships and gender politics front and center. I think it is too much for pre-teens and now regret watching. (Kids at that age don't even want to see adults kiss, although grow out of it as they approach teenhood).
> Even their flagship offerings like Stranger Things are creatively bankrupt references for bored millennial parents.
Geez, as someone who doesn't actively watch TV (whatever the tween children or my millennial wife is watching), you're making me feel even worse about wasting time slogging through the entirety of the most recent season.
Sorry dude it was not intended to make you feel bad. I sincerely think this is what the producers are talking about in boardrooms and zoom calls when getting ready for every season .
I was joking about making me feel bad. What you said is the reason I only consciously watch one or two series per year. Many of them look great, but few hold my interest.
I had the exact same experience with Mononoke Hime. It piqued my interest in the rest of the world as a kid. I started importing a lot of media globally after that, and made some life-long friends at various record and comic book stores around the world, who to this day still help me get my grubby little mitts on physical-only releases.
People may also forget that Netflix and similar offered DVD rentals and purchases via mail prior to streaming. That's not to be underestimated in how important it was to a significant demographic, being able to access culture they otherwise would not have been able to due to cost or scarcity.
Right but you don’t need Hollywood as much any more. Lots of streaming companies original content isn’t “Hollywood” in the traditional sense. Not to mention all the other ways of consuming entertainment nowadays… Hollywood doesn’t really have the power to gatekeep any more (outside of maybe the Oscars, but that’s a tempest in a tea pot.)
Considering the precipitous decline in Oscar viewership over the last decade, it's safe to say Hollywood's death grip on American film and television is all but broken these days. The jump in the most recent Oscars viewership has more to do with tabloid antics (i.e. "the slap") than anything else, and even then it was still the second worst year on record.
I've been watching english subtitled shows for decades. Before high speed internet was affordable, people were sharing fan subbed anime. Dudes at university would show up with their RAIDs with multiple seasons worth of anime. Back then we still measured RAM in megabytes.
Eh for awhile my Apple TV was starting to seem like the asymptotic limit of how easy it could be to watch what I wanted at the price of subsidizing a bunch of empty suits in Hollywood.
Then at some point everyone with an IP catalog started launching a streaming service and at the rate it’s going I might re-learn how piracy works because I value my own time enough to be pretty much over trying to figure out if my show du jour is on Disney Plus or Viacom Prime.
I think we're both seeing a generational difference here. Those of us who remember those times know in our bones how much better things are...even if you don't want to look that hard. That was 15+ years ago. A lot of HN probably wasn't around to remember.
I don't want this to be a "kids today don't know how good they have it" post, but that's playing a role. However, that attitude is probably what's going to keep driving things to get even better.
Netflix effectively killed torrenting's chances at truly reaching the masses. Most people weren't hooking a PC up to their TV. By the time little hackable streaming devices became popular Netflix had already fully taken over.
Yet Netflix and the movie industry itself hasn't been able to reduce torrenting by much, since the limited choice and fragmentation of movie licenses across a dozen services means that Torrent is still the best way to watch everything you want. Their greed, their loss.
If Spotify and Steam have reduced music and game torrenting by 99%, Netflix & co. reduced it by much less than that.
Most of my non-technical friends pay for one service or maybe two, everything else is on Popcorn Time.
> Yet Netflix and the movie industry itself hasn't been able to reduce torrenting by much,
They don't need to. Clearly streaming services have been and continue to be successful. This is not a zero sum game. Nerds who hate paying for stuff will always exist, but most people aren't going to hack a device or even download Kodi to their Fire Stick. These people are satisfied.
The old school movie studios definitely care a lot because they hate innovation, and they've definitely failed.
> Most of my non-technical friends pay for one service or maybe two, everything else is on Popcorn Time.
Sorry, you're still posting on Hacker News which has certain implications regarding the people you like hanging out with. Your non-technical friends are still unusual.
I watched it as a teen at a friend's house around year 2000. Might have been an early bootleg, he was really into bootlegged Japanese VHS tapes. I found the story and tone really disturbing. I remembered it this way, and wasn't really interested in seeing it again.
Didn't watch it again until maybe a year ago when my wife wanted to watch it. She's gotten really into Studio Ghibli and we've been working our way through the catalog. Even so, I was actually still hesitant to watch it.
I found it much different than I remembered. Layered story with actual shades of gray that Hollywood isn't capable of producing. Only movie I can think of where there are multiple factions and none of them are clearly good or bad. Compelling narrative all around. It's genuinely a masterwork only outdone by Spirited Away.
Point of my story is, I wasn't ready for it, I don't know if America was.
> I found it much different than I remembered. Layered story with actual shades of gray that Hollywood isn't capable of producing. Only movie I can think of where there are multiple factions and none of them are clearly good or bad
Actually I feel like western movies and tv tends to be more morally ambiguous than anime. In terms of multiple factions where none are clearly good/bad, Game of Thrones comes to mind
Game of Thrones is based on a book series and for the first couple seasons was very faithful to that book series in terms of characters and plot. You can't really give credit to Hollywood writers for something created by a novelist. In fact, as soon as they started running out of book material you see a noticeable decline in the quality of writing.
Looks as though Spirited Away (one of my favorite animations) also flummoxed the world. Here it (initially) earned $10M, (Japan at $234M, China $69M, France $6M)
Not too surprising for the US, which pretty much ignored electronic music, both domestic (except for NIN) and foreign (except for 'Autobahn'), until Prodigy arrived in 1996 with "Fat of the Land" (US#1??!!) and landed one more with 'Smack My Bitch Up'.
You must have a very narrow concept of "electronic music?" Otherwise, the second British invasion, hip hop, house, and freestyle, all huge in the 80s would like a word with you.
Even things traditionally not electronic like R&B and Hard Rock were significantly influenced by drum machines and synthesizers in the 80s. TR-808? Keytars?
The thing that gets me about Spirited Away (and most
Ghibli films) is the sense of being transported.
The characters at the end are no longer in a place where they can go back to “the way things were” but somehow it’s okay. So there is this pain but in the end it’s ultimately cathartic and you feel joy and hope.
yes, spirited away is hands down the best ghibli film, for that ability to grab your spirit and transform it alongside chihiro's (the young protagonist). it's probably one of my top 5 or top 10 films of all time.
i liked mononoke, but it felt heavy-handed in comparison, so it doesn't rate as highly in my book. it would have rated way worse had disney gotten its way with it.
edit: totoro would be #2, kaguya and grave of the fireflies would be tied for #3/4, then howl's moving castle at #5, then ponyo, mononoke, and kiki's delivery service would be among the remaining top 10 spots for me.
Spirited away has a shiny fairground visuals but really dark undercurrents. Not my favorite even if technically is great. Mononoke is deliberately gross and confusing in some moments. Not for small children.
Ponyo or Totoro would rank much higher for me. Ponyo is really smart in many aspects. The Tomb of fireflies is a terrible and depressing black hole, but maybe a necessary experience. Porco rosso is the opposite, light and very enjoyable.
In any case this article is related clearly with the fact that Mononoke is again broadcasted in the movie theaters just this week.
to be clear, even though i ranked them, my bar for a good film is whether i'd watch it again or not, and all the ghibli films i've seen, except perhaps arrietty (i haven't seen earwig or earthsea, but the consensus seems to be against those as well), are well worth watching again and again.
grave of the fireflies is heartwrenching for sure, and absolutely worth watching again (when you have tissues and a loved one to hug nearby).
spirited away is amazing because of the chihiro's journey through the fantastical world of the kami, where she has to contend with not only her own present but generations past and all their virtue and vice. it's about the ever-present struggle to place oneself in a world built upon tradition and deference. this is a common theme in east asian tv and film, but miyazaki explores it in such an enveloping and actually rather gentle way, filled with symbolism and mysticism. the film's representation of coming of age seems to be external (overcoming spirits), but it's all about the girl's coming to terms with herself in relation to her parents and everyone who came before them. it's a blip in her life externally but internally, everything has changed. chihiro transforms in that little blip.
i haven't seen nausicaä yet, but all the ghibli films are great (except perhaps arrietty, as noted in a nearby comment). porco rosso was fun and more action oriented than most ghibli films. it's been a while since i've seen castle in the sky but it sits storywise between mononoke and howl's moving castle in my head.
Here is a simpler and less prosaic perspective to you:
A spoiled young girl must enter as a slave worker in a bath/massage club to repay their parents debt. She must work hard doing difficult and dirt chores while trying to find a way out. He cleans the body of a client plagued from a nasty contamination, and as reward receives a small gift that could help her to be free.
Meanwhile, she treats nicely a shy client and allow him in the building. The client soon gets obsessed with the girl and starts spending a lot of gold to pass more and more time with her.
Yep, is a film for children.
When the rich weirdo realizes is being blocked and distracted by the greedy staff, he has a tantrum, turns in a violent monster and starts destroying the place and eating alive anybody that stands in the path to her.
The girl flees, but finally decides to return to help him, the monster is appeased, they travel together and the character is finally rehabilitated far away from the bathhouse.
After a last chore, finally the girl befriends the madamme and is allowed to go and quit the bathhouse in good terms, see their parents again and keep with their former life. She is ordered to never tell anybody, never look back and forget all about the sordid place. Happy end.
Moral of the history: the solution to child abuse is hide it, never tell to anybody and pretend that nothing happened.
Howl's Moving Castle is my personal favorite. Also one of the rare cases where the English dub is on par with the original voice-acting. English cast includes Christian Bale, Jean Simmons and Billy Crystal.
Howl's Moving Castle really falls apart at the end, and it's a shame.
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Castle in the Sky are the most similar in feeling to Princess Mononoke. High fantasy, adventure, against all odds. (This is my favorite batch of Ghibli / Miyazaki / Takahata films.)
Spirited Away is an otherworldly coming of age treasure that cannot be missed. Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service feel similar. Whisper of the Heart is this too, just aimed a little older. (And if you like that, check out Your Name by Shinkai or Wolf Children by Hosoda - not Ghibli films, but very deserving of a watch if you like this sort of film.)
Grave of the Fireflies is a very poignant anti-war film.
FWIW, I bought the old Miramax domain name for Princess Mononoke and kept the website online [1]. It's one of my favorite films. I wish Miyazaki made more films like Mononoke and Nausicaa - they're sublime.
On a more serious note, the book is quite good too. The book doesn't describe the castle as a giant steampunk thing walking around in the hills. It's actually just a plain 4 sided stone building that hovers around a little over the ground, no legs. So in this regard the movie is better IMHO. But in the book there is another location the door opens to and the stuff we see in there changes the whole story. In the movie we spend some time trying to figure out what version of the characters, Howl especially, are the real version. The book turns this up further with the additional location.
At the end the take away is quite different between book and movie. Both good in their own ways.
In my humble opinion, Spirited Away also kind of falls apart at the end. I never really got a sense of resolution from that movie. Not so for Mononoke.
> Is princess Mononoke the best movie from Studio Ghibli?
As far as I am aware, most anime nerds say that Grave of the Fireflies is the best movie from Studio Ghibli (for this movie, Hayao Miyazaki was only producer and not director). But be aware that Grave of the Fireflies is a rather sad movie.
I had my spouse, who crys often at movies, watch it with me. I gave them fair waning that it was very sad and apparently very good. She agreed, and was also "I'm never watching that again". She enjoyed it. Can confirm, brutal and great. But like other amazing sad war movies like Schindler's List, I'm not going to watch it for fun.
Actually that's a good way to think of it, compress SL into a anime length movie and you have the emotional hit of Grave.
I was going to say Spirited Away with an honorable mention to Howl's Moving Castle as a crowd pleaser — but I haven't see either you mentioned. Thanks for the rec!
It's Schindler's List in a few important ways. 1) it's about WWII, 2) It's a gut punch, and 3) It's one of the greatest movies you only need to see once, and likely will only want to watch once.
I've told the kids they can only watch that movie once they're old enough to drink.
Well, if you want Ghibli's best movie ... Grave of the Fireflies to my mind is easily one of the best movies ever made, let alone Ghili's best. I've seen it at least 3 times because I'm a glutton for punishment that way.
I've heard this so much about _Grave of the Fireflies_ that I'm afraid to watch it - what if it doesn't affect me the way it does everyone else? Would that mean there's something wrong with me? Is it some kind of cinematic Voight-Kampff?
I've seen every Ghibli film except the Earthsea film, and I'd say the best are Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Princess Kaguya, and Totoro.
That said, I've liked pretty much every film they've made except Kiki's Delivery Service (I found it a bit dull) and Howl's Moving Castle (it just didn't work for me). They're pretty much all worth watching at least once.
The original Fox English dub of Kiki’s Delivery Service is wonderful - especially Phil Hartman as Gigi. I normally wouldn’t recommend a dub, but I have always enjoyed this one. My understanding is that Disney redid at least some of it when they acquired distribution rights and I’m not sure if that’s still the English version, but there are definitely DVDs available with it.
Porco Rosso seems to get ignored frequently. It’s fantastic as well.
That English dub has two serious flaws. First, they took out the two fun 70's J-POP songs, which really set the tone of the film, and replaced them with forgettable American songs written for the movie. Second, they inserted background music into parts of the film that aren't supposed to have music (e.g., when the mood is set by the sounds of the town, or suspense is heightened by only having the sound of the wind).
Edit: Also, Jiji (Kiki's cat) played by Phil Hartman has a completely different character from Jiji in the Japanese version.
It's hard to define best, as someone who watched a lot of it as a kid.
For a pre-teen audience, Nausicaä of the valley of the wind, Castle in the Sky, Totoro, basically all the stuff before Princess Mononoke are great films.
I see Princess Mononoke to be a film for people coming of age, where it's time to realize the binary view of the world is overly simplistic.
Just don't bother with the dubs. Hollywood just couldn't get the right voice actors to act with the right voice to fit the setting and the theme. For example, the main characters dub for Castle in the Sky felt older than the original (or Cantonese dub, which was my first introduction). Pazu was supposed to be an orphan, a child worker in a frigging mine. While the film doesn't directly call attention to that much, it hints at it by having the original voice to be too young to even crack yet.
>> Graphic and bloody violence is a key element of Princess Mononoke, making it far from children's fare (Credit: Alamy)
No, no, no. That is exactly what children want to watch. It's their parents who don't want them to watch it. Kides themselves are all over this stuff and the moment they're old enough to get their hands on it, they binge on it.
Speaking as someone who once was a child (with a splatter-gore phase no less).
My personal recomendation for HN users to get into Ghibli is to start with The Wind Rises. It's more recent (2014), and loosely based on a true story/biography. No crazy monsters or spirits. It also emcompasses creativty, engineering and hard work as the main characeter design a fighter plane. Truly a masterpiece that resonated with me
Of course the other ones mentioned in this topic are good too.
As a counterpoint, I thought that was maybe my least favorite movie directed by Miyazaki!
Even a bad Miyazaki movie is pretty good, but for me it didn't have what makes his other movies special. I'd recommend it only if a person absolutely can't, say, tolerate elements of the fantastical in their entertainment. The lead character is an engineer who makes planes, but the movie (understandably) doesn't really go into that part.
Mononoke is probably tied with Wind Rises for "most serious Miyazaki movie." which might make it a perfect starting point for some in the HN crowd.
Spirited Away is probably the closest to a universal crowd-pleaser?
My first exposure to Anime was a duped VHS copy of Akira in 1993. Holy cheese and crackers, what an experience. My jaw was dropped the whole time and even during the credits my eyes were glued to the screen. Even as my high school friends got up, turned on the lights and puttered around getting ready to go home I couldn't move I was so transfixed.
Princess Mononoke is what you get when you make Dances with Wolves/Pocahontas/Avatar, but with the humanist perspective that people everywhere are both good and bad.
So like any movie except american ones ? :D In Europe and Asia, we do enjoy the US movies but it's not like we think they have quality, hell it's like macdo and coke, it s fun to consume but got is it awful :D
The US has the ability to appeal to your base instinct instead of trying to reach your brain, it's striking !
There are plenty of Americans producing interesting films, but the blockbusters that get the big budgets and the promotion are just going for the biggest possible audience, so they don't take risks.
But the downward spiral is impressive: I feel popular movies in the past felt less like copies of each others than now. It's not just not taking risk: like coca cola they found the perfect formula and arent going to change it. And if they try, they d have insane addicts asking them to bring back the original formula.
Imagine big studios saying now they'll stop marvel movies, there d be a riot. I remember when the Inception + Shutter Island miracle happened and was reading Hollywood execs were flabbergasted and trying to formalize it so they could churn copies every few months.
There s nothing to do: they are private entreprises and they fit an addictive hole. Would be like trying to forbid beer because it s not as intellectual as cognac. I just feel like for some reason smaller markets do films differently because they just cant compete: Im French and live in Hong Kong, in both, local big budget blockbusters flop spectacularly because they feel too much like Ersatz (the CGI is years behind, the love story is under developed, the explosions are not well timed, the enemy is not as manichean, whatever), while smarter movies make us all proud "heh americans couldnt shit one like that, we're so special" :D
I don't know. I've watched plenty of anime and plenty of it is garbage. Ghibli is an outlier. Possibly the worst Ghibli movie was Earthsea and even that is merely average and only bad when compared to the rest of their catalogue.
Other cultures have their thing too. Bollywood has dancing in everything which still doesn't make sense to me after watch a bunch of Bollywood movies. Korea has their K-Dramas. Every one is the same.
Many of the cliches about other movie industries were actually imported from early Hollywood. The large eyes in most anime is what happened when the Japanese adopted the style from the early Disney movies. Early Bollywood movie style was just imported from early Hollywood musicals - musicals were much more common in the 1930s. Now all the industries have diverged over time, and they look very quirky when compared to each other. But the common source of all these styles is Hollywood itself.
I'm not familiar with who stole what from who and I generally don't care. But all these cultures have taken whatever it is and made it their own. Big eyed stuff is now synonymous with Japan. People breaking out in dance is a Bollywood trope. Some of this stuff circles back around eventually.
I'm only pointing out they are also pandering to their own fan bases and it can be just as formulaic as Hollywood. No need to put things on a pedestal.
shape of water was good for it's ethereal scenery and underlying storyline, but for the 2018 oscars, i thought 3 billboards got robbed for best picture. that was the last year i paid any attention to the oscars (especially considering the thoroughly mundane green book won the following year). hollywood has nothing interesting to offer anymore.
You can thank Netflix for changing that. I worked in Hollywood when Netflix rolled out House of Cards, and it was nothing less than a revolution for the execs at the time. Netflix terrified them. Before then, every entrenched name in Hollywood mocked the internet as something consumers would never prefer for movies. However, Netflix created a place for big budget, niche content in a way that forced Hollywood to sit up and take notice. If Netflix hadn't happened, nothing would've changed.
And thank God. I remember seeing Mononoke Hime in the theater, and it was my first introduction to anime. It was a breath of fresh air for me in terms of entertainment. I was so tired of western film at that point and it made me aware that there was so much more out there if I was willing to look for it. Nowadays, it hardly requires looking.