18 | the world today | april & may 2017

Japan

The art of animeAlex Dudok de Wit pays tribute to Tokyo’s master of the magical moving image

Last summer, it was a rare teen in Japan who didn’t go to see Your Name. By Janu-ary, Makoto Shinkai’s gender-bending tale of young love had become the top-grossing anime – Japanese animation – film of all time. Before long, the world’s media anointed Shinkai ‘the new Miyazaki’.

Whether Shinkai is the spiritual heir to Hayao Miyazaki, the revered director of dazzling fantasy epics such as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, is up for debate. That Miyazaki is a megastar, the reigning emperor of anime, is not. ‘The new Miyazaki’, really, is just shorthand for ‘This guy is a big deal.’

The irony is that Shinkai’s wistful medi-tations on romance in contemporary Japan put me in mind of another great anime filmmaker − one closely related to Miyaza-ki yet completely divorced from him. Isao Takahata is popular in Japan, and known to animation buffs elsewhere: the 81-year-old has been in the game for six decades. It was on his films that Miyazaki cut his teeth in the 1960s. In 1985, the two cofounded the legendary Studio Ghibli, where Taka-hata has made five exquisite features. However, like an anime George Harrison, he has been eclipsed by his flamboyant and more prolific partner. Nobody is ever called ‘the next Takahata’.

Even as their careers intertwined, the two took pains to differentiate their styles. ‘I was very conscious of making films that he would steer clear of,’ Takahata later recalled. ‘I hear he was doing the same as far as I was concerned.’ Miyazaki deals in fantasy: his films are centred on wildly fan-ciful set pieces and powered by the sheer inventiveness of his designs. Takahata is the master draughtsman of social dynam-ics. Miyazaki’s characters are mavericks; Takahata’s are ordinary folk. The former exist outside of society as we know it, while the latter strain against its confines.

Some of Takahata’s films contain ele-ments of fantasy, often deriving – as in Miyazaki’s works − from Japanese folklore. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya opens with a homunculus emerging Thumbelina-like from a bamboo tree. Pom Poko features a cast of shape-shifting raccoon dogs who use their testicles to fly − Disney this ain’t. Yet these magical flourishes are not just for spectacle: they are there to cast a satirical light on human follies. The homunculus grows into a beautiful princess whose fey naivety exposes the vanities of aristocratic Japan. The raccoon dogs disguise them-selves as humans in order to sabotage an urban development project that threatens their habitat.

Most affecting, though, are his ‘real-world’ films. As a child, my favourite was My Neighbours the Yamadas, a delightfully zany series of vignettes about the hum-drum existence of a dysfunctional house-hold. In its own caricatural style, the film sketches the trials of modern family life. Neighbours quarrel, children struggle with homework, a father ponders his own mediocrity. It’s the closest thing Japan has to The Simpsons.

Later, I warmed to Only Yesterday, a romantic drama that weaves together scenes from a Tokyo woman’s holiday in the rural north and her recollections of her awkward school days. The film touches on familiar Takahata themes, such as child-hood innocence and environmental despo-liation. It moves at a measured pace that is unusual for animation but typical of the director. Moments of epiphany and beau-ty are related in entirely still shots – ironi-cally, something animation is better equipped to create than live action.

Then there is Grave of the Fireflies, Taka-hata’s most famous work. Set in the dying days of the Second World War, it follows a teenage boy and his little sister as they flee

their bombed-out city. When they seek the help of strangers, the children are rebuffed; as things get desperate, the breakdown of the social fabric is mirrored in the deterio-ration of their health. Although Fireflies is based on Akiyuki Nosaka’s story of the same name, Takahata drew on his own memories of the war, and the film is shot through with a horrible plausibility. It’s in the painstakingly realistic bomb scenes, but also in the details of the girl’s ever more erratic behaviour. One scene in which she eats a marble, believing it to be candy, is almost unwatchable.

Unusually for a director of animated films, Takahata is not himself an animator. He insists he cannot draw. He rose up through the hierarchical Japanese studio system, passing an examination to join Toei Animation in 1955 and swiftly rising through the ranks to the director’s chair. It is here that he met Miyazaki, who served as a lead animator on his TV series and films.

At Studio Ghibli, however, the two kept their projects largely separate, and Taka-hata’s work gradually became more aes-thetically daring. Unconstrained by a drawing style of his own, the director pushed his animators away from the flat planes, bold colours and thick outlines of classic anime. While others used digital technology to achieve ever greater realism, Takahata harnessed it in his last two fea-tures, Yamadas and Kaguya, to push into abstraction. With their muted palettes, sparse compositions and dynamic brush-strokes, these films owe as much to water-colour painting and medieval Japanese scroll art – on which Takahata has written a book – as to anime. Indeed, Takahata

A still from ‘Grave of the Fireflies’, Isao Takahata’s most famous film set in the dying days of the Second World War

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the world today | april & may 2017 | 19

Japan

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20 | the world today | april & may 2017

often reaches beyond animation for inspi-ration. His characters listen to Hungarian folk music and take part in Buddhist dance cults. By opening with its tragic conclu-sion, Fireflies evokes the form of tradition-al Japanese double-suicide plays. The com-edy in Yamadas is boldly punctuated with haikus by Basho. In Only Yesterday, the feel of a banana plunges the heroine into a Proustian reminiscence.

As in his work, erudition and reserve meet in the man. Last September, at a party I attended in Tokyo, Takahata stood quietly to one side as industry figures net-worked. A Japanese friend who loves his films failed to recognize him. Days later, I accompanied him on a countryside trip. He was unassuming as ever, and there were long moments of silence between us. But then he would break into a passionate dis-cussion of Steven Spielberg or Ravi Shankar or animist beliefs in Japan. As we strolled though a forest, he would occa-

sionally stop, indicate a plant and name it in French, knowing that it is my mother tongue. At the end of the trip, he surprised me by revealing that he had published translations of French poetry.

Given his slow working pace, Takahata is unlikely to make another film − though he has said he wants to. He will never be a titan at the box office. With the aid of an Oscar nomination, Kaguya grossed a respectable $24 million globally; Spirited Away took $275 million, and Your Name $328 million. Of course, Takahata’s movies are a tougher sell.

Many people still subscribe to the notion that animated films are for children, and should only depict things beyond live action’s reach: superheroes and talking animals, but not wars or family dramas. This prejudice is especially strong in Anglophone countries, although recent hits such a Persepolis and Waltz With Bashir are challenging it.

Yet Takahata’s oeuvre gives the lie to this notion. Take Grave of the Fireflies. With costumes and special effects, its story could have been told in live action. But animated characters are more abstract, more malleable, less mired in particulars than real people. They can also be dubbed more seamlessly. The protagonists, unme-diated by distracting actors, become more universal; viewers relate to them more eas-ily. In Takahata’s films, the animation amplifies the reality in the story.

The late film critic Roger Ebert got it right when he described Fireflies as ‘an emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation’. The same, to varying extents, is true of all Taka-hata’s greatest works. Perhaps it took a non-animator to do the medium this ser-vice. Certainly, it took a rare genius.

Alex Dudok de Wit is a journalist and critic

Sake is thought to be an everyday drink for the Japanese just like beer is for the English and Germans and wine is for the French. In fact, the national beverage now accounts for less than 7 per cent of Japan’s total alcoholic consumption.

With the population ageing and declin-ing, and the economy suffering years of deflation, beer and beer substitutes are now more popular. Well before the UK faced Brexit, Japan was on the verge of Sakexit.

Sake producers are now looking for drinkers outside Japan. Once a rather rus-tic brew, sake has become more sophisti-cated in recent years with the arrival of pure and delicate products to suit palates used to drinking fine wines.

In Britain, it is often drunk warm, but the advice today is to serve it chilled at around 10 to 15 degrees Celsius, like white wine.

Terry Kandylis, head sommelier at 67 Pall Mall, a London wine lovers’ club, said in a recent interview: ‘People think that sake should be enjoyed only with Japanese

food, but that’s wrong. That would be like saying that French wines should be drunk only with French food. Sake works amaz-ing well with many western ingredients; parmesan, tomatoes, caviar and chocolate.’

Last year the respected wine critic, Jan-cis Robinson, admitted to being a ‘sake ingénue’ but after trying 21 premium brews wrote: ‘I was truly uplifted by the subtle variations in these cool, ineffably pure, limpid ferments, averaging around 16 per cent alcohol.’

The Japanese government is now pro-moting the export of sake, as part of its Cool Japan Initiative, to open new markets for its cultural and creative products and services.

Hiroshi Sakurai, owner of the rising star brand, Dassai, has set a goal of selling half his output abroad to make up for lost domestic consumers. He has focused the brand promotion in Paris, hoping that the fashion will cross the Atlantic to New York.

Sake is inevitably expensive due to its complex manufacturing process, he has said. ‘Therefore, the top 5 per cent income

earners of the world are our target custom-ers. My experience indicates that the tastes of this 5 per cent are the same regardless of country.’ He believes success will come if sake is taxed at the same rate as wine and doubts the value of government subsidies and promotional events.

These remarks appear to contradict the Japanese conventional wisdom, which is to pursue younger consumers including women, and to emphasize US and Asian markets rather than Europe, and to sell the product cheap.

It is worth recalling that, in Japan, wine began as a luxury product, gradually pen-etrated the market and to a large extent took the place of sake. So maybe it’s time for the Japanese government and industry to stop copying past successes and make a new start.

Nobuyuki Sato is a visiting fellow of the International Economics Department at Chatham House, seconded from the Japan’s Ministry of Finance. He is also a visiting professor at Nagoya University

The Samurai spiritCool Japan is exporting its taste for sake, writes Nobuyuki Sato

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