Here we are in 2012; the thrill of Toy Story 3 is gone and we are left to the dregs of absolute chunder-inducing animation grub like Paranorman or Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. Why the hell would you shell out your hard earned $13.50 for a cheap paper ticket admitting entrance to the theater of painful-to-watch computer generated pseudo-funnies? That's right, you're a filmgoer of taste, class, and brawn. That's why you go to Doc, and that's why you'll enjoy every minute of the unspooling of our Studio Ghibli retrospective.
The work of Hayao Miyazaki has become cherished by Western audiences relatively recently, with the success of dubbed versions of his films Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and Ponyo. But our film series reaches further back, into the interstices of the animation studio that Miyazaki helped found. In addition to the classics, Doc will be screening several of Miyazaki's lesser known early gems, like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Porco Rosso. These are no plebeian cartoons: Mr. Miyazaki is a well-versed scholar of film, and it is not difficult to see the influence of classic genre film on his work (For Porco Rosso, the noir films of Humphrey Bogart or Howard Hawks, and for Princess Mononoke, the jidaigeki and samurai films of one Akira Kurosawa). These films breathe, and are as deep and life-fulfilling as any of the other selections in our Fall calendar.
We have also reached back to some of the other Ghibli directors that are less familiar to Western Audiences for this series: including the late Yoshifumi Kond?'s majestic Whisper of the Heart, and Isao Takahata's critter-fest of Pom Poko. These men are no "lesser Miyazakis", but extremely gifted animators and filmmakers in their own right.
Several of these films have never screened before in their original Japanese languages, and it will be a long time before they make it back to theaters in the United States. Whether you are an old hat, or an uninitiated Pixar die-hard, you'll find something to dig your heart into.
-Max Frank